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The Life and Times of Ernst Mayr

By evolgen on August 16, 2006.

There is a good biography of Ernst Mayr in the upcoming issue of Theoretical Population Biology. The author, Eviatar Nevo, provides both a summary of Mayr's work and distills his contributions into categories. I especially like how he explains Mayr's understanding of evolution (which he calls Darwinism, much to my chagrin) into five sub-theories:

For Mayr, a full understanding of the autonomy of biology is impossible without an analysis of Darwinism. Modern biology is conceptually Darwinian to a large extent. Mayr summarized this conceptual insight by showing that Darwinism basically embraces five independent theories of evolution. These include: change (or evolution as such), common descent, gradualism, speciation, and natural selection. Mayr claimed the autonomy of biology could never be understood without appreciating the nature of Darwin's five theories. Intriguingly, Darwin himself did not realize that his evolutionary theory is actually a compound of five different theories.

I wouldn't say the five sub-theories are independent -- gradualism is a type of change that occurs via common descent. But ignoring the claim of independence, this is a good breakdown of what evolution is (couldn't resist). Maybe Razib could use these as a framework for finding a "common ground".

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evolution

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