Here’s an item that touches on two of my passions: good obituaries and the propagation of the theory of evolution.
Ernst Mayr, Pioneer in Tracing Geography’s Role in the Origin of Species, Dies at 100
He died as the courage to teach evolution is in doubt across the country.
Ernst Mayr was a giant. Here’s a list of the things he basically came up with out of the blue or played a huge part in developing.
Evolutionary or modern synthesis, which brought Darwin’s
theories together with mid-century laboratory geneticists and field
scientists to develop the strain of evolution which is/ should be
taught in schools today.
Allopatric
speciation: when populations of a single species are
separated from one another, they slowly accumulate differences until
they can no longer interbreed.
The biological species concept: populations that can successfully
interbreed are the same species and those that cannot are different
species.
He fathered an entirely new field of study, creating almost
singlehandedly the field of history and philosophy of biology as a
distinct discipline, apart from the history of physics and chemistry
Peripatric speciation and genetic revolutions: new species can be produced
when very small populations are cut off from the rest of the species.
Unlike the more general theory of allopatric speciation, holding that
isolated populations slowly accumulate differences until they can no
longer interbreed, peripatric speciation posits that extremely small
populations, isolated in unusual habitats, undergo what Dr. Mayr termed
a “genetic revolution.” Undergoing drastic changes in their genome,
populations evolve quickly to become new species.
He named more than 24 valid bird
species, more than 400 subspecies and several new genuses of birds.
Not a bad string of work. Finally, here’s a snip from Carol Kaesuk Yoon’s excellent obituary:
Dr. Mayr went on to fulfill what he called “the greatest ambition of my
youth,” heading off to the tropics. In the South Pacific, principally New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, Dr. Mayr collected more than 3,000 birds from 1928 to 1930. (He had to live off the land, and every bird, after being skinned for study, went into the pot. As a result, he is said to have eaten more birds of paradise than any other modern biologist.)