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Mayr was an outspoken defender of the scientific method and was known to critique sharply science on the edge. As a notable example, in 1995, he criticized the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), as conducted by fellow Harvard professor Paul Horowitz , as being a waste of university and student resources for its inability to ...
Painting of Hugo de Vries, making a painting of an evening primrose, the plant which had apparently produced new forms by large mutations in his experiments, by Thérèse Schwartze, 1918. Mutationism was the idea that new forms and species arose in a single step as a result of large mutations. It was seen as a much faster alternative to the ...
In his 1942 book, evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr described evolutionary traps as the phenomenon that occurs when a genetically uniform population suited for a single set of environmental conditions is susceptible to extinction from sudden environment changes. [4]
This concept Ernst Mayr proposes here is now commonly referred to as the biological species concept. The biological species concept defines a species in terms of biological factors such as reproduction , taking into account ecology, geography, and life history; it remains an important and useful idea in biology, particularly for animal ...
Like the form, this is a controversial type of explanation in science; some have argued for its survival in evolutionary biology, [21] while Ernst Mayr denied that it continued to play a role. [22] It is commonly recognised [ 23 ] that Aristotle's conception of nature is teleological in the sense that Nature exhibits functionality in a more ...
Mayr's definition has gained wide acceptance among biologists, but does not apply to organisms such as bacteria, which reproduce asexually. Speciation is the lineage-splitting event that results in two separate species forming from a single common ancestral population. [15] A widely accepted method of speciation is called allopatric speciation.
For some time it was difficult to prove that sympatric speciation was possible, because it was impossible to observe it happening. [3] It was believed by many, and championed by Ernst Mayr, that the theory of evolution by natural selection could not explain how two species could emerge from one if the subspecies were able to interbreed. [29]
Ernst Mayr argued that the criticisms made by Gould and Lewontin in "Spandrels" were valid, but that the problems they identified were the result of mistakes in the execution of the adaptationist program, such as excessively atomistic and deterministic perspectives, rather than flaws of the adaptationist program itself. [17]