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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 ]
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.
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 ...
The 20th century saw the growth of the field of speciation, with major contributors such as Ernst Mayr researching and documenting species' geographic patterns and relationships. The field grew in prominence with the modern evolutionary synthesis in the early part of that century.
Established evolutionary biologists—particularly Ernst Mayr, Theodosius Dobzhansky, and George Gaylord Simpson, three of the architects of the modern synthesis—were extremely skeptical of molecular approaches, especially their connection (or lack thereof) to natural selection.
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).
Founder effect: The original population (left) could give rise to different founder populations (right). In population genetics, the founder effect is the loss of genetic variation that occurs when a new population is established by a very small number of individuals from a larger population.