Just found out he passed on the other day and thought he deserved a thread. A true giant in the field of modern biology and probably the biggest name in evolutionary biology this century. Can’t say I always agreed with him, but as a student I genuinely appreciated his writing ( particularly Towards a New Philosophy of Biology:* Observations of an Evolutionist* and The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance ) and great intellect.
Sigh…not terribly surprising news, but depressing nonetheless. Even so, he had an extraordinarily long and fruitful career of remarkable accomplishment and influence, and was still active and writing at the age of 100… Surely his was as full a life as anyone could reasonably hope for. Well done, Prof. Mayr.
Or rather, What Evolution Is…opps. So much for my respectful and carefully worded contribution to the memorial thread. As if Mayr would have seen fit to mince words on this topic by using a rhetorical question for a title…
Another giant passes. Crick, Ed Lewis and John Maynard Smith last year, Ira Herskowitz in 2003, Gould a few years back. With all of the creationism crap floating around, we need all the strong voices we can get. And Mayr was productive even after he turned 100.
I’m glad I got to see Watson talk a few weeks ago and I’ve seen/met other giants in the past few years (Seymour Benzer and Ed Lewis come to mind, although I’ve heard probably around a dozen Nobel Laureates speak).
“Saturday Night Live” gave some props to him, with Amy Poehler joking on “Weekend Update” that he was “killed by a bigger, stronger evolutionary biologist.”
