Ernst W.

Mayr
1904–2005

A Biographical Memoir by
Walter J. Bock

©2014 National Academy of Sciences.

Any opinions expressed in this memoir are
those of the author and do not
necessarily reflect the views of the
National Academy of Sciences.
E R N S T W A LT E R M A Y E R
July 5, 1904–February 3, 2005
Elected to the NAS, 1954

Ernst Walter Mayr1,2 was a man of the twentieth century,

having missed only a few years at the beginning of that
century and lived a few years into the twenty-first. He
was by inclination a naturalist from youth onward, which
established the foundation for his career as an evolu-
tionary biologist. Often called the “Darwin of the twen-
tieth century,” Ernst was one of the leading evolutionary
biologists of his time, having been a major architect of
that famous meeting of the minds known as the modern
evolutionary synthesis of 1937-48 and the moving force
behind the founding of the Society for the Study of
Evolution.
Although he was born and educated in Germany, Ernst
By Walter J. Bock
was a thoroughly American scientist, having worked at
New York’s American Museum of Natural History (AMNH)
and the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University for 74 of his 100 years.
Despite his highly developed scientific mind, Ernst was truly a non-technical person and
complained in his later years about libraries’ putting their catalogues in an electronic form
because he did not know how to type—he did not even know the location of the keys on
the keyboard—which delayed him greatly in finding books. The most advanced electronic
device he ever used was a Dictaphone. Computers were out of the question.

Ernst was outgoing, sought out interesting people whether they were important or not,
talked to them, listened to what they said, read intensively, and thought deeply about
what he took in. He had an amazing memory, but, more importantly, he could readily put
small pieces of knowledge together into new and significant ideas. He was a real teacher
and simply could not bear to have someone leave his company with wrong notions. He
had firmly held beliefs, hence many people considered him to be somewhat dogmatic. He
was interested in what was correct, but not necessarily in who was correct. He would argue
1 This memoir originally appeared, in slightly different format, in Biographical Memoirs of the Royal Society 52
(2006):167-187 and is reprinted with permission.
2 Author’s affiliation: Walter J. Bock, Professor of Evolutionary Biology, Department of Biological Sciences,
Columbia University, New York, NY 10027.
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 ER N S T M AY R

strongly for his ideas, but he would change his position readily if he became persuaded
of the rightness of the opposing point of view. One had to be certain of one’s facts and
logic in any discussion with Ernst, which prevented many students and co-workers from
discussing controversial ideas with him, something that he regretted. I can recall his saying,
“My bark is worse than my bite.”
My first meeting with Ernst was in the summer of 1953, when I was an undergraduate
student volunteer in the Department of Ornithology at the AMNH. He had just
started his tenure as an Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology at Harvard’s Museum of
Comparative Zoology. We talked a bit about my educational aims. Late the following
summer, when he was again at the AMNH, I was able to speak with him further about
graduate studies, and to my complete surprise he suggested that I study with him at
Harvard. I applied, was accepted, and received my degree in 1959.
From that time forward I maintained close contacts with Ernst as a mentor to me and as
a close friend for the rest of his life. I visited him for the last time in late December 2004,
a few weeks before his death, when he was in the nursing wing of his retirement home.
During my visit, he walked down a long corridor to another room for physical therapy,
which he did every day because he was anxious to return to his apartment. I also spoke
with him by telephone several times the following month. His mind was remarkably
clear until the very end, but he was slowing down and finally lost interest in his last
project, which was on Darwin’s attitude toward creationism (Bock, 2005).
Major treatments of Ernst’s work in evolutionary biology and the history and philosophy
of biology (Greene and Ruse, 1994) and in ornithology (Bock, 2004a; Bock and Lein,
2005) are available, as is a complete bibliography of his papers by Jürgen Haffer (2005).
Haffer (2007) has also completed a full-length biography of Ernst Mayr.
Early life
Ernst Mayr, the second son of three, was born on July 5, 1904, in Kempten, Bavaria. His
father, Otto Mayr, was a jurist in the Bavarian court system; Otto died of kidney cancer
in 1917 at just 49 years of age, shortly before he was to be appointed to the supreme
court in Leipzig. Ernst’s mother, Helene Pusinelli (1870–1952), was of a German family
with Italian ancestry who had come to Germany in 1809. Ernst grew up in a tightly knit
family, with the parents taking the three boys on long excursions on weekends, during
which they placed great emphasis on the boys’ learning natural history. By the time he
was 10 years old, Ernst could identify the birds of the area by song as well as by sight.

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After his father’s death, the family moved to

Following a tradition in the Dresden, the hometown of his mother, where he
Mayr family in which the attended the Gymnasium, graduating in 1923.
boys went into either law or Following a tradition in the Mayr family in which
medicine, Ernst opted for the boys went into either law or medicine, Ernst
medicine—though, consid- opted for medicine—though, considering where
ering where his life’s path his life’s path would lead, perhaps with less than
would lead, perhaps with less full enthusiasm.
than full enthusiasm.
In Dresden Ernst joined the Saxony Bird Society,
a group of amateur birders. When he graduated
from the Gymnasium in April, his mother gave him a new pair of binoculars as a present
for earning his Abitur—a combination school-leaving and university enrollment eligi-
bility certificate. He used his free time before starting his medical studies to do some
intensive bird watching. One day in late March he bicycled to the ponds of Moritzburg,
the former hunting palace of the kings of Saxony, where he observed a pair of ducks that
were new to him and not mentioned in the guidebooks. These proved to be a pair of
red-crested pochards (Netta rufina), a species that had not been reported in Germany since
1846 (1).3
This fortuitous event would have an impact on Ernst that he could hardly have imagined
at the time. He was unable to show this pair of ducks to any of the older members of the
Saxony Bird Club, because the birds had disappeared before the weekend, when some
adult members were able to accompany him to Moritzburg. But one of the members was
a former classmate of Dr. Erwin Stresemann, of the Zoological Museum in Berlin, and
he provided Ernst with a letter of introduction to Stresemann.
For his medical studies Ernst chose the University of Greifswald, located near the
southern coast of the Baltic Sea in the northeast part of Germany. He made this choice
not on the basis of the university’s having any kind of reputation as a top medical school,
but because it sat in one of the more ornithologically interesting regions of Germany.
And by good fortune, the train he would be taking from Dresden to enroll at Greifswald
made a stop in Berlin. Armed with his letter of introduction, Ernst got off the train
in Berlin and called on Stresemann to report his sighting of the red-crested pochards.
Stresemann read Ernst’s field notes carefully and then quizzed him on the identity of
other species of ducks, using specimens from the museum’s collection. He was satisfied

