The Friends of Charles Darwin

Ernst Mayr, Harvard University professor emeritus and biologist extraordinaire, died peacefully in Bedford, Massachusetts, on February 3. He was 100 years old and had been associated with the biology department at Harvard since he joined its faculty in 1953. An era in evolutionary thought, called variously the New Synthesis, neo-Darwinism or the Modern Synthesis, came to an end with his passing. The death of the last of the great evolutionary biologists of the 20th century concluded an intellectual movement in the study of evolution—a point of view whose most striking aspect was the extent to which all of the evolutionary history of life on Earth was perceived as a subdiscipline of biology. Whereas Thomas Kuhn, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, might have called it a paradigm, Ludwik Fleck (author of Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, 1935) would have recognized the correlated demise of neo-Darwinism and the death of Professor Mayr as a paradigm lost.