Abstract
Born on July 5, 1904, in Kempten in southern Germany, Ernst Mayr passed away peacefully at the Methuselah-like age of 100 on February 3, 2005, in Bedford near Cambridge, Massachusetts. Mayr was, by the accounts of his Harvard colleagues the late Stephen Jay Gould and Edward O. Wilson, not only the greatest evolutionary biologist of the 20th century, but even its greatest biologist overall. Thomas Henry Huxley was dubbed “Darwin's bulldog” for fighting for the acceptance of Darwinian ideas soon after their inception in the last decades of the 19th century. Similarly, Ernst Mayr has been called “Darwin's apostle” or the “Darwin of the 20th century” for promoting and dispersing Darwin's hypotheses throughout the past century.
Highlights
Mayr lived for a century and accomplished more than several lifetime’s worth of science in different biological disciplines
Mayr’s interests subsequently began to diversify beyond taxonomy into evolutionary biology, and this expansion of his interests culminated in his first, and possibly still most important book, Systematics and the Origin of Species, published in 1942 [3]. This was his main contribution to the so-called Modern Synthesis of the Citation: Meyer A (2005) On the importance of being Ernst Mayr
Ernst Mayr had many fundamental insights into evolutionary biology, and almost every topic of importance in evolution was advanced by his ideas
Summary
Mayr lived for a century and accomplished more than several lifetime’s worth of science in different biological disciplines. Mayr’s interests subsequently began to diversify beyond taxonomy into evolutionary biology, and this expansion of his interests culminated in his first, and possibly still most important book, Systematics and the Origin of Species, published in 1942 [3]. This was his main contribution to the so-called Modern Synthesis of the Citation: Meyer A (2005) On the importance of being Ernst Mayr.
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