3 Numbers in this form refer to the Selected Bibliography at the end of the text.

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with the sighting and, impressed with the knowledge and enthusiasm shown by this
young student, invited him to work as a volunteer at the museum during his university
holidays. Ernst accepted immediately, exclaiming later, “It was as if someone had given
me the key to paradise.”
Ernst worked at the museum several times during his university holidays. There he was
introduced to a broad range of avian biology. Viewing the young man’s efforts and his
unmistakable passion for this kind of work, Stresemann felt that his future belonged
in the biological sciences, not medicine, and he set about persuading Ernst to change
his field of study. Stresemann even offered him the promise of a birding expedition
to a far-away site. Soon, Ernst gave in to Stresemann’s urging and his own preferences
and in March 1925 changed his studies from medicine at Greifswald to zoology at the
University of Berlin. Ernst completed his Ph.D. summa cum laude in 16 months (in
June 1926) just before his 22nd birthday. He had to rush through the work because
a position was opening up at the museum and the deadline for applying was July 1.
He needed to have his doctorate in hand to be able to apply. He thus had to work day
and night on his course work and thesis. There was very little time for anything else,
including courses and books that were not directly applicable to finishing his degree.
Hence during his student days in Berlin he did not learn more than the very basics about
what would become a major focus of his work—evolutionary theory, including species
concepts and speciation. He did, however, have a firm grounding in species systematics.
Expedition
Having dangled the possibility of an expedition to an exotic land before the eyes of the
youthful Ernst, Professor Stresemann now had the obligation to arrange such an expe-
dition. As it happened, a collector working for the noted gentleman ornithologist Lord
Walter Rothschild, F.R.S., was unable to undertake a planned expedition to Dutch New
Guinea because of a stroke. Stresemann introduced Ernst to Lord Rothschild and the
curator of his extensive bird collection, Ernst Hartert, at the International Congress of
Zoology in Budapest in 1927 and suggested that the budding ornithologist would be
a good substitute. The decision to send the inexperienced Ernst on an expedition to an
unexplored section of New Guinea was very speculative and almost foolhardy. Ernst was
in excellent physical shape, but he had never collected a bird in his life and had almost
never had a shotgun in his hands; his knowledge of tropical lands came only from what
he had read. Fortunately for him, the Natural History Museum in Buitenzorg, Dutch
East Indies, became deeply involved in the expedition.

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With all preparations completed, Ernst sailed on a German boat, the Fulda, from Genoa
on February 7, 1928. During the voyage, he learned Malay from several younger Javanese
passengers. The boat reached Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia) on March 4, and Ernst
went to the Buitenzorg Museum, where Dr. Karel Willem Dammermann, the director,
and Dr. Siebers received him graciously and instructed him for two weeks. They provided
him with equipment and, most importantly, with three experienced indigenous museum
assistants who knew how to collect and prepare birds and insects and how to camp and
survive in the jungle. The three assistants trained Ernst to become a competent collector
and explorer.
Ernst’s expedition became tripartite; the first two parts were in New Guinea, where he
collected for the Rothschild Museum, in Tring, England, and the AMNH, and later for
the Berlin Museum (3, 6). Close to the end of this phase of the expedition, he received a
telegram inviting him to take part in the Whitney South Sea Expedition (WSSE) of the
AMNH as well as a message from Professor Stresemann advising him to accept, with the
permission of the Berlin Museum to do so. Stresemann wrote Ernst that accepting this
invitation could be good for his future career, advice that turned out to be prophetic.
The expedition visited several islands in the Solomons (13) and under Ernst’s urging
changed tactics from exploring the lowlands only to including also the interior uplands—
an important move to ensure that endemic species living in the mountains were not over-
looked. Although reaching and collecting in the elevated parts of each island was much
harder, this effort increased the number of species obtained by the WSSE and became the
standard procedure thereafter.
The expedition was a central turning point in Ernst’s life. He started as a novice and
ended as a seasoned field man. He was able to visit remote areas and people in New
Guinea just before the major influx of Europeans into the interior. And he acquired
enough stories to last for the rest of his life. But most importantly, it brought him into
contact with several people who influenced the rest of his career. These included Lord
Rothschild and Dr. Hartert of the Tring Museum, but more importantly, Dr. Leonard
Sanford, a trustee of the AMNH and patron of its Ornithology Department, who would
set the stage for Ernst’s move to the United States.
Dr. Sanford was a wealthy surgeon in New Haven, Connecticut, a professor in the
Medical College of Yale University, and an amateur ornithologist with a private collection
of birds. He was in close touch with Rothschild and Stresemann, and he was a friend of
many wealthy people and could readily raise funds for the museum. He was especially

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successful in obtaining support from Harry

Payne Whitney and his family of New York, who Ernst’s move to the United
provided funds for the WSSE and much of the States had nothing to do with
money needed for building a new wing of the the worsening political climate
AMNH that housed the Department of Orni- in Germany. It happened only
thology and several exhibition halls of birds. His because the position at the
family later purchased the Rothschild ornitho- AMNH was by far the best one
logical collection for the AMNH and would that he could have obtained in
provide Ernst’s salary for most, if not all, of his the early 1930s.
tenure at the museum. Dr. Sanford and Ernst
also became close friends, with Sanford becoming
a mentor and, indeed, almost a surrogate father to Ernst, whose own father had died
when Ernst was only 12 years old.
Early years in New York
Some potential difficulties with the WSSE were developing back in New York in 1930,
because little work had been done on the large and important collection of birds that was
being amassed in the Ornithology Department. Dr. Sanford worried that if nothing was
done to begin putting the collection in shape, the Whitneys would lose interest and cut
off further funding of the expedition before its work was completed. To forestall such
an event, he persuaded the Whitneys to fund the hiring of a temporary person to study
this collection, and he already had a candidate in mind—Ernst Mayr. Ernst received an
invitation to join the AMNH as a visiting research associate in October 1930. The Berlin
Museum granted him a year’s leave of absence, and Ernst accepted this position, leaving
Germany early in 1931 and reporting for work at the AMNH on January 19.
Ernst’s move to the United States had nothing to do with the worsening political climate
in Germany. It happened only because the position at the AMNH was by far the best one
that he could have obtained in the early 1930s. He would have available to him one of
the best possible collections of birds to study questions of the species concept, speciation,
and biogeography. Further, it would have been most difficult for him to obtain a
university position in Germany after having worked at a natural history museum.
Once in New York, Ernst plunged right into work on the WSSE birds. He published his
first paper on March 31 (4), just two months after he arrived, and by the end of the year
he had published 12 papers describing 12 new species and 68 new subspecies. But his job
with the AMNH was only for one year—until further events unfolded. Lord Rothschild

