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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 ...
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 ...
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 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 ]
For some time it was difficult to prove that sympatric speciation was possible, because it was impossible to observe it happening. [3] It was believed by many, and championed by Ernst Mayr, that the theory of evolution by natural selection could not explain how two species could emerge from one if the subspecies were able to interbreed. [29]