Links:

    -ESSAY: The concerns of science (Ernst Mayr, July-August 1999, Skeptical Inquirer)
    The Evolution of Ernst: Interview with Ernst Mayr: The preeminent biologist, who just turned 100, reflects on his prolific career and the history, philosophy and future of his field On July 5, renowned evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr celebrated his 100th birthday. He also recently finished writing his 25th book, What Makes Biology Unique?: Considerations on the Autonomy of a Scientific Discipline [Cambridge University Press, in press]. A symposium in Mayr's honor was held at Harvard University on May 10. Scientific American editor and columnist Steve Mirsky attended the symposium and wrote about it for the upcoming August issue. On May 15, Mirsky, Brazilian journalist Claudio Angelo and Angelo's colleague Marcelo Leite visited Mayr at his apartment in Bedford, Mass. (Scientific American, 7/06/04)
    -CV: Ernst Mayr
    -Ernst Mayr Library
    -PROFILE: Ernst Mayr, Darwin's Disciple (Christine Bahls, Nov. 17, 2003, The Scientist)
    -PROFILE: The Big Picture: Ernst Mayr: Evolutionary biologist (Beth Potier, Harvard Gazette)
    -EXCERPTS: from Ernst Mayr's "Toward a New Philosophy of Biology"
    -Ernst Mayr and the Evolutionary Synthesis (PBS.org)
    -ESSAY: Nature, Freedom, and Responsibility: Ernst Mayr and Isaiah Berlin (Strachan Donnelley, Winter, 2000, Social Research)
    -ARCHIVES: "ernst mayr" (Find Articles)
    -REVIEW: of The Evolutionary Synthesis: Perspectives on the Unification of Biology, Ernst Mayr + William B. Provine (editors) (Danny Yee)
    -TRIBUTE: Ernst Mayr, Biologist Extraordinaire: An appreciation of Harvard's visionary of modern evolutionary synthesis (Lynn Margulis, May/June 2004, American Scientist)
    -EXCERPT: Fred Hoyle, Mathematics of Evolution

"The ability of species to adapt by changing one base pair at a time on any gene, and to do so with comparative rapidity if selective advantages are reasonably large, explains the fine details of the matching of many species to their environment. It was from the careful observation of such matchings by naturalists in the mid-nineteenth century that the Darwinian theory arose. Because the observations were made with extreme care, it was highly probable that immediate inferences drawn from them would prove to be correct, as the work of Chapters 3 to 6 shows to be the case. What was in no way guaranteed by the evidence, however, was that evolutionary inferences correctly made in the small for species and their varieties could be extrapolated to broader taxonomic categories, to kingdoms, divisions, classes, and orders. Yet this is what the Darwinian theory did, and it was by going far outside its guaranteed range of validity that the theory ran into controversies and difficulties which have never been cleared up over more than a century."