Mayr's legacy

Ernst Mayr, who died in 2005 at the age of 100, was the last surviving member of evolutionary biology's Modern Synthesis, and a highly controversial figure. You would never have known the latter if you were an undergraduate at his institution (Harvard) in the last few years of his life. At Harvard, whose Organismal and Evolutionary Biology department had seen serious academic rivalries, faculty almost universally spoke highly of him, and were generally thrilled that their eminent colleague was still alive. Many senior faculty (such as Gould and Wilson) considered him a personal hero and mentor. I remember one professor of mine proclaiming that he was "immortal and irreplaceable". I remember with great excitement each of the four times I saw him on campus. Part of it was disbelief that this great researcher was still alive at this great university (an attitude I think I would have had even if I had not been an undergraduate at the time).

Mayr's reputation at Berkeley could hardly be more different. At the time he died, Ernst Mayr was many decades out of step with current thinking in systematics and his biological species concept and absolute rejection of sympatric speciation were being increasingly abandoned by evolutionary biologists. He never accepted cladistic classification, even though cladistics was first introduced in the literature when he was 46, in his native language (German). He did not revise his opinions on any of these issues during the last few decades of his life. As a result, he is almost universally derided amongst faculty at Berkeley, whether paleontologists, botanists, or systematists. Although Mayr perhaps better than anybody in recent evolutionary biology exemplifies the old adage that "funeral by funeral, science advances", he was certainly not wrong about everything. His primary contribution to biology--his models of allopatric and peripatric speciation in animals--are still taken quite seriously by people who study this topic, and inspired punctuated equilibrium, even though his ornithological bias led him to categorically deny sympatric speciation.

I bring this up because I have recently been reading some of his very old papers in Systematic Zoology from the 1960's, in which he attacks cladistics. Everybody at Harvard used cladistics at the end of Mayr's lifetime, but professors never really criticized him for this. The reluctance to criticize their own senior colleague is perhaps predictable, but if you look at it in a different light, why bother criticizing him anyway? Mayr was hardly ever around on campus, and his views were already irrelevant.