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was being bled dry by a blackmailer, an infamous but still unnamed “titled lady,” so he
could not continue his ornithological researches and was forced to sell his collection.
The Rothschild collection came to New York in 1932, and Ernst was appointed the first,
and only, Whitney-Rothschild curator (31). At this point he came to the momentous
decision to make his home in the United States, and he resigned his position in Berlin.
In 1931 Ernst joined the Linnaean Society of New York, a group of amateur bird
watchers who met in the museum; he established an informal monthly seminar to discuss
current papers in field ornithology and encouraged members to concentrate on some
project. In the 1940s he started another informal seminar in systematics that lasted
into the 1970s, well after he had left for Harvard. He directed independent research
projects for several students and served as a mentor for three younger members of the
department. He liked teaching, and he interacted well with younger people interested in
biology and systematics.
During Ernst’s first decade at the AMNH, his scientific work was focused mainly on
avian systematics and biogeography (Bock, 1994; LeCroy, 2005; Schodde, 2005; Vuil-
leumier, 2005). The museum’s vast collection of birds from Australia, New Guinea, and
the South Pacific provided him with the best possible material on which to study avian
speciation and biogeography. His empirical work on the AMNH collections provided
him with a firm foundation for his theoretical work in systematics and evolution
and, later, in the history and philosophy of biology. While doing all this research, he
was involved in moving the bird collection to its new quarters in the Whitney Wing,
unpacking the Rothschild collection, integrating it into the existing collection of the
AMNH, and cataloguing this immense body of material.
In the early 1940s he also supervised the Sanford Hall of the Biology of Birds (15),
probably the first exhibition hall in an American natural history museum devoted to the
biology of a single group of organisms (LeCroy, 2005). During this busy period Ernst
completed his synopsis of New Guinea birds (11), which, more than 70 years later, is
still the basic reference work on this avifauna. Some of his important ideas are hidden
in papers with unexceptional titles, such as “The birds of Timor and Sumba” (14),
the only paper that discussed in English the new approach by Stresemann for biogeo-
graphical analysis. He also published his first theoretical paper on the species concept and
speciation (10).
Ernst had read the then-new book by Bernhard Rensch (1929) on species concepts and
speciation after his return from the South Pacific, and was much impressed by it (25).

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He always stated that Rensch’s book provided the foundations for his later thinking
about the species concept, species taxa, and speciation. Clearly, however, he formed most
of his own ideas about evolutionary theory after arriving at the AMNH, when he was
able to study the vast collections there. This empirical research, supplemented by his
wide reading of the literature coming into the museum’s library and conversations with
recently trained biologists in fields from genetics to ecology, formed the foundation for
his evolutionary thinking and later work in the philosophy of biology.
Although almost everyone thinks of Ernst as an evolutionary theorist, his first and last
interest was biogeography (Vuilleumier, 2005). He analyzed in detail the spread in
Europe of the serin (Serinus canarius) (2) and attempted to provide explanations for its
remarkable geographical advance over a period of just 125 years. In all he published
about 80 papers (almost 10 percent of his total output) on biogeography, treating
diverse topics, from island biogeography to the origin of the North American avifauna
to the definition of a fauna. Unfortunately, he never wrote a book on biogeography, but
a careful analysis of all his papers on this subject provides an excellent account of his
thinking. In his studies of the avifauna of New Guinea and the South Pacific, he knew at
least as much about the biogeography of these birds as about their systematics and evolu-
tionary history.
Biogeography was important in the earliest projects that Ernst chose when starting
at the AMNH, such as his analysis of the birds of Randell Island (5), which was the
second paper he published that was based on his research in the AMNH collections. In
an almost unknown 1933 paper with the innocuous title “Die Vogelwelt Polynesiens”
(7), he laid out the total set of ideas about island biogeography, a subject made famous
much later by MacArthur and Wilson (1967). Ernst repeated his ideas in a subsequent
set of papers (8, 9). His penultimate book (34) dealt with a very detailed analysis of the
distributional history of the birds of Northern Melanesia, the region of the last part of his
expedition 70 years earlier.
At the 1939 AAAS meeting in Columbus, Ohio, the American Society of Naturalists
and the Genetics Society of America sponsored a joint symposium on speciation; Ernst
was asked to speak on geographical variation in birds and its bearing on the process of
speciation. His lecture was a great success. After the symposium, Professor L. C. Dunn
of Columbia University invited Ernst to take part in the 1941 Jesup Lectures, together
with Edgar Anderson. When Anderson stated that he would not provide his part of the

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manuscript for the planned book based on the joint lectures, Ernst was asked to expand
his manuscript, which became Systematics and the Origin of Species (12).
In this volume Ernst expressed his now-famous definition of the biological species
concept (p. 120): “Species are groups of actually or potentially interbreeding natural
populations, which are reproductively isolated from other such groups.” He also distin-
guished between physical isolating barriers, which were needed during the process
of speciation, and intrinsic isolating mechanisms, which are attributes of species and
prevent gene flow from one species to others. He argued against the widespread concept
of sympatric speciation, in which new species evolve from a single ancestral species in the
same location. He said that conceptual difficulties existed in the proposed mechanisms of
external barriers keeping apart two sympatric populations of the same species during the
speciation process.
Later years in New York
Ernst had a very informal manner, a result of his years of living in the United States, and
asked younger colleagues and his students, once they obtained their doctorate, to call
him by his first name. He was fiercely loyal to his friends, with whom he corresponded
throughout his life. He was generous in discussing research projects with younger
workers and reading the resulting manuscripts. Many visitors stayed with Ernst and his
wife Gretel in their home in Tenafly, New Jersey, and later in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
as well as their rural retreat in New Hampshire. Ernst and Gretel were key figures in the
American Ornithologists’ Union project of sending care packages to European ornithol-
ogists after World War II, as well as sending large numbers of packages independently of
this cooperative ornithological effort.
After his Jesup Lectures and the publication of his Systematics and the Origin of Species,
Ernst continued his work on birds but became more and more interested in evolutionary
theory and in the formation of what became the Society for the Study of Evolution and
its journal, Evolution, of which he was the founding editor (Cain, 1994; Smocovitis,
1994a, b). However, he became more and more reckless in his situation in New York
City. He accepted a single-term appointment at the University of Minnesota in the
spring of 1949 and another at the University of Washington in the autumn of 1952.
Although Ernst had become an adjunct professor at Columbia University in the late
1940s and taught a course every winter, he was unable to direct graduate students there.

