Ernst Mayr

Provides a thorough overview of historical and contemporary theories of evolution, discusses key concepts and terms, and argues that our understanding of evolution has changed the beliefs and values of modern humankind. Reprint. 30,000 first printing.

What Evolution Is

What Evolution Is (Science Masters)

Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology (Emeritus) Museum of Comparative Zoology Ernst Mayr

Peter D. Ashlock

Principles of Systematic Zoology

Evolutionary theory ranks as one of the most powerful concepts of modern civilization. Its effects on our view of life have been wide and deep. One of the most world-shaking books ever published, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, first appeared in print over 130 years ago, and it touched off a debate that rages to this day. Every modern evolutionist turns to Darwin’s work again and again. Current controversies in the life sciences very often have as their starting point some vagueness in Darwin’s writings or some question Darwin was unable to answer owing to the insufficient biological knowledge available during his time. Despite the intense study of Darwin’s life and work, however, many of us cannot explain his theories (he had several separate ones) and the evidence and reasoning behind them, nor do we appreciate the modifications of the Darwinian paradigm that have kept it viable throughout the twentieth century. Who could elucidate the subtleties of Darwin’s thought and that of his contemporaries and intellectual heirs—A. R. Wallace, T. H. Huxley, August Weismann, Asa Gray—better than Ernst Mayr, a man considered by many to be the greatest evolutionist of the century? In this gem of historical scholarship, Mayr has achieved a remarkable distillation of Charles Darwin’s scientific thought and his enormous legacy to twentieth-century biology. Here we have an accessible account of the revolutionary ideas that Darwin thrust upon the world. Describing his treatise as “one long argument,” Darwin definitively refuted the belief in the divine creation of each individual species, establishing in its place the concept that all of life descended from a common ancestor. He proposed the idea that humans were not the special products of creation but evolved according to principles that operate everywhere else in the living world; he upset current notions of a perfectly designed, benign natural world and substituted in their place the concept of a struggle for survival; and he introduced probability, chance, and uniqueness into scientific discourse. This is an important book for students, biologists, and general readers interested in the history of ideas—especially ideas that have radically altered our worldview. Here is a book by a grand master that spells out in simple terms the historical issues and presents the controversies in a manner that makes them understandable from a modern perspective.

Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought

One Long Argument

The diversity of living forms and the unity of evolutionary processes are themes that have permeated the research and writing of Ernst Mayr, a Grand Master of evolutionary biology. The essays collected here are among his most valuable and durable: contributions that form the basis for much of the contemporary understanding of evolutionary biology.

Selected Essays

Evolution and the Diversity of Life

Jared M. Diamond

Speciation is the process by which co-existing daughter species evolve from one ancestral species - e.g., humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas arising from a common ancestor around 5,000,000 years ago. However, many questions about speciation remain controversial. The Birds of Northern Melanesia provides by far the most comprehensive study yet available of a rich fauna, composed of the 195 breeding land and fresh-water bird species of the Bismarck and Solomon Archipelagoes east of New Guinea. This avifauna offers decisive advantages for understanding speciation, and includes famous examples of geographic variation discussed in textbooks of evolutionary biology. The book results from 30 years of collaboration between the evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr and the ecologist Jared Diamond. It shows how Northern Melanesian bird distributions provide snapshots of all stages in speciation, from the earliest (widely distributed species without geographic variation) to the last (closely related, reproductively isolated species occurring sympatrically and segregating ecologically). The presentation emphasizes the wide diversity of speciation outcomes, steering a middle course between one-model-fits-all simplification and ungeneralizable species accounts. Questions illuminated include why some species are much more prone to speciate than others, why some water barriers are much more effective at promoting speciation than others, and whether hypothesized taxon cycles, faunal dominance, and legacies of Pleistocene land bridges are real. These years of study have resulted in a huge database, complete with distributions of all 195 species on 76 islands, together with their taxonomy, colonization routes, ecological attributes, abundance, and overwater dispersal. Color plates depict 88 species and allospecies, many of which have never been seen before. For students of speciation, Northern Melanesian birds now constitute a model system against which other biotas can be compared. For population biologists interested in other problems besides speciation, this rich database can now be mined for insights.

