Abstract
Many of the obituaries following his death credit Mayr with the solving the problems of species and speciation. Mayr was a great champion of the biological species concept, but he knew that it did not apply to the first 3 billion years of evolution on Earth, was less applicable to plants than it was to birds, and that the concept entailed focusing upon isolating factors in speciation. He had no idea how isolating factors evolved and thought of them as ad hoc factors that did not evolve through the causes of natural selection, and were not correlated with morphological differences. Closely related species with marked phenotypic differences can often interbreed easily and Mayr cited many examples of species that looked so similar that only experts could tell them apart, yet they could not interbreed.Mayr focused upon species and speciation and influenced many others to focus upon the same issues, all to the good of modern evolutionary biology. He often argued that his views on species and speciation were superior to those of Darwin. My suspicion is that Mayr's views did not advance as far from those of Darwin on species and speciation as he thought. Darwin's provisional hypothesis of pangenesis in 1868 is about as vague and biologically useless as Mayr's 1963 homeostatic gene pools.
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