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Acclaimed Evolutionary Biologist Ernst Mayr Dies
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (Reuters) -
Ernst Mayr, a Harvard
University evolutionary biologist called "the Darwin of the
20th century," has died, the school said Friday. He was 100.
A member of the Harvard faculty for more than half a
century, Mayr was considered the world's most eminent
evolutionary biologist. He almost single-handedly made the
origin of species diversity the central question of
evolutionary biology that it is today, Harvard said.
In an interview with The Boston Globe before his 100th
birthday last year, Mayr said he always had "tremendous
curiosity" and balked at suggestions he stop working.
"People say to me, Why don't you retire?' I say, 'My God,
why should I retire? I enjoy what I'm doing,"' he told the
Globe.
Through his travels in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands,
Mayr showed what Darwin had never quite established: that new
species arise from isolated populations.
Mayr's death came amid renewed debate in the United States
over the teaching of evolution. One Pennsylvania school
district recently became the first in the country to begin
teaching "intelligent design" -- an alternative to evolution
that contends nature was created by an all-powerful being.
Born in 1904 in Kempten, Germany, Mayr earned a medical
degree from the University of Greifswald in 1925. Descended
from generations of doctors, he broke off his medical career
and turned his attention to zoology, earning a doctorate from
the University of Berlin just 16 months later.
"I was curious about far places," he told the Harvard
Alumni Bulletin in 1961, "and decided that as an M.D., I should
have but small chance of traveling."
He got the chance to do just that in 1927, when he met Lord
Rothschild at a zoological convention in Budapest, Hungary.
Rothschild had been looking for someone to travel to New Guinea
to collect birds of paradise.
Mayr died Thursday at a retirement community outside of
Boston after a short illness, Harvard said. He is survived by
two daughters, five grandchildren, and 10 great-grandchildren.
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