Ernst Mayr Interview (page: 5 / 8) The Darwin of the 20th Century	Print Interview

Keeping in mind that no one can be creative without making some mistake or other, what would you consider to be those areas where you have been wrong theoretically, and what have you learned from those experiences?

Ernst Mayr: Everybody, looking back, finds that certain things one believed turned out to be wrong. For instance, there was a time when E. B. Ford recognized different kinds of polymorphism, one of them neutral polymorphism, and he said that was one of the chronic errors. In my 1942 book you will find quite a few pages which are devoted to neutral polymorphism, polymorphisms that couldn't be due to any selective forces. Well, I've completely reneged on that one and within a very short time, I think within three or four years.

The next thing is sympatric speciation. When I published my 1942 book, the majority of taxonomists still believed, as had Darwin, that sympatric speciation was the major, if not the almost universal form of speciation. I said, "No, it's geographic speciation," following the lead of some continental European authors. If you read my work carefully, which most of my opponents don't do, I don't say a sympatric species is impossible. I say, "No case of sympatric speciation has been proven, has been well documented." I thought it would be very rare because it would mean simultaneous preference for a given set of characters of the mate, and for the location where the mate is found. Two different things. I said simultaneous preference for two such very different things is impossible. Well, it has now been shown that it occurs very commonly in fishes, particularly cyclic fishes. So here's another thing where my intuition was wrong.

There are other things where I've been accused of having been wrong but I wasn't really wrong. For instance, in 1950, and in preliminary publications before that, I showed that the 115 or so species names for fossil hominids -- and the 32 generic names for fossil hominids -- were ridiculous, and that one should make a null position and adopt the smallest possible number of species in general that are needed to explain the variation among fossil hominids. I furthermore said we have to make the assumption that at any one time only one hominid existed and eliminate about 95 synonyms. Well, pretty soon it was shown that the so-called robust Australopithecus existed side by side with the gracile Australopithecus, therefore the idea that there was at any one time only one fossil hominid is wrong. There are two.

That's about the only really major mistake I made in that line. On the other hand, from the very beginning, I always pointed out that all mammals have geographic races. The primates, for instance, whenever a genus of primates has several species, they are allopatric, with only two exceptions. You have sympatric species of lemurs and cercopithecus. But the South American monkeys, for instance, the different species are all allopatric. And I said, "I'm sure that when you had Australopithecus africanus and Australopithecus afarensis, there must have been a lot of allospecies in other parts of Africa where they haven't found any fossils yet. But in some very recent publications it was stated that I had always fought for a linear sequence of fossil species, which I never had.

So people haven't read you carefully enough?

Ernst Mayr: Their own thinking is strictly linear, so they think that way. I don't know a single specialist in fossil man who really understands geographic variation.

What do you see as the greatest challenges that face a natural history approach today?

Ernst Mayr: There are so many things. Behavior is sort of the pace maker of anything that happens in evolution. All these connections between how behavior varies without genetic changes into behavior that is different because of genetic changes, there is still an awful lot to be done in that whole area. Molecular biology has sort of entered all of biology. We don't have a museum anymore that doesn't have its DNA sequencing machinery. With the molecular methods being used in all branches of biology, I'm beginning to ask, "Is there any molecular biology left? Is there something that isn't really part of some other field?"

Molecular biologists have developed an enormous interest in evolution and that was surely a complete surprise to them. But if you go now to an issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and look at the articles on molecular biology you will find that a quarter if not a third of them deal with evolutionary problems. When molecular biologists take a certain molecule, they are interested in its evolution. "How did it come to be like this in such and such an animal while it is like that in some other animal, and yet this is basically the same gene or the same molecule?" So now the lines drawn between different points of biology have become very vague in many respects. Let me go back now to the question of natural history.

About two years ago, three years ago, for maybe the 20th time I went over the whole business of the species concept. What is a species? I looked at the major figures in the evolutionary synthesis, and I looked at Robzhansky and myself, and Huxley and Stebbins, all of us had reasonable species concepts, and the only person that had a species concept that I thought was quite absurd was the paleontologist G.G. Simpson. And then I said to myself, "Well, he can't have been a naturalist in his youth if he had such a peculiar, unworkable species concept." So I went to Simpson's biography and what did I find? I found that in college he was an English major. He had never been a naturalist as a youngster. He never collected anything, and he discovered geology in his senior year in college, and from there he went to stratigraphy and finally to paleontology. Not surprisingly, not having been a naturalist, he has no idea what a species is and he never had. I argued with him about the species concept year after year, but lacking that background, he was unable to see it, and that is the thing. Being a naturalist -- having had that background of being a naturalist -- gives you a view of nature that cannot be acquired just learning from books.
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It's something that you live with. That was where Darwin had his great advantage, and where people like me have a great advantage.

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