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Ernst felt real and perceived obligations to Dr. Sanford, who had been responsible for
a good part of the growth of the Department of Ornithology at the AMNH, including
bringing Ernst there, and he turned down several offers of positions elsewhere. Ernst
felt that he could not leave the museum during Sanford’s life, because this would have
been a great disappointment to the older man, who had been so central to his career.
With Sanford’s death in December 1950, Ernst felt free to consider offers from other
institutes, and in the autumn of 1952 he received a telephone call from Professor Alfred
S. Romer, director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University,
inquiring whether he would be interested in a position as an Alexander Agassiz Professor
of Zoology. Ernst accepted, because this was the best possible university position for him
in the United States. As attractive as the offer from Harvard was, however, he left the
AMNH with a sad heart because he had been there for 22-plus years and had accom-
plished much. Also, he was leaving behind the marvelous collection of the AMNH and,
as a consequence, his own empirical research, which would continue to be the essential
foundation for all of his theoretical work after he left the museum.
The Harvard years
Evolutionary Biology
Ernst’s career after moving from New York to Cambridge, Massachusetts, can be divided
roughly into three categories. These are not sharply separated, and all three started well
before he arrived at Harvard. Moreover, his earlier interests in ornithology, systematics,
and biogeography continued to the end of his life. The three parts were evolutionary
theory, history of science, and philosophy of science.
The Mayrs were able to find an apartment in Cambridge located so that Ernst could walk
to work. Later they bought a house even closer to the museum. And they started to look
for a rural retreat, finding an old farm on a dirt road outside of Wilton, New Hampshire.
The farm had been abandoned and the house was in poor condition, but with most of
the property wooded and bordering on a pond, it was just what they were looking for.
Always known thereafter just as “the Farm,” it became the Mayrs’ little piece of heaven.
They spent almost all weekends there from spring until late autumn and all summers
when they were not travelling. Students, friends, and visitors were taken there whenever
possible, and were always given guided walks with extensive commentary on the local
natural history. For Ernst, the naturalist, it was a place for quiet, reflection, observation,
and work. He spent four to six hours a day in his room in one corner of the house,
dictating papers and correcting manuscripts and proofs.

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The move to Harvard basically ended Ernst’s empirical research career, because he no
longer had access to the bird collections he would have needed. His ornithological work,
however, continued. He was asked by James Greenway, curator of ornithology, to join as
his co-editor in the completion of the massive, and exhaustive, Peters Check-List of Birds
of the World, which had been started in the late 1920s by the then-curator James Lee
Peters and was less than half completed at the time of Peters’ death in 1952. Although
Romer assigned Greenway the task of completing this multi-volume project, Ernst took
over the major role of organizing the work, assigning the treatment of diverse families
to other ornithologists all over the world, obtaining the initial funds for completing the
project, and editing most volumes.
Ernst oversaw the publication of volumes 8-15 and revised volume 1, which was far out
of date; time and energy did not exist for him to revise any of the other early volumes.
The decision was made to publish the remaining volumes in whatever order they reached
completion. The last volume to come out was number 11, which appeared in 1986, 55
years after the publication of volume 1 and 23 years after Ernst took over the project. His
inscription in the copy that he sent to me was, “At last the millstone is off my neck.” The
result was a complete list of all birds of the world down to the level of subspecies (Bock,
1990).
Ernst was one of the few people who had been present at both the 50th (1933) and the
100th anniversary meetings of the American Ornithologists’ Union. He was president
of the organization from 1956 to 1959 and also served as president of the International
Ornithological Committee (1958-62) and hence of the 13th International Ornitho-
logical Congress, in Ithaca, New York, in 1962. He was elected to the National Academy
of Sciences in 1954, shortly after moving to Harvard, and for the next decade he served
on the National Science Foundation and on the Biology Council of the National
Research Council. In these positions he pushed strongly for increased support for
systematics and for natural history museums. For this work and for his contributions in
systematics and evolutionary biology, Ernst received the prestigious National Medal of
Science in 1969 from the President of the United States.
Ernst continued to work in systematics, but his main output on this subject was general
papers. He also wrote three new editions of his textbook in systematics (16), publishing
them either alone or with different co-authors. He became deeply involved with the work
of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, starting with the 1953
Copenhagen Zoological Congress, and was elected a commissioner in 1954, serving

