When I met Mayr that Sunday, I was a 16-year-old schoolboy. He later inspired me to launch a second career, parallel to my work as a membrane physiologist, on the evolutionary biology of New Guinea birds, his own early speciality. For 30 years he and I collaborated on analysing a mammoth database that he had accumulated on the distributions of island birds. The result was a co-authored 556-page book published soon after his 97th birthday. That Sunday lunch and its consequences illustrate many keys to Mayr's greatness: his capacity for close friendships and collaborations with younger scientists as well as with peers; his broad perspective that let him recognize new significance in the work of many specialists; and his capacity for sustained hard work and complex analysis.
The achievements for which Mayr is best known fall into six areas. First, as an ornithologist he was the leading expert on birds of New Guinea and the tropical southwest Pacific; he described more species and subspecies of living birds than anyone else of his or subsequent generations. Second, as a systematist he was a principal architect of what is termed the ‘evolutionary synthesis’, which finally succeeded in showing how the adaptive changes that natural selection produces in single populations result in the evolution of biodiversity. That synthesis fused the hitherto separate research programmes of geneticists and field naturalists, and explained how evolution has given rise to organisms ranging from microscopic bacteria to redwood trees.
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