Ernst Mayr, 1904–2005

On 23 March 1923, 18-year-old Ernst Mayr observed a pair of Red-crested Pochards Netta rufina on a pond in Mortizburg, Sachsen, Germany. This species had not been seen in Germany in over 75 years and this sighting changed the course of 20th-century ornithology and evolutionary biology, and marked the beginning of one of the most extraordinary careers in science. Ernst Mayr was born on 5 July 1904 in Kempten, Bavaria. He died on 3 February 2005 in Bedford, Massachusetts. His life spanned a century that saw remarkable changes in ornithology and evolutionary biology – changes in which he was an active participant. It is an impossible task to summarize such a life and accomplishments in a brief memorial, and I will not attempt to do so. Rather, I shall try to present a glimpse of Ernst Mayr as an ornithologist, scientist and person. Like many ornithologists, Mayr developed a strong interest in natural history and birds as a child. His family encouraged these activities but, when he graduated from the Gymnasium, he planned to pursue a career in medicine, a family tradition. Everything changed when his famous sighting of the Pochards led to a meeting with Professor Erwin Stresemann of the Berlin Museum. This was the first of a series of serendipitous events that shaped Mayr's career. Stresemann encouraged Mayr to abandon medicine in favour of ornithology. The availability of a curatorial position at the Berlin Museum spurred him to complete his PhD in 18 months, and at the age of 21. Shortly thereafter, the unavailability of Lord Walter Rothschild's bird collector led to an opportunity for Mayr to undertake a collecting expedition to New Guinea in 1928. While still in New Guinea, he was invited to join the Whitney South Sea Expedition of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in the Solomon Islands. The AMNH had no one with the background to curate and describe the birds of the Whitney Expedition and hired Ernst Mayr to do so in 1931, initially on a temporary and year-to-year basis. In 1932, Lord Rothschild was forced to sell his bird collection to the AMNH and Mayr became the first and only Whitney–Rothschild Curator. The first phase of Mayr's career, which began in Germany and continued throughout his tenure at the AMNH, was as a systematic ornithologist and biogeographer. During this period he described an amazing total of 26 new species, and 445 new subspecies of birds, mostly from Melanesia and the southwest Pacific. This remained an area of interest throughout his life, culminating with the publication of The Birds of Northern Melanesia (2001), co-authored with Jared Diamond. Mayr's extensive work on the nature and significance of geographical variation of birds of the southwest Pacific led directly to his ‘second career’ as an evolutionary biologist. He was invited to present a series of lectures on speciation in the Jesup Lectures at Columbia University. These lectures were published as Systematics and the Origin of Species (1942), establishing Mayr's position as one of the chief architects of the ‘neo-Darwinian synthesis’ that laid the basis for modern evolutionary biology. Questions about the nature of biological species and the processes that resulted in the formation of new species dominated Mayr's endeavours during his later years at the AMNH. This focus continued during his early years at the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) at Harvard University, where he moved in 1953 as an Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology, a position he held until his formal ‘retirement’ in 1975. These efforts resulted in the publication of his encyclopaedic Animal Species and Evolution (1963) and its abridged and revised version Populations, Species, and Evolution (1970). Mayr's attempt to grapple with the nature of biological species and other problems of evolution, and his long-standing interest in the philosophy of science, led to his ‘third career’ as a historian and philosopher of biology. These interests became increasingly dominant during his later years at Harvard, but really flourished after his ‘retirement’. He produced a series of books that will define these areas for subsequent workers: Evolution and the Diversity of Life (1976), The Growth of Biological Thought (1982), Toward a New Philosophy of Biology (1988), One Long Argument (1991) and What Makes Biology Unique? (2004). The last book appeared a month after his 100th birthday, capping a career that resulted in a staggering list of over 850 publications. Mayr's extraordinary scientific productivity can be attributed to several factors. He had a photographic memory and could recount details of papers that he had read decades previously. His commitment to science was absolute – he probably worked on one or more manuscripts every day of a professional life that spanned more than 80 years. Even while ‘relaxing’ at his summer home in New Hampshire, he would rise early in the morning and dictate non-stop for 3–4 h. The tapes were delivered to his secretary in Cambridge for transcription into first drafts of manuscripts. His command of the English language was remarkable, and his simple and concise prose made even complex ideas accessible to his readers. As an ornithologist, Mayr was a generation ahead of most of his colleagues. He joined the American Ornithologists’ Union in 1927, prior to moving to America. However, he was unenthusiastic about the state of ornithological research in North America, as evidenced by his comments on the papers presented at the first AOU meeting that he attended in Detroit in 1931. In an interview in November 2003, he recounted that he was ‘terribly bored by the triviality of the lectures – it was all about a new breeding record for so-and-so's warbler for the state of South Dakota or an early arrival date for so-and-so's sparrow in California’. Although most of his ornithological publications