Ornithology, Evolution, and Philosophy 123

292 9 Ernst Mayr—the Man
His handwriting was fairly neat and clear becoming less legible in his old age. After
his retirement, when he had only temporary secretarial help, he also wrote many
pages of his manuscripts by hand which were typed later (he never made personally
the transition to the typewriter, the laptop or other virtues of the computer age).
Mayr had learned in school the German script which he used in his notebooks,
letters, and manuscripts until the mid-1920s, but in about 1927 he switched to the
regular Latin script. He was a non-technical person, but managed or was involved
in numerous practical chores at The Farm.
Mayr had many informal students. He influenced D. Amadon and trained the
dentist C. Vaurie discussing with him every sentence of all of his papers (at least
into the 1950s); he trained B. Biswas from India, and was the first teacher of
D. Ripley and M. Moynihan. About four or five historians of science (including
Coleman, Adams, Burkhardt, Churchill) consider him as their PhD supervisor,
even publishing a Festschrift on the occasion of his 75th birthday. Mayr influenced
numerous people in North America and other countries of the world through personal
contact, through his publications or through correspondence. As examples
I cite expressions of several colleagues to show how they looked up to him. Steven
J.Gouldsaidwhenhecompletedhismagnum opus on The Structure of Evolutionary
Theory (2002): “It is my greatest joy that I have finished this while Ernst [at age 97]
is still with us. We have been talking about it for a long time;” Douglas J. Futuyma:
“To receive a signed copy of such a work [Birds of Melanesia, 2001], from my
intellectual hero who has been an inspiration to me since my undergraduate days,
is truly rewarding.”
Irv De Vore: “I don’t think I have ever had the chance to tell you how much I
have treasured you, over the years, as the mentor who was instrumental in leading
me out of the swamp of Social Anthropology into the more granitic and satisfying
precepts of biology. It was all those years ago, at the Wenner Gren Conference when
I first met you, Simpson, et al., that I joined you on your predawn ambles across
the Austrian hills. Those walks with you, in which I was dazzled by the depth of
your understanding of all of nature around, were surely the most formative events
in my intellectual life.”
One of his characteristics that is often overlooked was Mayr’s sense of humor,
although admittedly his humor was sometimes a bit sharp. In conversation he
loved to make his partners laugh by making “cracks.” On the occasion of a social
dinner a colleague once remarked: “I try to get on Mayr’s table, because that is
the table where there is the most laughing.” One of his roommates at 55 Tiemann
Place in Upper Manhattan during the early 1930s remembered that Mayr loved to
read the comics in the weekend edition of one of the New York newspapers.
The paleontologist Edwin H. Colbert of the AMNH was quite right, when he
called Mayr a man of strong opinions.Someofhiscolleaguesevenconsideredhim
as dogmatic. He was never afraid to express his views directly and he said so in
some published statements. He was of the opinion that this is the quickest way
to get at the truth. “To take an unequivocal stand, it seems to me, is of greater
heuristic value than to evade the issue.”