Ornithology, Evolution, and Philosophy 123

Personality and General Views 293
“Because I hate beating around the bush, I have sometimes been called dogmatic.
I think this is the wrong epithet for my attitude. A dogmatic person insists on being
right, regardless of opposing evidence. This has never been my attitude and, indeed,
I pride myself on having changed my mind on frequent occasions. However, it is
true that my tactic is to make sweeping categorical statements. […] My own feeling
is that it leads more quickly to the ultimate solution of scientific problems than
a cautious sitting on the fence” (1982d: 9). He once told Frank Sulloway about his
risk-taking in science. He said that he liked to go out on a limb sometimes because
this motivated other scientists to try to prove him wrong by cutting off the limb on
which he was standing. If it turned out he was mistaken, he said, then something
was learned that would not otherwise have been learned had he taken a more
cautious stance. Such a bold willingness to be the target of criticism takes a strong
ego to put into action, Sulloway commented.
In Dresden the family attended regularly when some special music by Bach or
Händel was performed in one of the churches. Later in Tenafly, New Jersey Ernst
andGretelsubscribedtosomeconcertseriesandgreatlyenjoyedhearingthemajor
artists of the 1930s and 1940s. They also subscribed to the Boston symphony when
they had concert series at Harvard’s Sanders Theater. While they enjoyed classical
music, modern music and poetry did not play any major role in their lives. In
1951 Mayr was deeply moved by a performance of Gluck’s Orpheo and Euridice in
the Scala of Milan under the direction of Wilhelm Furtwängler; the staging, the
singing, everything was quite overwhelming. When he needed some relaxation,
Mayr walked across Central Park from the American Museum to visit the Whitney
Museum on a number of occasions.
Although ambitious and driven in his profession, Mayr easily switched over to
his family when at home. He was available to his two girls and more easy going
with them than sometimes their mother. When needed, he helped the children with
their homework and to care for them when one was ill. Of course, he spent long
hours in his “office” upstairs, a “sacred” place and essentially “off-limits” to the
children while the family lived in Tenafly. They both remember heated discussions
on technical subject matter when Dobzhansky and his family came over from
Manhattan for dinner.
Ernst Mayr was raised in a family in which charity was ranked as one of the
foremost virtues. His mother’s life philosophy was “Geben ist seliger als nehmen”
(to give is more blessed than to receive) and Gretel Mayr, a minister’s daughter,
was equally committed to charitable giving. According to American tax laws one
gets credit in the income tax calculation for charitable donations up to one half of
one’s income. Gretel and Ernst Mayr always tried to use as much of this allowance
as possible. During the 1990s, he annually gave about $25,000–40,000 for social
purposes (charity, conservation, science) and he never used for himself the money
associated with the prizes he won. With the $100,000 of the Balzan Prize (1983)
he established the annual Ernst Mayr grants 1 , with the $100,000 of the Japan
1 The principal aim of the Ernst Mayr travel grants (administered by the MCZ) is to
stimulate taxonomic research on neglected, difficult or poorly known taxa, in particular
the study of types in different museums.