related to systematics, this reflected the constraints of his employment more than his interests. He had a broad understanding of the behaviour, ecology and biogeography of birds, and developed innovative ideas in these areas in his doctoral thesis and other publications. The patterns of avian distribution and ecology that were the focus of North American ornithology in the early decades of the 20th century were less interesting to him than were the processes that generated these patterns. He ‘escaped’ the boring paper sessions at the 1931 AOU meeting and went to the library, where he met a kindred spirit, Margaret Morse Nice. Mayr and Nice worked over the next several decades to introduce North American ornithologists to the innovative work in avian ethology and breeding biology that was being conducted by researchers in Western Europe. Mayr was instrumental in the publication of Nice's monumental study on the life history of the Song Sparrow Melospiza melodia, a work that was the starting point for many areas of modern avian population biology. Among those who knew Ernst Mayr only casually through brief exposures at scientific meetings, he had a reputation as being somewhat aloof, even cold. His incisive questions were frequently damaging to the egos and confidence of their recipients. However, there was no malice in Mayr's comments. He was single-minded in his pursuit of truth and accuracy in science, and asked the same questions of a beginning graduate student that he would of a senior colleague. Those who were fortunate enough to know him personally describe a different Ernst Mayr. He was a warm and gentle individual who was especially supportive of young scientists. He delighted in inviting students and other academic waifs to evening socials at his home in Cambridge, or to join family celebrations on his farm in New Hampshire at Thanksgiving (where they would be invited to help cut the year's supply of firewood). In his early years at the AMNH he encouraged many young ‘birders’ to pursue scientific studies of the birds that they were observing. After he became famous, he would spend hours providing detailed and encouraging comments on unsolicited manuscripts received from students. He was a demanding, but supportive and helpful, graduate supervisor. Ernst Mayr was a superb naturalist who savoured the natural world around him. He felt considerable regret that the constraints of his career had limited the amount of time that he had been able to devote to the study of living birds. His interests went far beyond birds. In his later life, acceptances of invitations to give lectures around the world would be accompanied by requests that he be helped to observe some local ornithological speciality or other natural feature. He was perhaps happiest when he was guiding groups of visiting friends around his New Hampshire farm, sharing his profound knowledge of the local natural history with them. He was a man of deep social conscience. At the end of World War II, Ernst and Gretel Mayr worked with a number of North American ornithologists to help provide relief to their colleagues in Germany and Western Europe. In the 1960s Mayr was deeply opposed to the Vietnam War and the politicians who supported it. He was one of the first recipients of the National Medal of Science in 1969, but travelled to Washington to accept it from Richard Nixon only because it provided an opportunity for his grandchildren to visit the White House. Most of the royalties from his books and the honoraria associated with the many prizes that he received were directed to support the library at the Museum of Comparative Zoology (now the Ernst Mayr Library), to an endowment to the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panamá to support the research of students from developing nations, to the Nature Conservancy, and to other similar philanthropies. The honours and awards bestowed on Ernst Mayr during his life are too numerous to list. Working in a field that was not eligible for a Nobel Prize, he captured the ‘triple crown’ of biology: the Balzan Prize (1983), the International Prize for Biology (1994) and the Crafoord Prize (1999). He received honorary degrees from 17 institutions, including both Oxford (1966) and Cambridge (1982). Prizes from scientific societies included the Godman–Salvin Medal from the BOU (1994), the Wallace Darwin Medal (1958) from the Linnean Society of London, and the William Brewster Memorial Award (1965) from the American Ornithologists’ Union. He was an honorary member of no fewer than 48 scientific societies. He was especially proud of his recognition by fellow ornithologists and was an Honorary Member of the BOU (1956) and ten other ornithological societies. I visited Ernst at his beloved farm in southern New Hampshire on the occasion of his 100th birthday in July 2004. As we sat and chatted, he drew my attention to the song of a Wood Thrush Hylocichla mustelina. He was excited by this and launched into an animated description of how, over the previous 50 years, he had observed the almost complete disappearance of this bird from the area and of its gradual replacement by the Veery Catharus fuscescens. He was an ornithologist at the beginning and at the end! A symposium celebrating the 100th birthday of Ernst Mayr was held during the 122nd Stated Meeting of the American Ornithologists’ Union in Québec, Canada, in August 2004. The papers presented in this symposium have been published recently (Bock, W.J. & Lein, M.R. (eds.). 2005. Ernst Mayr at 100: Ornithologist and Naturalist. Ornithological Monographs no. 58) and provide extensive information on many of the topics covered in this obituary. This monograph also includes a complete bibliography of Ernst Mayr by Jurgen Häffer, along with a DVD containing excerpts from a video-taped interview with Ernst Mayr in November 2003.

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