Systematics and the origin of species: An introduction

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E rnst Mayr, one of the 20th century's greatest scientists and a principal author of the modern theory of evolution, passed away on February 3, 2005, at the age of 100. From December 16 to 18, 2004, before Mayr's passing, a colloquium on “Systematics and the Origin of Species” sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences was held in his honor. The colloquium's title was the same as that of Mayr's 1942 book (1), generally considered one of the foundation books of the theory of evolution. The 17 papers that follow explore current knowledge about the main topics of Mayr's book. The modern theory of evolution embodies a complex array of biological knowledge centered around Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection couched in genetic terms. It is not one single theory with its corroborating evidence, but a multidisciplinary body of knowledge bearing on biological evolution: an amalgam of well established theories and working hypotheses together with the observations and experiments that support accepted hypotheses (and falsify rejected ones), which jointly seek to explain the evolutionary process and its outcomes. These hypotheses, observations, and experiments originate in disciplines such as genetics, developmental biology, neurobiology, zoology, botany, paleontology, and molecular biology. Darwin's theory of evolution (2) argued that natural selection, the process accounting for the adaptation and diversity of organisms, emerges as a necessary conclusion from two premises: ( i ) the assumption that hereditary variations useful to organisms occur and ( ii ) the observation that more individuals are produced than can possibly survive. A serious difficulty facing Darwin's evolutionary theory was the lack of an adequate theory of inheritance that would account for the preservation through the generations of the variations on which natural selection was supposed to act. Theories then current of “blending inheritance” proposed that offspring struck an average between the …