On the Importance of Being Ernst Mayr 英文参考文献.docVIP

Open access, freely available online Obituary On the Importance of Being Ernst Mayr “Darwin’s apostle”died at the age of 100 Axel Meyer B orn on July 5, 1904, in Kempten in southern Germany, Ernst Mayr passed away peacefully at the Methuselah-like age of 100 on February 3, 2005, in Bedford near Cambridge, Massachusetts. Mayr was, by the accounts of his Harvard colleagues the late Stephen Jay Gould and Edward O. Wilson, not only the greatest evolutionary biologist of the 20th century, but even its greatest biologist overall. Thomas Henry Huxley was dubbed “Darwin’s bulldog” for ?ghting for the acceptance of Darwinian ideas soon after their inception in the last decades of the 19th century. Similarly, Ernst Mayr has been called “Darwin’s apostle” or the “Darwin of the 20th century” for promoting and dispersing Darwin’s hypotheses throughout the past century. Mayr lived for a century and DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0030152.g001 accomplished more than several Ernst Mayr in 1994, after receiving an honorary degree at the University of Konstanz lifetime’s worth of science in different biological disciplines. Brought up by parents who loved nature and who took the young Ernst on long hikes, he was exposed to natural history early on, but although birds were his passion all his life, he was, like Darwin, ?rst compelled to study medicine. He began his studies at Greifswald—a prime birding spot—and through the chance observation of a rare species of duck that had not been seen in Germany for many years, he came in contact with the Berlin ornithologist Erwin Stresemann, who proposed that he switch to biology. Mayr abandoned medicine for biology and published his ?rst scienti?c paper (of a total of almost 700) at the age of 19 in 1923, receiving his Ph.D. from Humboldt University in Berlin after only 16 months of graduate work and dissertation research; he was just 22. Ernst Mayr’s last book (of a total of 25) was published in August 2004, a month after he turned 100 [1]. (