3 The New York Years (1931–1953)

CuratorofOrnithologyattheAmericanMuseumofNaturalHistory 133
with the botanist E. Anderson. Since 1943, Mayr attended regularly the summer
meetings of geneticists at Cold Spring Harbor (p. 243).
Mayr and Th. Dobzhansky met for the first time in October–November 1936,
when Dobzhansky visited New York to deliver a series of lectures at Columbia
University 10 . Mayr invited him to the museum and showed him some beautiful
examples of geographic differentiation and speciation in island birds he had
studied (e.g., species of Pachycephala, Monarcha, Rhipidura, and others). When
Dobzhansky came to New York again in late 1937, L.C. Dunn invited him, the
Professor Schraders and the Mayrs for dinner. This indicates the fairly close ties
Mayr had established with the zoology department of Columbia University. He
described his personal and scientific relations with Th. Dobzhansky (1900–1975)
as follows:
“For many years I had been unhappy about the neglect by the geneticists of
the problems that confronted the taxonomists (see p. 45). Nowhere in the writings
of the geneticists did I find any appropriate discussion of geographic variation,
incipient species, and the completion of speciation. All they did, as I saw it, was to
discuss what happened within a single gene pool. For this reason, I was quite excited
when I read a paper by a person with the name of Dobzhansky who discussed
geographic variation in ladybug beetles and the genetic basis of this variation.
I was so enthusiastic that I did something I had never done before in my life, I sat
down and wrote him a fan letter (p. 185). This was in 1935, and between that time
and Dobzhansky’s death in 1975 there has been continuous interaction among the
two of us.
I became much better acquainted with him when, in 1936, Dobzhansky, who at
that time was at Cal Tech in Pasadena, came to the East and worked at Cold Spring
Harbor, visiting New York at regular intervals. At one or several of these visits he
came to the American Museum of Natural History, where I demonstrated to him
the marvelous geographic variation of South Sea island birds and the many cases
of incipient species. This quite fascinated him, and I had the impression that it
revived in him an interest in these kinds of questions, an interest that had been
dormant while he was working on more or less physiological problems during the
preceding 8 or 9 years at the Morgan Laboratory. Of course, I also attended his
lectures at Columbia in 1936, and had then also occasion to talk with him. What
Dobzhansky did for me primarily was to teach me the most modern evolutionary
genetics. Even though by that time I had abandoned regular Lamarckism, that
is, a belief in the inheritance of acquired characters, I still was, in a manner of
speaking, fighting mutationism and held the widespread opinion, which of course
Darwin also had had, that there are two sources of genetic variation, mutational
and gradual ones. I think it was Dobzhansky who convinced me that by accepting
very small mutations etc. one could bring both types of variation on a common
genetic denominator.
10 These lectures were not Jesup lectures and his text was originally meant to be a standalone
text in evolutionary genetics. Several months later, in May 1937, L.C. Dunn back
dated, naming Dobzhansky a Jesup lecturer and including his book manuscript as the
first volume in the revived Columbia Biological Series (Cain 2002a).