E. Mayr 2007. What Makes Biology Unique? Considerations on the Autonomy of a Scientific Discipline. First paperback edition; first published 2004. xiv + 232 pp. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Price £12.99, US $16.99 (paperback). ISBN 9780 521 70034 4.

Abstract

Ernst Mayr not only lived to a distinguished age, but his years were paralleled by his scientific distinction as one of the last century's leading evolutionary biologists. One gets the measure of his own self-assessment when we read on p. 172 ‘I am presumably well qualified . . . having discussed the species problem in sixty-four books and scientific papers, published from 1927 to 2000. I also had to make decisions on species status when describing 26 new species and 473 new subspecies of birds. Furthermore I had to make decisions on the rank of species level taxa in twenty-five generic revisions and faunistic reviews. Hence, there should be no doubt about my qualifications’. Quite so, and nobody would wish to deny that Mayr was one of the pivotal figures in the neo-Darwinian synthesis. …