Ernst Mayr: The Most Influential Feminist

A notable biologist I have recently discovered and want to learn more about is Ernst Mayr. Ernst has a different childhood which helped pave the way to the impressive biologist he became. Ernst Mayr was born in Kempten, Germany on July 5, 1904 and was the son of Dr. Otto Mayr who was a successful lawyer and physician from a poor family. Ernst was born the middle of 3 brothers with an upper middle class life. As a young child Ernst and his family took a hike almost every Sunday where they collected flowers, mushrooms, and fossils. This is how Ernst became a naturalist at a young age and his father’s naturalist interests of history and philosophy grew within Ernst. Ernst’s father had an early death in 1917 which took a financial toll on the family.
Stresemann convinced the Zoological Congress that Ernst would be the best person to continue A.F. Eichhorn’s work in New Guinea. Ernst led his first expedition to the New Guinea in 1928 and continued the two year expedition to Melanesia with the American Museum of Natural History’s (AMNH) Whitney South Sea Expedition. “During this period he described an amazing total of 26 new species, and 445 new subspecies of birds, mostly from Melanesia and the southwest Pacific” (British Ornithologists' Union 2006). All this impressive work lead Ernst to the opportunity to move to New York in 1932 and become the Whitney-Rothschild Curator of The American Museum of Natural History for two decades. During this time Ernst became an evolutionary biologist and published List of New Guinea Birds (1941) which “fills a long felt want as an aid to the study of Papuan ornithology; it furnishes a fresh starting point from which sub- sequent workers may undertake further studies” (Peters 1941). Ernst also published Systematics and the Origin of Species (1942) that shows “Certain aspects of speciation can be most advantageously developed from an ornithological approach” (Hubbs 1943) and this factor helps Ernst strengthen his work. In 1953, Ernst joined the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) at Harvard University where he taught undergraduate and graduate students. Later in 1961 Ernst becomes the director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology for 9 years. Also in 1961 Ernst published Cause and effect in biology which highlights, “evolutionary research has found no evidence whatsoever for a "goal-seeking" of evolutionary lines, as postulated in that kind of teleology which sees "plan and design" in nature” (Mayr 1961). In 1970, Ernst received the National Medal of Science and in the years following continued to receive recognition for his work in the field of Biology. In 1975 Ernst retired from Harvard University but continued to publish over 200 articles. Even after 65 years of