MACROSCOPE
Ernst Mayr, Biologist Extraordinaire
An appreciation of Harvard's visionary of modern evolutionary synthesis
Lynn Margulis
What Evolution Is
We celebrated the publication of our books, both brought out by
Basic Books, in the summer of 2002. At his lovely retirement
village, with the help of many friends as well as family (including
Mayr's daughters Susanne and biologist Christa Menzel of Simsbury,
Connecticut), we had a wonderful bibliophilic party. For our book
(Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of
the Origins of Species), Mayr had written the fascinating,
not uncritical, foreword. But Mayr's book was what we all came to
celebrate. For readers unfamiliar with his comprehensive opus
spanning more than 75 years of scientific productivity on a panoply
of evolutionary themes, I recommend that you begin with this one,
his 24th: What Evolution Is. Designed for the curious,
nonspecialist reader, it is a fine read for those interested in the
achievements of importance in 20th-century evolutionary biology.
Not immodestly, Mayr considered his 2002 trade book to be the single
best summary of uncontested, documented evolutionary thought.
"Evolution" refers to the results of experimental,
observational and theoretical science that support the common
ancestry of all life on Earth. Yes, of course, people are primates
directly related to other great apes such as gorillas, chimps and
bonobos. Yes, of course, humans were not made by an all-seeing,
all-knowing white-man deity. Indeed, evidence points to the
possibility that several species of nonhumans became extinct because
of our aggressive, even murderous, greedy ancestors. These early
Homo sapiens, related to us, displayed traits that
still abound!
The questions and answers, at the end of the book especially, help
any reader, even one naive with respect to science, to understand
the basic concepts of this most important area of study. Mayr's
reasonableness is especially pertinent today in the face of
ignorance, prejudice and religious fundamentalism. For those who try
to deny the validity of science that uses carefully collected
evidence from investigators worldwide, this book is a responsible antidote.
Some three weeks before his death, I called him at home in Bedford
and asked, "Ernst, how are you? How do you feel?" He
responded cheerily, "I feel fine. That is, I feel exceptionally
well given the diagnosis." "What diagnosis?" I asked.
"Didn't I tell you? The doctors tell me I have cancer. It has
already metastasized, but I don't feel sick at all." "Oh,
Ernst, I'm so sorry," I responded. "Well, Lynn," he
said cheerfully, "I will have to die of something."
© Lynn Margulis
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