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until 1976. He was very active in the preparation of the first two editions of the Code of
Zoological Nomenclature, arguing strongly for the conservation of established names in
opposition to strict priority and writing the important preamble to the first edition of the
code, which has been kept in all subsequent editions.
Beginning in his last years at the AMNH, Ernst had become increasingly involved with
evolutionary theory and especially with details of the species concept and speciation. In
his 1942 book, he discussed the “dumbbell model” of speciation. On further analysis, he
felt that this model was not sufficient, and he formulated what he termed the “founder
principle,” which was central to the “peripatric or the budding model” of speciation (17),
in which a “genetic revolution” accompanies the speciation process. He was concerned
with the size of the population that led to a new species in peripatric speciation—
evolution of a new species physically isolated from a larger parent species—and
concluded that most often it was very small, as in a founder population.
Ernst considered this idea to be one of his most important in evolutionary theory, but
considerable controversy still surrounds the concept of a genetic revolution during
speciation and whether most speciation events result from peripatric speciation. Ernst
published two important papers in connection with the centenary of Darwin’s On
the Origin of Species; one was “The emergence of evolutionary novelties,” in the major
Chicago celebration (18), and the second was “Accident or design: the paradox of
evolution,” in Melbourne, Australia (20), where he was on his first sabbatical from
Harvard.
During his first decade at Harvard Ernst completed his enlarged treatment of the species
concept and evolution in Animal Species and Evolution (21), which was his last major
book on species and speciation, although Populations, Species, and Evolution (23) is not
just an abridgement of his 1963 book but a considerable revision. He did not discuss
sympatric speciation in the book because he felt that the subject had been sufficiently
covered in his earlier works. In later years, however, he acknowledged that sympatric
speciation may have occurred—for example, in the cichlid fishes in African lakes [see
also (12), pp. 213-215]—but the nature of the essential external barriers during the
speciation process in these cases is still unknown.
History of Biology
As Ernst was completing the revised edition of his book on animal species, his interests
turned more and more to the history of biology. This was not a new career direction for
him but went back to papers he had written in the 1930s; now, however, he focused
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more on this area. His first project was a historical analysis of the period of the evolu-
tionary synthesis of 1937-1948. Ernst felt that it would still be possible to collect
observations and interpretations directly from several of the important architects of this
synthesis. He organized two conferences held in Cambridge in May and October 1974,
and sent questionnaires to several workers. He summarized the results of the conferences
and other contributed material in a book titled The Evolutionary Synthesis (25, 26), which
provides many insights into what was and was not accomplished during this most inter-
esting period of evolutionary biology since Darwin.
In connection with his evolutionary work, Ernst read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species
several times. It is not clear whether he read very much of Darwin’s other publications,
but he did know and greatly appreciate this one. He was disturbed that although many
reprints of this book were available, in both the first and the sixth editions, most inter-
ested scientists did not have the exact first edition available. He therefore persuaded the
Harvard University Press to publish a facsimile of this edition, for which he wrote an
introduction (22). Later he presented a thorough analysis of Darwin and the beginnings
of evolutionary thought (30).
Ernst’s most important contribution to the history of biology started at the end of the
1960s, when he first had the thought of writing a book on the history of ideas in biology.
He spent the years from 1970 to 1975 reading, organizing his notes, and preparing
the first draft of his book. At that time it was clear to him that the coverage of all of
biology was too vast a subject for a single volume and he decided to limit the book to
what he called “ultimate (evolutionary) causations,” the area that he knew best. Even
with this restriction, it took seven more years until The Growth of Biological Thought (27)
appeared—a volume of 980 pages, covering in detail systematics, evolution, and genetics,
along with four general chapters. This book remains the standard treatment of these three
subjects to this day.
Originally Ernst planned a second volume on “the biology of ‘proximate’ (functional)
causations”—see (27: pp. vii-viii)—but this proved to be too large a task in an area of
biology less known to him. At the same time, his thoughts were turning more and more
to the philosophy of biology.
Ernst’s most important paper on Darwin contained an argument stating that Darwin
had presented in the Origin not merely one theory, as Darwin himself had claimed and
almost everyone had accepted, but a bundle of five independent theories (28). According
to Ernst, one of these theories—that common descent implies that all species or popu-

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lations of organisms have descended with modification from common ancestors—is

historical-narrative. The other four—evolution as such, gradualism, multiplication of
species (splitting of phylogenetic lineages as well as transformational change within a
lineage), and natural selection (Darwin’s mechanism for phyletic transformation)—are
all nomological-deductive (Bock, 2004b). Ernst’s analysis of Darwin’s theories about
evolution is significant in that it provides a better understanding of the history of
Darwin’s ideas as well as permitting a clearer comprehension of the philosophy of evolu-
tionary ideas.
Philosophy of Biology
The major thrust in Ernst’s thinking during the last two decades of his life was the
philosophy of biology and especially how it differed from the standard philosophy of
science, which was based on physics. This interest was not new for him, but went back
to his earliest work in evolutionary biology, which was centered on individual and other
variation in species. He stressed population thinking in biology, in contrast to typology
and stereotypes that dominated scientific thinking in all areas, including biology. He
sketched the beginnings of his agenda in the philosophy of biology in the introductory
chapter of Growth of Biological Thought (27). Although he published several papers
dealing with diverse aspects of the philosophy of biology, and brought together many of
these in his several collections of essays (24, 29, 33, 36), Ernst never published a book on
the philosophy of biology. This was a great regret for him, as he expressed in a recorded
interview that was made in November 2003 and published in DVD form (Bock and
Lein, 2005). However, a careful reading of his papers on this subject, including those in
evolutionary theory, will provide a good overview of Ernst’s thinking.
Most significantly, he argued that biology was autonomous from the physical sciences
in that all explanations in biology depended on a dual causation (19, 27, 36), which he
called proximal (=functional explanations) and ultimate (=evolutionary explanations)
causations.
Ernst rejected typology and insisted that in biology all individuals were unique, so that
one always had to use population thinking. Unfortunately a short and catchy term like
typology has not been introduced for population thinking. He always emphasized the
importance of population thinking in all theories about relationships between humans,
and he stressed the incorrectness, as he saw it, of stereotypical approaches to thinking

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about all human aspects—from growth to education to medicine. One wonders what he
would have thought about mapping the human genome.
When reading Ernst’s writings on the philosophy of biology, one must be aware of
several idiosyncrasies in his thinking. Perhaps most important was that his concept of
biology, when he considered the philosophy of science, was that biology was restricted to
evolutionary biology and perhaps almost to historical evolutionary theory. He therefore
did not believe in statements that were given the status of natural or scientific laws; he
substituted the notion of concepts in their place. Other biological explanations that
were strictly in the area of functional biology he dismissed as physics. He considered
reductionism and holism as systems of explanations, and he favored holism in biological
explanations. His holism, however, was not complete, because it seemed to go only to the
level of the organism and fell short of the necessary holistic level of the organism in its
full interaction with its environment. He rejected all forms of reductionism and therefore
referred to any analysis that does confuse the issue as “methodological reductionism,”
because all scientific and technological investigations have to start as methodological
reductionism.
Ernst rejected teleology, but included concepts of teleomatic, and of teleonomic, for
goal-directed activities controlled by a program such as ontogenetic development and by
many types of animal behavior. He stated, quite correctly, that evolutionary change was
not teleological, because there was always an accidental cause for phyletic evolutionary
change, thus evolution is always accidental, and it is difficult or impossible to label evolu-
tionary change as progressive or having a goal.
Furthermore, Ernst quite correctly rejected both a Cartesian approach to science and a
philosophy of science based strictly on the physical sciences, yet he was unable to develop
a coherent philosophy of science that included all aspects of biology. He was sadly disap-
pointed that the large amount of work done by philosophers of biology over the previous
four decades had not achieved this important goal. His explanation was that most philos-
ophers interested in the philosophy of biology were trained in physics or mathematics
and thus lacked a sufficient understanding of biology, including an appreciation for dual
causation in biology. Part of the reason why he was unable to write such a book himself
is that he simply ran out of time. He became primarily interested in the philosophy of
biology at an age when most of us cease scholarly work, and there were other projects
that he wanted to complete.

