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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 ...
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.
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.
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).
Ernst Mayr argued that geographic isolation was needed to provide sufficient reproductive isolation for new species to form. Ernst Mayr's key contribution to the synthesis was Systematics and the Origin of Species, published in 1942. [73]
The German evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr argued in the 1940s that speciation cannot occur without geographic, and thus reproductive, isolation. [29] He stated that gene flow is the inevitable result of sympatry, which is known to squelch genetic differentiation between populations.
Many of the early terms used to describe speciation were outlined by Ernst Mayr. [21] He was the first to encapsulate the then contemporary literature in his 1942 publication Systematics and the Origin of Species, from the Viewpoint of a Zoologist and in his subsequent 1963 publication Animal Species and Evolution .