Ernst Walter Mayr (/ˈmaɪər/ MYRE, German: [ɛʁnst ˈmaɪɐ]; 5 July 1904 – 3 February 2005)[1][2] was a German-American evolutionary biologist.

[3] His work contributed to the conceptual revolution that led to the modern evolutionary synthesis of Mendelian genetics, systematics, and Darwinian evolution, and to the development of the biological species concept.

His father was a district prosecuting attorney at Würzburg[4] but took an interest in natural history and took the children out on field trips.

In February 1923, Mayr passed his high school examination (Abitur) and his mother rewarded him with a pair of binoculars.

"[5] He entered the University of Greifswald in 1923 and, according to Mayr himself, "took the medical curriculum (to satisfy a family tradition) but after only a year, he decided to leave medicine and enrolled at the Faculty of Biological Sciences.

[8] At the International Zoological Congress at Budapest in 1927, Mayr was introduced by Stresemann to banker and naturalist Walter Rothschild, who asked him to undertake an expedition to New Guinea on behalf of himself and the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Also, while in New Guinea, he visited the Lutheran missionaries Otto Thiele and Christian Keyser, in the Finschhafen district; there, while in conversation with his hosts, he uncovered the discrepancies in Hermann Detzner's popular book Four Years among Cannibals: New Guinea, in which Detzner claimed to have seen the interior, discovered several species of flora and fauna, while remaining only steps ahead of the Australian patrols sent to capture him.

Mayr moved to the United States in 1931 to take up a curatorial position at the American Museum of Natural History, where he played the important role of brokering and acquiring the Walter Rothschild collection of bird skins, which was being sold in order to pay off a blackmailer.

During his time at the museum he produced numerous publications on bird taxonomy, and in 1942 his first book Systematics and the Origin of Species, which completed the evolutionary synthesis started by Darwin.

He noted that the German society was "far more scientific, far more interested in life histories and breeding bird species, as well as in reports on recent literature.

Allen, Frank Chapman, and Jonathan Dwight, the society concentrated on taxonomy and later became a clearing house for bird banding and sight records.

The heckling of this German foreigner was tremendous, but he gave tit for tat, and any modern picture of Dr E. Mayr as a very formal person does not square with my memory of the 1930s.

[9] Mayr said of his own involvement with the local birdwatchers: "In those early years in New York when I was a stranger in a big city, it was the companionship and later friendship which I was offered in the Linnean Society that was the most important thing in my life.

Nice wrote to Joseph Grinnell in 1932, trying to get foreign literature reviewed in the Condor: "Too many American ornithologists have despised the study of the living bird; the magazines and books that deal with the subject abound in careless statements, anthropomorphic interpretations, repetition of ancient errors, and sweeping conclusions from a pitiful array of facts.

"[9] Mayr joined the faculty of Harvard University in 1953, where he also served as director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology from 1961 to 1970.

He had married fellow German Margarete "Gretel" Simon in May 1935 (they had met at a party in Manhattan in 1932), and she assisted Mayr in some of his work.

For his work, Animal Species and Evolution, he was awarded the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal from the National Academy of Sciences in 1967.

[1] In 1995 he received the Benjamin Franklin Medal for Distinguished Achievement in the Sciences of the American Philosophical Society, of which he was already a member.

The precise mechanisms of sympatric speciation, however, are usually a form of microallopatry enabled by variations in niche occupancy among individuals within a population.

As a notable example, in 1995, he criticized the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), as conducted by fellow Harvard professor Paul Horowitz, as being a waste of university and student resources for its inability to address and answer a scientific question.

Except for that slight revision, the basic Darwinian theory hasn't changed in the last 50 years.Darwin's theory of evolution is based on key facts and the inferences drawn from them, which Mayr summarised as follows:[29] In relation to the publication of Darwin's Origins of Species, Mayr identified philosophical implications of evolution:[30]