Mayr, Ernst Walter

▪ 2006

      German-born American biologist (b. July 5, 1904, Kempten, Ger.—d. Feb. 3, 2005, Bedford, Mass.), did work in avian taxonomy that provided insights into evolution and led to his becoming one of the leading evolutionary biologists of the 20th century. In the 1940s he presented the now widely accepted definition of species as “groups of interbreeding natural populations that are reproductively isolated from other such groups,” and he showed how geographic isolation played an important role in the origin of new species. In the late 1920s Mayr traveled to New Guinea and the Solomon Islands to study and collect specimens of birds. He subsequently worked with major collections of bird skins at the University of Berlin as associate curator (1926–32) and at the American Museum of Natural History as associate curator (1932–44) and curator (1944–53). Later he served (1953–75) as professor of zoology at Harvard University and led (1961–70) Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. Mayr authored or coauthored more than 20 books, including Systematics and the Origin of Species (1942), The Growth of Biological Thought (1982), and What Evolution Is (2001). He received the U.S. National Medal of Science (1970) and the Royal Swedish Academy's Crafoord Prize in biology (1999).

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