ERNST MAYR AT 100: A LIFE INSIDE AND OUTSIDE OF ORNITHOLOGY

Auk, The, Jul 2004 by Bock, Walter J

LONG AGO -on 5 July 1904, just six months after the first powered flight by humans at Kittyhawk, North Carolina -a person was born in a small town in Bavaria, Germany, who was to make his name famous through study on another group of flying creatures. To put that date in proper perspective for ornithologists, it was the year before the 4th International Ornithological Congress in London and five years before the publication of the last volume of R. Bowler Sharpe's A Hand-list of the Genera and Species of Birds. And the American Ornithologists' Union (AOU) had just attained its majority, having reached its 21st year. I refer, of course, to Ernst Walter Mayr, whose 100th birthday is on 5 July 2004.

Many ornithologists have had long lives and others have reached the century mark, including Wilhelm Meise, another doctoral student of Professor Erwin Stresemann and a student colleague of Ernst Mayr in Berlin during the middle of the 1920s. Although Mayr turned to other areas of inquiry later in his career, he trained as an ornithologist, made his name as an ornithologist, and still is most interested in avian biology and in those who study birds. Other areas of study such as evolution, the history of biology, and the philosophy of biology may also claim Ernst Mayr as one of their own, but ornithology retains his primary alliance.

Some years ago, while discussing several earlier workers, Mayr made the comment to me that Professor Erwin Stresemann never ventured outside of ornithology, a remark that I found very interesting. Upon further reflection, it was clear that Stresemann was similar to many other well-known students of avian biology. On the other hand, Mayr did go well beyond the boundaries of avian biology and was just as successful in those outside areas as he was in ornithology. It is this wandering outside of the area for which he was trained and in which he made his initial reputation that makes an examination of Mayr's career so fascinating-hence the title of this article.

A second aspect of Ernst Mayr's career worth examination is the series of accidental events that occurred to him, and the importance those accidental events have had to the success of his career. With due respect to Professor Mayr and to my students (to whom I insist that the following is a major error, because changes in one organism cannot be considered to be evolutionary), I would like to consider the development and success of his career in terms of the two basic sets of causes of organic evolution. These can be summarized as "accidental and design," to borrow the title of one of Mayr's papers (Mayr 1962); accidental when the origin of genetic-based phenotypic variation and other events are chance based (with respect to selective demands), and in which the action of selective demands can be considered as a "design" aspect of evolutionary change. Chance events, both good and bad, are common to all careers - for example, whether a desirable position becomes available just when one is able to fill it. Then one has to work to fulfill the promise of the chance event. Here, I describe the accidental events that happened to Ernst Mayr and, what is more important, how he responded to the "design aspects" that shaped his career. What is significant is the combination of accidental events and responses to them. The design responses are useless unless the proper accidental events precede them, as are the chance events if one cannot respond to them properly.

First, a personal note: because I grew up in New York City and because the Agriculture College at Cornell University still had a farmpractice requirement for male undergraduates at that time (of which two-thirds could be done away from farms for students in nonagricultural areas, such as the Department of Conservation), I spent several summers as a student volunteer working "on the range" in the collection rooms of the Department of Ornithology at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) during the first half of the 1950s. I had the chance to meet Ernst Mayr at the AMNH in August, 1953, just before he left for the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) at Harvard University and his new career as an Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology. At the end of the next summer, I saw him again in the AMNH and discussed graduate schools with him. Unexpectedly, Mayr suggested Harvard and the possibility of working with him -something that I had never thought of. Following his advice, I applied to Harvard, started my graduate studies in September 1955. I obtained my Ph.D. degree in 1959. Since then, I have maintained close contact with him. Therefore, much of the material in this history comes from personal contact with Ernst Mayr, and from an earlier article I wrote for a symposium honoring Mayr's 90th birthday (Bock 1994), on his life as a naturalist and his contributions as a systematist and evolutionist (see also the entire symposium, Greene and Ruse 1994).

A major biography of Ernst Mayr is being prepared by Jürgen Haffer. It will appear in a couple of years and will provide much additional detail.