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The last years

Gretel died in 1990. Ernst continued to work at his office in the Museum of Compar-
ative Zoology, but more and more he went in only in the mornings. In the afternoons he
worked at home in his small office and then took a long walk in the late afternoon. His
daily walk was essential to him and was perhaps one of the reasons why he enjoyed good
health throughout his long life. He also spent considerable time at the farm, as long as he
was still able to manage alone or when one of his children or grandchildren stayed there
with him. His birthday on July 5 was always celebrated at the farm in a ritual gathering
for all of his family living in the area, and included his 100th birthday in 2004.
After Gretel’s death, Ernst spent January to March in a warmer clime, first in Gamboa,
Panama, as a guest of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, and later in Florida as
a Distinguished Scholar at Rollins College in Winter Park. Finally, in 1997, he gave up
his house in Cambridge and moved to a full-care residential community, the Carleton-
Willard Village in Bedford, Massachusetts, close to his younger daughter. Ernst still
did his daily walks and was occasionally taken on short birding outings in the area. He
still drove to the museum at least once a week until his 99th year, when his daughters
persuaded him to give up driving.
The final decade of his life was a busy one. He published five books during this period
(30, 32, 33, 36), including The Birds of Northern Melanesia (34), in which he returned
to the avifauna he had first observed 70 years earlier in the last part of his South Seas
expedition and studied in his years at the AMNH. His last book (36) appeared after his
100th birthday and dealt with his final ideas on the philosophy of science, including why
he considered biology to be autonomous from the physical sciences. I was pleased to be
involved in his last co-authored paper (35) on ordering systems in biology.
Ernst received many honorary degrees, memberships, awards, and recognitions. His first
honorary doctorate was in 1957 from Uppsala University (Sweden) in systematics, in
connection with the observation of the 250th birthday of Linnaeus. Of his awards, he
was especially pleased to receive the Balzan Prize (Switzerland/Italy) in 1983, the Inter-
national Prize in Biology (Japan) in 1994, and the Crafoord Prize (Sweden) in 1999.
Characteristically, he donated the monetary awards associated with these prizes to various
causes and funds. His last award came late in 2004: the Gold Medal from the Acca-
demia dei Lincei (Italy). When I last visited him he was on the telephone in a complex
discussion on how to arrange a time and place when a delegation from the Accademia
dei Lincei could present the actual medal to him. Alas, this never happened because

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of his illness and because of a major blizzard late in January 2005 that prevented the
planned trip to Bedford of the director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, who
had received the medal and was to present it to him. But of all of the honors he received,
the one that pleased him the most was the naming of the Museum of Comparative Zool-
ogy’s library for him. Libraries were very special to him as the accumulation of human
knowledge, and he once remarked to me that every time a scholar dies, a library of accu-
mulated knowledge dies with him or her.
Ernst told me in the late summer of 2003 that the doctors had found secondary cancer
lesions in his liver but that the primary site was not known. He became steadily weaker,
although his mind was clear until the very end. Early in the morning of February 3,
2005, his two daughters received a telephone call that their father was not going to last
very long. They came immediately and were at his bedside when he quietly slipped away.
In 2005 Ernst’s family gathered as usual on the July 4 weekend at the Farm; I was invited
to join them. On Sunday morning, everyone gathered on the glacial esker bordering
Burton Pond, which had been Ernst and Gretel’s favorite spot. His ashes were scattered
along this low ridge to join those of Gretel.
Ernst Mayr was surely one of the greatest ornithologists and evolutionists of the twen-
tieth century as well as an outstanding biologist. He was a leader in the history of biology
and one of the driving forces in the philosophy of biology since its emergence in the early
1960s. Because of his long life, he provided a connection to many workers in what most
of us would consider the dim past. He was well known to scholars around the world and
is missed by all.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to express my appreciation to my co-authors in volume 58 of Ornithological Mono-
graphs—namely, Ross Lein, Richard Schodde, Mary LeCroy, François Vuilleumier, and Jürgen
Haffer—for their work in gathering considerable material about Ernst Mayr’s life and work, which
made my task of writing this manuscript much easier. I should especially like to thank Jürgen
Haffer for making available to me his unpublished manuscript on Ornithology, Evolution and
Philosophy, the Life and Science of Ernst Mayr (1904–2005), which made checking the accuracy of
many facts far easier. And finally, I should like to thank Ernst’s daughters, Christa and Susie, for
their help and support over many years.

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 ER N S T M AY R

POSITIONS
1926–32 Assistant Curator, Zoological Museum, University of Berlin
1931–32 Visiting Research Associate, Department of Ornithology, AMNH, New York
1932–44 Associate Curator, Whitney–Rothschild Collection, AMNH, New York
1944–53 Curator, Whitney-Rothschild Collection, AMNH, New York
1953–75 Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology, Harvard University
1961–70 Director, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University
1975–2005 Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology, Emeritus, Harvard University
HONORARY DEGREES
1957 PhD, Uppsala University (Sweden), systematics
1959 DSc, Yale University, systematics
DSc, University of Melbourne (Australia), evolution
1966 DSc, Oxford University (England), ornithology
1968 DPhil, University of Munich (Germany), evolution
1974 DPhil, University of Paris VI (Sorbonne), evolution
1979 DSc, Harvard University, evolution
1982 DSc, Cambridge University (England), evolution
DSc, Guelph University (Canada), philosophy of biology
1984 DSc, University of Vermont, evolution
1993 PhD, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, systematics
1994 DSc, University of Vienna (Austria), ornithology
DPhil, University of Konstanz (Germany), philosophy of biology
1995 DSc, University of Bologna (Italy), evolution
1996 DSc, Rollins College, Florida, philosophy of biology
1997 Degree honoris causa, Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris, systematics
2000 DPhil, Humboldt University of Berlin (Germany), systematics

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 ER N S T M AY R

AWARDS AND RECOGNITIONS

1946 Leidy Medal, Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia
1958 Wallace–Darwin Medal, Linnean Society of London
1965 Brewster Medal, American Ornithologists’ Union
1966 Verrill Medal, Peabody Museum, Yale University
1967 Daniel Giraud Eliot Medal, National Academy of Sciences
1969 Centennial Medal, American Museum of Natural History, New York
National Medal of Science
1971 Walker Prize, Museum of Science, Boston, Massachusetts
1972 Molina Prize, Accademia delle Scienze, Bologna, Italy
1977 Linnean Medal (Zoology), Linnean Society, London
Coues Prize, American Ornithologists’ Union
1978 Premio Jabuti, Brazil, CBL Medal, Collège de France
1980 Mendel Medal, Leopoldina Academy, Halle (Germany)
1983 E. Eisenmann Medal, Linnaean Society of New York
Balzan Prize (Switzerland/Italy)
1984 Darwin Medal, Royal Society (England)
1986 Award for Service to the Systematics Community, Association of Systematics Collection
Sarton Medal (History of Science)
1989 Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, Medal
1991 Phi Beta Kappa Book Prize
1992 Naming of Ernst Mayr Dining Room at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
1994 Salvin–Godman Medal, British Ornithologists’ Union
International Prize for Biology, Japan Prize
Dedication of the Ernst Mayr Library at the Museum of Comparative Zoology,
Harvard University
1995 Walk of Fame, Rollins College
Benjamin Franklin Medal (American Philosophical Society)
1996 George Gaylord Simpson Award (Society for the Study of Evolution)
1997 Establishment of the Ernst Mayr Lectureship at the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie
1998 Lewis Thomas Prize (Rockefeller University)

