Deze week in Nature een artikel van Jared Diamond ¹⁾ over Ernst Mayr ¹⁾ :

Returning from an expedition to New Guinea in 1965, John Terborgh and I laid out our hundreds of bird specimens in the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology for Ernst Mayr to identify. Ernst had made only one collecting trip to New Guinea 36 years previously, and his last publication on New Guinea birds had appeared in 1954. Nevertheless, as he walked along the shelf and glanced at one specimen after another, he quickly identified each by its Latin species name and then by its subspecies name; he told us which zoologist had described it, in what year and in which journal; gave the alternative names under which other zoologists had discussed it; and explained its broader biological significance (for example, "Check that one for altitudinal hybridization"). He hesitated only at one obscurely mottled specimen: "See if that's a female Rhagologus." We found later that it was indeed a female Rhagologus, a whistler whose relatives are usually banded black and gold.

This incident illustrates some of what made Ernst Mayr the greatest evolutionary biologist of the twentieth century."

Aldus het bericht in Nature.

Voor de rest van dit artikel zie de onderstaande link:

http://www.vkblog.nl/bericht/159486/Ernst_Mayr%3A_De_grootste_evolutionist_van_de_20e_eeuw