Sadly, the great Ernst Mayr has passed away at the age of 100:
He was known as an architect of the evolutionary or modern synthesis, an intellectual watershed when modern evolutionary biology was born. The synthesis, which has been described by Dr. Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard as “one of the half-dozen major scientific achievements in our century,” revived Darwin’s theories of evolution and reconciled them with new findings in laboratory genetics and in field work on animal populations and diversity.
One of Dr. Mayr’s most significant contributions was his persuasive argument for the role of geography in the origin of new species, an idea that has won virtually universal acceptance among evolutionary theorists. He also established a philosophy of biology and founded the field of the history of biology.
Truly one of the great figures in science, Mayr explained macroevolution through his theories of allopatric and peripatric speciation:
Today allopatric speciation (allo, from the Greek for other, and patric, from the Greek for fatherland) is accepted as the most common way in which new species arise: when populations of a single species are geographically isolated from one another, they slowly accumulate differences until they can no longer interbreed. It was Dr. Mayr who first convinced evolutionary biologists of the importance of allopatric speciation with the detailed arguments in his seminal book “Systematics and the Origin of Species.”
He was the principal thorn in the side of the Discovery Institute creationists.
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