Ernst Mayr

Ernst Mayr was a German-born evolutionary biologist and ornithologist who worked at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and later at Harvard. A central figure of the modern evolutionary synthesis, he formulated the biological species concept, defining species as groups of interbreeding populations reproductively isolated from others. His distinction between proximate and ultimate causes, and his insistence on the autonomy of biology from physics, made him a major voice in the philosophy of biology.

Key ideas

• A species is a group of actually or potentially interbreeding natural populations reproductively isolated from other such groups.
• Biological phenomena have proximate causes (how a mechanism works) and ultimate causes (why it evolved), and both questions are legitimate.
• Population thinking, which treats variation as real, should replace typological thinking about fixed essences.
• Biology is an autonomous science whose explanations are not reducible to those of physics.

Major works

• Systematics and the Origin of Species (1942)
• Animal Species and Evolution (1963)
• The Growth of Biological Thought (1982)
• What Makes Biology Unique? (2004)

In the conversation

• Discussion Twenty-odd species concepts, and conservation law written as if there were one Anand Kurup · 3 replies
• Debate Species are drawn, not discovered: biology has already chosen nominalism Ignacio Cárcamo · 5 replies