Ernst Mayr, an evolutionary biologist who connected Charles Darwin's theories on natural selection to the science of genetics and in doing so helped create the field of evolutionary biology, died Feb. 3 of liver cancer at a retirement community in Bedford, Mass., where he lived. He was 100.
A seminal figure who began his career searching for birds in New Guinea, Dr. Mayr developed "evolutionary synthesis," making the origin of species diversity the central question in biology for the past six decades.
Ernst Mayr's career crossed into many fields through the years, including ornithology, biology and philosophy.
(Jane Reed -- Harvard University)
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"I do consider him the Darwin of the 20th century," said Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis, a historian of science at the University of Florida. "He carried over the naturalist tradition, starting out in ornithology, then moving into evolution, biology. And in the last 40 years of his career, he became a historian, philosopher and writer."
Although not as well known as such scientists as E.O. Wilson, Stephen Jay Gould and Jared Diamond, Dr. Mayr was in many ways their intellectual predecessor, and each publicly acknowledged his leadership. His reputation was made with his 1942 book, "Systematics and the Origin of the Species from the Viewpoint of a Zoologist," which proposed that Darwin's theory of natural selection could explain all of evolution, including why genes evolve at the molecular level.
Species originate, he said, when a population is separated from the main group by time or geography. The separated groups eventually evolve different traits. Those traits are called "isolating mechanisms," and they discourage the two populations from interbreeding.
Thus, species are organisms that have the ability to interbreed, he said. That definition has remained the most widely accepted one in the field.
Dr. Mayr was the first scientist to win biology's "triple crown," capturing the International Balzan Foundation prize in 1983, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences' Crafoord Prize in 1999 and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science's International Prize for Biology in 1994. He also won the U.S. National Medal of Science in 1970. He was named one of the 100 most influential scientists of all time in a 1996 book.
He wrote 25 books, five after he turned 90, and one that attempted to explain, in laymen's terms, "What Evolution Is" (2001). It had an appendix with arguments for encounters with believers in creationism.
"I'm an old-time fighter for Darwinism," he told the Harvard University Gazette in 1991. "I say, 'Please tell me what is wrong with Darwinism. I don't see anything wrong with Darwinism.' "
The Washington Post Book World said of his "The Growth of Biological Thought" (1982), "It seems safe to say that this magisterial study -- all 974 pages of it -- is one of the greatest works ever on the history of science."
He was born in Kempten, Germany, and received a medical degree from the University of Greifswald in 1925. Despite coming from a long line of physicians, he turned to zoology and received a doctorate in the field 16 months later.
Offered the chance to travel to New Guinea to collect birds of paradise, he went off to the South Seas for several years, traveling through hostile territories, battling dengue fever, malaria and dysentery while collecting specimens and developing his scientific theories.
Upon his return, he worked at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and in 1953 moved to Harvard, where he stayed, retiring in 1975 but keeping an office. He was seen on campus as recently as last week.
On his 100th birthday, in an interview with Scientific American, he addressed the breadth of his career.
"When people ask me what is really your field, 50 years or 60 years ago, without hesitation, I would have said I'm an ornithologist. Forty years ago I would have said I'm an evolutionist. And a little later I would still say I'm an evolutionist, but I would also say I'm an historian of biology. And the last 20 years, I love to answer, I'm a philosopher of biology."
He also was a curator, running Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology from 1961 to 1970. He edited the journal Evolution. In 1990, he joined members of the nation's most prestigious science organization and 49 Nobel Prize winners in appealing to President George H.W. Bush to take the threat of global warming seriously and to begin immediately to curb the man-made gases that contribute to the greenhouse effect.
In 1997, The Post wrote that Dr. Mayr had become the world's loudest opponent of the search for radio signals from intelligent civilizations in other worlds.
"They're not out there," he said. "Life is almost a certainty, but it would be something like bacteria." He spoke with a mixture of conviction and outrage. "How many species have existed on the Earth since the origin of life, which was 3,850,000,000 years ago? A good answer is 1 billion. How many of those species have acquired advanced intelligence? You know the answer.
"High intelligence is just absolutely a fluke of history."
His wife of 55 years, Margarete Mayr, died in 1990.
Survivors include two daughters, five grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.
