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Teaching and PhD Students 259
Philadelphia and New Haven for a total of 11 days and 6 different agencies or
committees. What a life!” (9 November 1966; transl.).
His emphasis of systematics and organismic biology cannot be construed, as
some authors have done, as an opposition to the rise of molecular biology as such.
To the contrary, he was enthusiastic about it!
Although Mayr had been interested in the history of science since the time
he wrote his dissertation, the activities before and during the Darwin centennial
(1959) and his own participation in the celebrations stimulated and boosted his
historical interests considerably. The number of titles on the history and philosophy
of biology increased annually, especially after his “retirement” in 1975, and in 1982
(d), he published his masterly synthesis on The Growth of Biological Thought
followed by Toward a New Philosophy of Biology (1988e), One Long Argument.
Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought (1991g), This
is Biology. The Science of the Living World (1997b), What Evolution is (2001f),
and What makes Biology Unique? Considerations on the Autonomy of a Scientific
Discipline (2004a). Generally speaking, these publications deal mostly with the
history and structure of biological theories and ideas, in particular with Darwin’s
theses of evolution, with Darwin’s predecessors, his successors and opponents and
with the development of the synthetic theory of evolution (1937–1950). In his
philosophical writings he emphasized the autonomy of biology, in particular its
independence from physics.
Teaching and PhD Students
At high school, Ernst Mayr suffered from stage fright. He overcame this condition
when, in the United States, he presented papers at ornithological meetings and
was not nervous at all before his first major public lecture at the AAAS meeting in
Columbus, Ohio on December 29, 1939.
When preparing his Jesup Lectures in early 1941 he wrote: “I have never taught
in a class-room and I give only one or two lectures a year, which means that lectures
for me are always somewhat of an ordeal. I have to go by lecture notes and I prefer
to have a manuscript near me on which I can fall back on when I feel that I have lost
my trail” (Ernst Mayr to Edgar Anderson, 28 January 1941; HUGFP 14.7, Box 2).
Later he developed a teaching routine along with a course on “Evolution and
speciation” he held as a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota in 1949:
“Thiswas7yearsaftermybook,IwaseditoratthattimeofthejournalEvolution,
and I had all the manuscripts of all the latest work that was going on. I remember
that I had outlines of the first fifteen or twenty lectures, and I brought the first
five with me on the podium as I gave the first class. By the end of the class, I had
used up the first three outlines for the first three lectures, and I was just panicking
that I would run out of material. I went to Professor Minnich, the chairman of the
department, and said ‘Look here, I’m very inexperienced, that’s what happened
to me. What should I do?’ He said ‘Well, the first thing you do, of course, is that
everything you say, you repeat about three times,’ and the second thing was, he said