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The Growth of Biological Thought (992 pages, Belknap Press, ISBN 0674364465) is a book written by Ernst Mayr, first published in 1982. It is subtitled Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance, and is as much a book of philosophy and history as it is of biology. [1] It is a sweeping, academic study of the first 2,400 years of the science of biology ...
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 ...
Ernst Walter Mayr (/ ˈ m aɪər / MYRE, German: [ɛʁnst ˈmaɪɐ]; 5 July 1904 – 3 February 2005) [1] [2] was a German-American evolutionary biologist. He was also a renowned taxonomist , tropical explorer, ornithologist , philosopher of biology , and historian of science . [ 3 ]
It was not long before the synthesis was broadened to include paleontology, systematics and botany in a series of notable books: Systematics and the Origin of Species (1942) by Ernst Mayr; Tempo and Mode in Evolution (1944) by George Gaylord Simpson; and Variation and Evolution in Plants (1950) by G. Ledyard Stebbins. [19]
The concept of teleonomy was largely developed by Mayr and Pittendrigh to separate biological evolution from teleology. Pittendrigh's purpose was to enable biologists who had become overly cautious about goal-oriented language to have a way of discussing the goals and orientations of an organism's behaviors without inadvertently invoking teleology.
Mayr, on the basis of an understanding of genes and direct observations of evolutionary processes from field research, introduced the biological species concept, which defined a species as a group of interbreeding or potentially interbreeding populations that are reproductively isolated from all other populations.
Darwin's theory of evolution is based on key facts and the inferences drawn from them, which biologist Ernst Mayr summarised as follows: [6] Every species is fertile enough that if all offspring survived to reproduce, the population would grow (fact). Despite periodic fluctuations, populations remain roughly the same size (fact).
Toward a New Philosophy of Biology: Observations of an Evolutionist (published by Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1988) is a book by Harvard evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr. [1]