| RefNo | EC/1988/44 |
| Previous numbers | Cert XXII, 141 |
| Level | Item |
| Title | Mayr, Ernst: certificate of election to the Royal Society |
| Date | 1985 |
| Description | Certificate of Candidate for Election to Foreign Membership. Citation typed |
| Citation | Ernst Mayr is distinguished for his sustained contribution to the understanding of the processes of organic evolution, particularly in sexually reproducing animals. Born and educated in Germany, he led expeditions to study the systematics of New Guinea and Soloman Island birds, before emigrating to U.S.A. in 1932 to work as curator of birds at the American Museum of Natural History, and from 1953 as Alexander Aggasiz Professor of Zoology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard. In the nineteen forties his studies of Speciation Phenomena in Birds (1940), emphasizing the importance of geographic isolation in the early stages of speciation, led to a textbook Systematics and the Origin of Species (1942), contributing to what J.S. Huxley called "The New Systematics", by its emphasis on "populations" in what became known as the "biological species concept", and on geographic isolation (allopatry) as a stage in the speciation process. He was a major contributor to a consensus between biologists of diverse approaches to evolution that has been called "the evolutionary synthesis", the modern expression of "neo-Darwinism". To this synthesis Mayr contributed many new concepts and models, arising from continued research on the taxonomy , biogeography and evolution of birds, but also from excursions into genetics (of Drosophila and in general) and from contributions to symposium volumes with colleagues (such as Evolution as a Process, J.S. Huxley, A.C. Hardy, E B. Ford, Eds.); Evolution and Anthropology (Washington); and The Evolutionary Synthesis (Mayr & Provine, Eds.) Mayr himself produced a sequence of influential textbooks, including Animal Species and Evolution (1963), Principles of Systematic Zoology (1969), Evolution and the Diversity of Life (1976) and The Growth of Biological Thought (1982). Many terms, now part of the language of evolutionary biology were first introduced by Mayr. Through his contribution to establishing modern synthetic evolutionary theory, with genetic mutation as the basis of variation and natural selection as the main agent of change and adaptation, Mayr became an architect of one of the most important scientific achievements of this century. When awarded the Balzan Prize in 1983 he was called "our greatest living evolutionary biologist" in the pages of Science. He was the Royal Society's Darwin Medallist in 1984. |
| AccessStatus | Closed |
Fellows associated with this archive
| Code | PersonName | Dates |
| NA4744 | Mayr; Ernst (1904 - 2005) | 1904 - 2005 |