In memoriam: Ernst Mayr (1904-2005)

摘要

Ernst Mayr's death at the age of 100 earlier this year (3 January 2005) has left a void that will not easily be filled. Not only was Mayr one of the great evolutionary biologists and naturalists of the last century, his breadth and erudition in the history of biology had few equals among his peers. By founding the journal Evolution, he was instrumental in establishing evolution as a professional sub-discipline within biology in the United States. His efforts were critical in preventing evolutionary biology from being entirely cast aside by the new molecular biology of the late 1950s and 1960s. His paper, "Cause and Effect in Biology" (Mayr 1961), often regarded as the source of the distinction between proximate and ultimate causes in biology (especially by those unaware of the ancient Greek tradition connected to Aristotle), was intended as an attempt to establish a domain for organismic, especially evolutionary, biology on which molecular biology, in principle, could not encroach. Molecular biology studied only proximate causes; if we want ultimate causes, Mayr argued, we must turn to evolution by natural selection. The rhetoric was impeccable: surely, the best science is about ultimate causes, not merely proximate ones? The causes of evolution must therefore be more important than the proximate mechanisms of molecular biology. It was an astute move in a political struggle for prestige and research funds.