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Ernst Mayr at 93

Natural History, May, 1997 by Natalie Angier

Ernst Mayr, one of the world's greatest evolutionary biologists and the sort of living legend who's already in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, is ninety-three going on twenty-three-twenty--three books, that is. In the course of a long and surpassingly productive career, Mayr has written books on subjects as varied as evolution, ecology, ornithology, systematics, and the philosophy and history of biology, as well as publishing more than 600 scientific articles. He is a founder, along with Theodosius Dobzhansky, Julian Huxley, and George Gaylord Simpson, of the so-called modern evolutionary synthesis, the conceptual breakthrough that brought together a genetic understanding of how species adapt to their environment with an ecological consideration of why there is such a spectacular degree of biodiversity in the first place. Mayr (pronounced MIRE) also helped define the most enduring concept of a species--simply put, as a group of interbreeding populations--and established a philosophy of biology to rival the philosophical tenets of any other science.

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Born and educated in Germany, Mayr emigrated to the United States in 193i, working first as a curator at the American Museum of Natural History, then moving to the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, where he is a professor emeritus. As a young man, he studied the magnificent birds of paradise in New Guinea, and he has described more species and subspecies of birds than any other biologist alive. Mayr is opinionated and elitist, courtly and generous, and still working two decades after his supposed retirement. His twenty-first book, This Is Biology: The Science of the Living World, has just been published by Harvard University Press; his twenty-second book is now being edited; and his twenty-third is in progress. Natalie Angier, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer for the New York Times, visited him at his winter home in Winter Park, Florida, near Orlando, to talk about This Is Biology and Mayr's views on life as it is--and as it can never be.

How in the world did you end up here in Winter Park?

My life is nothing but a series of accidents. Coming here was an accident, too.

Did you want to be close to Disney World?

No, I've never been to Disney World. This is my fifth winter down here, and I haven't gone there. I said that to somebody and apologized for it, but he said, "Why apologize? You should be proud."

Your latest book goes over many of the themes that you've been interested in for much of your career. What is the take-home message of the new book?

The point of the book is that the great public, and that includes even most biologists, don't have the correct image of the science of biology. Many still have the idea that the physical sciences, physics, and the mathematical sciences are real science and everything else is inferior science. The physicist Ernest Rutherford once referred to the other sciences as postage-stamp collecting. Now, physics is perfectly good science, but it's a special science, and many things about it don't apply to the other sciences. By the same token, many things about the other sciences don't apply to physics. Yet they're all perfectly good science. Furthermore, I point out that at the present time, biology is the leading science. It has more to do with the problems we face, our contact with the environment, our future as a species, than does any other science. I come out very strongly in saying that understanding the principles of biology is what's most important for the future.

It seems that there's a real interest in Darwin now, almost a Darwin mania. People are writing about him, applying his ideas to human behavior, and so forth.

Owing to the power of physicalist and essentialist thinking, Darwin was neglected and misunderstood for seventy-five years after 1859. Indeed, it was widely believed that Darwin was no philosopher. Actually, most of the principles of biology were more or less proclaimed by him in 1859. Before him, you had a truly anthropocentric world. It was expressed in the Bible, where God says to Adam, this is your world, you can do with it what you please. Darwin, of course, showed otherwise, that we're descended from the apes. And as recent molecular research indicates, we're incredibly close to the apes, to the chimpanzees. But that doesn't mean man is "nothing but an animal." Two characteristics are unique to humans. One is language, grammar, and syntax, and all that. All our attempts to teach apes language have been totally unsuccessful. A chimpanzee cannot express something like, "Tomorrow I would like an apple for lunch." Another characteristic that we alone have, and Darwin stated this clearly, is an ethical system.

Has there been anything equivalent to Darwin's work in this century?

I don't know of anything. Freud's theory of the unconscious was a great achievement, but it wasn't comparable to Darwin's.

What do you make of the fact that people continue to resist the idea of evolution? About 40 percent of Americans do not believe in it.

Ernst Mayr at 93

Natural History, May, 1997 by Natalie Angier

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