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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 ]
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 ...
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).
Plato was called by biologist Ernst Mayr "the great antihero of evolutionism," [13] because he promoted belief in essentialism, which is also referred to as the theory of Forms. This theory holds that each natural type of object in the observed world is an imperfect manifestation of the ideal, form or "species" which defines that type.
Eventually, similarities between Java Man and Sinanthropus pekinensis led Ernst Mayr to rename both Homo erectus in 1950, placing them directly in the human evolutionary tree. To distinguish Java Man from other Homo erectus populations, some scientists began to regard it as a subspecies, Homo erectus erectus , in the 1970s.
Ernst Mayr wrote that a survey of evolutionary literature and biology textbooks showed that as late as 1930 the belief that natural selection was the most important factor in evolution was a minority viewpoint, with only a few population geneticists being strict selectionists.
Ernst Mayr proposed the widely used Biological Species Concept of reproductive isolation in 1942. Most modern textbooks make use of Ernst Mayr's 1942 definition, [63] [64] known as the biological species concept, as a basis for further discussion on the definition of species. It is also called a reproductive or isolation concept.
He looks at Ernst Mayr's biological species concept, which defines a species as "a reproductive community—a gene pool. And this means that species is an evolutionary community. If a 'good mutation' crops us within a certain species, say a mutation in tigers that boosts a female's output of cubs by ten percent, then the gene containing that ...