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1999 Crafoord Prize, Stockholm (Sweden)

2000 Golden Plate Award (American Academy of Achievement)
Biologist of the Year 2000 (Washington)
2004 Treviranus Medal (Verein deutscher Biologen)
Gold Medal from the Accademia dei Lincei, Rome, Italy

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HONORARY SOCIET Y MEMBERSHIPS

1939 Royal Australian Ornithological Union, Corresponding Member
1941 Deutsche Ornithologen-Gesellschaft, Honorary Fellow
1943 American Society of Naturalists, Honorary Fellow
1944 New York Zoological Society, Fellow; 1987, Scientific Fellow
1945 Netherlands Ornithological Society, Corresponding Member; 1953, Honorary Fellow
1948 Société Ornithologique de France, Honorary Foreign Member
Zoological Society of London, Corresponding Member
1949 Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, Correspondent
1950 Royal Society of New Zealand, Honorary Fellow
1951 Botanical Gardens of Indonesia, Honorary Fellow
Ornithologische Gesellschaft in Bayern, Corresponding Member; 1976, Honorary Fellow
1952 Linnean Society of London, Foreign Member
South African Ornithological Society, Corresponding Member
1954 National Academy of Sciences, Member
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Fellow
1955 Kongliga Vetenskaps-Societeten i Uppsala, Honorary Member
Zoological Society of India, Corresponding Fellow; 1961, Honorary Member
1956 British Ornithologists’ Union, Honorary Member
Dansk Ornithologisk Forening, Honorary Member
1958 American Association for the Advancement of Science, Fellow
1962 Sociedad Venezolana de Ciencias Naturales, Corresponding Member
Zoological Society of India (Calcutta), Honorary Member
1963 Asociacin Ornitologica del Plata (Buenos Aires), Honorary Member
Societas Scientiarum Fennica (Helsingfors), Honorary Member
1965 American Philosophical Society, Member
1968 Sociedad Colombiana de Naturalistas, Honorary Member
1970 Zoologische Gesellschaft, Germany, Honorary Member
1971 Academia de Ciencias Físicas, Matemáticas y Naturales (Caracas, Venezuela), Foreign
Corresponding Member

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 ER N S T M AY R

1972 Department of Ornithology, AMNH, Curator Emeritus

Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina, Halle (Germany)
Société Zoologique de France, Honorary Member
1975 Sociedad Espanola de Ornitologia (Madrid), Honorary Member
Nuttall Ornithological Club, Honorary Member
1976 Society of Systematic Zoology, Honorary Member
Linnaean Society of New York, Honorary Member
1977 Senckenbergische Gesellschaft, Frankfurt, Corresponding Member
Bayerische Akademie, Munich, Corresponding Member
1978 Académie des sciences, inscriptions et belles-lettres de Toulouse,
Corresponding Member
1980 Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Foreign Member
1981 Italian Zoological Society, Foreign Member
1984 Zoological Society of London, Honorary Member
1986 American Society of Zoologists, Honorary Member
1988 Royal Society, Foreign Member
1989 Académie des Sciences, Paris, Associate
1993 Center for the Philosophy of Science, Pittsburgh, Honorary Fellow
1994 Russian Academy of Science, Moscow, Honorary Member
Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie, Honorary Member
1998 Gesellschaft Naturforschender Freunde zu Berlin, Corresponding Member
2002 Verband Deutscher Biologen und biowissenschaftlicher Fachgesellschaften,
Honorary Member
2003 Gesellschaft für Biologische Systematik, Honorary Member
Sociedade Fritz Müller de Ciencias Naturais, Brazil, Honorary Member
Darwin-Gesellschaft, Honorary Member

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SOCIET Y OFFICES HELD

Linnaean Society of New York, Editor, Proceedings and Transactions, 1934–41
American Ornithologists’ Union, Vice President, 1953–56; President, 1956–59
Nuttall Ornithological Club; Councillor, 1954–55; Vice President, 1955–57; President, 1957–59
International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, Commissioner, 1954–76
American Society of Naturalists, President, 1962–63
Society for the Study of Evolution, Secretary, 1946; Editor, 1947–49; President, 1950
Society of Systematic Zoology, President, 1966
11th International Zoological Congress, Vice President, 1958
13th International Ornithological Congress, President, 1962
International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology, Honorary
President, 1990

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REFERENCES
Bock, W. J. 1990. Special Review: J. L. Peters’ Check-list of Birds of the World and a history of
avian check-lists. Auk 107: 629-639.

Bock, W. J. 1994. Ernst Mayr, naturalist: his contributions to systematics and evolution. Biol.
Phil. 9:267-327.

Bock, W. J. 2004a. Ernst Mayr at 100—a life inside and outside of ornithology. Auk 121:637-
651. (Reprinted in Ornithol. Monogr. 58:1-16.)

Bock, W. J. 2004b. Explanations in systematics. In Milestones in systematics (Systematics Associ-

ation Special Volume Series, no. 67), eds. D. M. Williams and P. L. Forey, pp. 49-56. Boca Raton,
Fla: CRC Press, 2004.

Bock, W. J. 2005. In Memoriam. Ernst Mayr, 5 July 1904 – 3 February 2005. Auk
122:1005-1007.

Bock, W. J., and M. R. Lein, eds. 2005. Ernst Mayr at 100. Ornithological Monographs, vol. 58.
McLean, Va.: American Ornithologists’ Union,

Cain, J. 1994. Ernst Mayr as community architect: launching the Society for the Study of
Evolution and the journal Evolution. Biol. Phil. 9:387-427.

Greene, J., and M. Ruse, eds, 1994. Ernst Mayr at ninety. Biol. Phil. 9:263-427.

Haffer, J. 2005. Ernst Mayr—Bibliography. Ornithol. Monogr. 58:73-108.

Haffer, J. 2007. Ornithology, Evolution and Philosophy, the Life and Science of Ernst Mayr (1904-
2005). Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag.

