Ernst Mayr, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

    

Ernst Mayr

German-American Evolutionary Biologist

Date of Birth: 05-Jul-1904

Place of Birth: Kempten, Bavaria, Germany

Date of Death: 03-Feb-2005

Profession: writer, zoologist, curator, biologist, ornithologist, university teacher, philosopher

Nationality: United States, Germany

Zodiac Sign: Cancer


Show Famous Birthdays Today, World

👉 Worldwide Celebrity Birthdays Today

About Ernst Mayr

  • Not to be confused with Ernst Mayr (computer scientist), Ernst Mayer, Ernst Meyer, Ernest Mayer or Ernest May.Ernst Walter Mayr (; 5 July 1904 – 3 February 2005) was one of the 20th century's leading evolutionary biologists.
  • He was also a renowned taxonomist, tropical explorer, ornithologist, philosopher of biology, and historian of science.
  • His work contributed to the conceptual revolution that led to the modern evolutionary synthesis of Mendelian genetics, systematics, and Darwinian evolution, and to the development of the biological species concept. Although Charles Darwin and others posited that multiple species could evolve from a single common ancestor, the mechanism by which this occurred was not understood, creating the species problem.
  • Ernst Mayr approached the problem with a new definition for species.
  • In his book Systematics and the Origin of Species (1942) he wrote that a species is not just a group of morphologically similar individuals, but a group that can breed only among themselves, excluding all others.
  • When populations within a species become isolated by geography, feeding strategy, mate choice, or other means, they may start to differ from other populations through genetic drift and natural selection, and over time may evolve into new species.
  • The most significant and rapid genetic reorganization occurs in extremely small populations that have been isolated (as on islands). His theory of peripatric speciation (a more precise form of allopatric speciation which he advanced), based on his work on birds, is still considered a leading mode of speciation, and was the theoretical underpinning for the theory of punctuated equilibrium, proposed by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould.
  • Mayr is sometimes credited with inventing modern philosophy of biology, particularly the part related to evolutionary biology, which he distinguished from physics due to its introduction of (natural) history into science.

Read more at Wikipedia

See Also