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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 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.
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. Like Jordan's works, they ...
In 1954 Ernst Mayr wrote a landmark paper attacking the idea that subspecies in ecotypic populations would lead to the formation of incipient species. [1] According to Mayr, species formation occurs in populations which are small and isolated, that is, populations which exemplified typostrophic variation .
The biologist Ernst Mayr championed the concept of ring species, stating that it unequivocally demonstrated the process of speciation. [10] A ring species is an alternative model to allopatric speciation, "illustrating how new species can arise through 'circular overlap', without interruption of gene flow through intervening populations…"
Ernst Mayr defined a species as a population or group of populations whose members have the potential to interbreed naturally with one another to produce viable, fertile offspring. (The members of a species cannot produce viable, fertile offspring with members of other species). [ 69 ]
Ernst Mayr considered orthogenesis effectively taboo in 1948. [ 6 ] By 1948, the evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr , as editor of the journal Evolution , made the use of the term orthogenesis taboo: "It might be well to abstain from use of the word 'orthogenesis' .. since so many of the geneticists seem to be of the opinion that the use of the ...