Speciation, Ecology & Biogeography

The Birds of Northern Melanesia

This book contains essays by Ernst Mayr, the most eminent evolutionary biologist of the twentieth century.

Considerations on the Autonomy of a Scientific Discipline

What Makes Biology Unique?

An incisive study of the development of the biological sciences chronicles the origins, maturation, and modern views of the classification of life forms, the evolution of species, and the inheritance and variation of characteristics

Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance

The Growth of Biological Thought

diversidade, evolución, herdanza

Historia do pensamento biolóxico

The 18th International Workshop on Graph-Theoretic Concepts in Computer Science (WG '92) was held in Wiesbaden-Naurod, Germany, June 18-20, 1992. Itwas organized by the Department of Computer Science, Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main. Contributions with original results inthe study and application of graph-theoretic concepts in various fields of computer science were solicited, and 72 papers were submitted and reviewed, from which 29 were selected for presentation at the workshop. The workshop was attended by 61 scientists from 16 countries. All 29 papers in the volume have undergone careful revision after the meeting, based on the discussions and comments from the audience and the referees. The volume is divided into parts on restricted graph classes, scheduling and related problems, parallel anbd distributed algorithms, combinatorial graph problems, graph decomposition, graph grammars and geometry, and modelling by graphs.

18th International Workshop, WG '92, Wiesbaden-Naurod, Germany, June 18-20, 1992. Proceedings

Graph-Theoretic Concepts in Computer Science

Mayr Ernst

At once a spirited defense of Darwinian explanations of biology and an elegant primer on evolution for the general reader, What Evolution Is poses the questions at the heart of evolutionary theory and considers how our improved understanding of evolution has affected the viewpoints and values of modern man.Science Masters Series

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Ernst W. Mayr

Earle Gorton Linsley

Gorton E.. Linsley

Robert Leslie Usinger

Methods and Principles of Systematic Zoology

Summery of Systematics and the Origin of Species by Ernst Mayr, Col. Univ. Press. 1942

Collected Papers of Ernst Mayr

Mayr

Perfect for birdwatching enthusiasts travelling to Indonesia, this concise guide is full of interesting information. This practical handbook, by an acknowledged authority, intended primarily for the field student, tells him how to identify and name the birds of Indonesia which he encounters, and what kinds of birds he can expect to find on each island. There is also a condensed summary of the present knowledge of distribution, geographical variation and habits. Whenever feasible, keys have been supplied to facilitate identification. These keys are simply and clearly worked out for the beginner who may not know the difference between a curlew and a godwit, or a triller and a graybird. Three magnificent color plates show 39 species which include at least one representation of all of the prominent bird families of the southwest Pacific. A series of black and white drawings show additional species. These pictures will be particularly valuable to bird students who have never seen a wood swallow, a flower pecker, a white-eye or a triller.

A Field Guide to the Birds of the Area between Samoar New Caledonia, and Micronesia

Birds of Southwest Pacific

Ernst Mayr's Bibliography

Michael Ruse

John C. Greene

Ernst Mayr at Ninety

In a series of twenty chapters, Ernst Mayr presents a consecutive story, beginning with a description of evolutionary biology and ending with a discussion of man as a biological species. Calling attention to unsolved problems, and relating the evolutionary subject matter to appropriate material from other fields, such as physiology, genetics, and biochemistry, the author integrates and interprets existing data. Believing that an unequivocal stand is more likely to produce constructive criticism than evasion of an issue, he does not hesitate to choose that interpretation of a controversial matter which to him seems most consistent with the emerging picture of the evolutionary process.

Ernst Mayr

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