LeCroy, M. 2005. Ernst Mayr as the Whitney-Rothschild Curator at the American Museum of
Natural History. Ornithol. Monogr. 58:30-49.

Lein, M. R. 2005. Ernst Mayr as a life-long naturalist. Ornithol. Monogr. 58:17-29.

MacArthur, R. H., and E. O. Wilson. 1967. The Theory of Island Biogeography. Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press.

Rensch, B. 1929. Das Prinzip geographischer Rassenkreise und das Problem der Artbildung.
Berlin: Borntraeger.

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Schodde, R. 2005. Ernst Mayr and southwest Pacific birds: inspiration for ideas on speciation.
Ornithol. Monogr. 58:50-57.

Smocovitis, V. B. 1994a. Disciplining evolutionary biology: Ernst Mayr and the founding of the
Society for the Study of Evolution and Evolution (1939-1950). Evolution 48:1-8.

Smocovitis, V. B. 1994b. Organizing evolution: founding the Society for the Study of Evolution
(1939-1950). J. Hist. Biol. 27:241-309.

Stresemann, E. 1927-34. Sauropsida: Aves. In Handbuch der Zoologie, ed. W. Kükenthal and
T. Krumbach, vol. 7, part 2. Berlin: W. de Gruyter & Co.

Vuilleumier, F. 2005. Ernst Mayr’s first and last interests—biogeography of birds. Ornithol.
Monogr. 58:58-72.

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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
The following publications are those referred to directly in the text. A full bibliography is available
as electronic supplementary material at http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbm.2006.0013 or via http://
www.journals.royalsoc.ac.uk.

1923 (1) Die Kolbenente (Nyroca rufina) auf dem Durchzuge in Sachsen. Ornithol. Monatsber.
31:135-136.

1926 (2) Die Ausbreitung des Girlitz (Serinus canaria serinus L.). Ein Beitrag zur Tiergeog-
raphie. J. Ornithol. 74:571-671.

1930 (3) My Dutch New Guinea Expedition, 1928. Novit. Zool. 36:20-26.

1931 (4) Birds collected during the Whitney South Sea Expedition. XII. Notes on Halcyon
chloris and some of its subspecies. Am. Mus. Novit. no. 469:1-10.

(5) Birds collected during the Whitney South Sea Expedition. XIII. Asystematic list of the
birds of Rennell Island with descriptions of new species and subspecies. Am. Mus. Novit.
no. 486:1-29.

1932 (6) A tenderfoot explorer in New Guinea. Reminiscences of an Expedition for Birds in the
Primeval Forests of the Arfak Mountains. Nat. Hist. Mag. 32:83-97.

1933 (7) Die Vogelwelt Polynesiens. Mitt. Zool. Mus. Berl. 19:306-323.

1940 (8) Borders and subdivision of the Polynesian region as based on our knowledge of the
distribution of birds. In Proc. Sixth Pacific Science Congress, vol. 4, pp. 191-195. Berkeley:
University of California Press.

(9) The origin and the history of the bird fauna of Polynesia. In Proc. Sixth Pacific Science
Congress, vol. 4, pp. 197-216. Berkeley: University of California Press.

(10) Speciation phenomena in birds. Am. Nat. 74:249-278.

1941 (11) List of New Guinea birds. Asystematic and faunal list of the birds of New Guinea and
adjacent islands. New York: American Museum of Natural History.

1942 (12) Systematics and the Origin of Species. New York: Columbia University Press.

1943 (13) A journey to the Solomons. Nat. Hist. 52:30-37, 48.

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1944 (14) The birds of Timor and Sumba. Bull. Am. Mus. Nat. Hist. 83:123-194.

1948 (15) The new Sanford Hall. Nat. Hist. 57:248-254.

1953 (16) With E. G. Linsley and R. L. Usinger. Methods and principles of systematic zoology.
New York: McGraw-Hill.

1954 (17) Change of genetic environment and evolution. In Evolution as a process, eds.
J. Huxley, A. C. Hardy, and E. B. Ford, pp. 157-180. London: Allen & Unwin.

1960 (18) The emergence of evolutionary novelties. In The evolution of life. Evolution after
Darwin, ed. S. Tax, vol. 1, pp. 349-380. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

1961 (19) Cause and effect in biology: kinds of causes, predictability, and teleology are viewed
by a practicing biologist. Science 134:1501-1506.

1962 (20) Accident or design: the paradox of evolution. In The evolution of living organisms
(Proc. Darwin Centenary Symposium of the Royal Society of Victoria, Melbourne, 1959), ed.
G. W. Leeper, pp. 1-14. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.

1963 (21) Animal species and evolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

1964 (22) Introduction. In On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preser-
vation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, by Charles Darwin (London: John Murray,
1859), a facsimile of the first edition, pp. vii-xxvii. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press.

1970 (23) Populations, species, and evolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. [An
abridgement of Animal Species and Evolution.]

1976 (24) Evolution and the Diversity of Life. Selected Essays. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press.

1980 (25) How I became a Darwinian. In The evolutionary synthesis. Perspectives on the unifi-
cation of biology, eds. E. Mayr and W. B. Provine, pp. 413-423. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press.

(26) (Ed., with W. B. Provine) The Evolutionary Synthesis. Perspectives on the Unification of
Biology. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

1982 (27) The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press.

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1985 (28) Darwin’s five theories of evolution. In The Darwinian Heritage, ed. D. Kohn, pp.
755-772. Princeton. NJ: Princeton University Press.

1988 (29) Toward a New Philosophy of Biology: Observations of an Evolutionist. Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard University Press.

1991 (30) One long argument: Charles Darwin and the genesis of modern evolutionary thought.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

1997 (31) Reminiscences from the first curator of the Whitney Rothschild Collection. BioEssays
19:175-179.

(32) This is biology. The science of the living world. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press.

2001 (33) What evolution is. New York: Basic Books.

(34) With J. Diamond. The Birds of Northern Melanesia. Speciation, Ecology,

and Biogeography. Cambridge, England: Oxford University Press.

2002 (35) With W. J. Bock. Classifications and other ordering systems. J. Zool. Syst. Evol. Res.
40:169-194.

2004 (36) What Makes Biology Unique? Considerations on the Autonomy of a Scientific Discipline.
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Published since 1877, Biographical Memoirs are brief biographies of deceased National Academy
of Sciences members, written by those who knew them or their work. These biographies provide
personal and scholarly views of America’s most distinguished researchers and a biographical history
of U.S. science. Biographical Memoirs are freely available online at www.nasonline.org/memoirs.

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