3 The New York Years (1931–1953)

196 5 Biological Species and Speciation—Mayr’s First Synthesis
casesinthehistoryofsciencewhereapioneerinposingaproblemarrivedatthe
wrong solution but where opposition to this solution led to the right solution,”
e.g., Goldschmidt-Mayr or Lyell-Darwin.
On Richard Goldschmidt (1878–1958) Mayr reported: “So far as I remember,
I never met Goldschmidt when I was a student at the University of Berlin. Presumably,
during that time (in 1925–1926) when I took courses at Dahlem he was
absent in Japan. When I first met him in the States, I don’t know. I do know that
in the 1930s he visited me several times at the American Museum of Natural History,
and that on those occasions I showed him all the marvelous examples of
geographic variation as displayed by the South Sea island birds, particularly those
of the Solomon Islands. Obviously, I did not convince him because he refers to
this only in a parenthetical footnote in his 1940 volume on The Material Basis of
Evolution.
Our relationship was quite cordial in spite of our scientific disagreement, and
this is illustrated by the following anecdote. Probably in 1936 Goldschmidt visited
me on a Saturday in the museum, and he was so much interested in my demonstrations
that it came close to my lunchtime. He accepted mine and Gretel’s invitation
to a simple lunch (lentils and frankfurters), came to my apartment in northern
Manhattan, and we had an altogether delightful time together.
The next thing was that I went up to New Haven together with my friend Herman
Spieth to attend Goldschmidt’s Silliman Lectures. Of course, I did not approve
at all of his saltationist origin of species through hopeful monsters, but it was
interesting to hear him present his ideas. As we were talking together after one of
his lectures, Herman asked him about the origin of birds from reptiles. He clearly,
unequivocally said, ‘Well, the first bird hatched out of a reptilian egg.’ He was that
much of a saltationist.
This experience, and particularly his rather cavalier treatment of my work in his
1940 volume, made me rather angry. I considered it almost unscientific to suppress
this splendid evidence for geographic speciation. And, as I have said on other
occasions, part of my Systematics and the Origin of Species was written in a mood
of anger over Goldschmidt’s behavior.
He was a typical Geheimrat—as the modern sociologists call it, a mandarin.
He was fully aware of his position in life and had little patience with ignorance
and poor manners. Interestingly, the fact that we disagreed scientifically did not
disturb our relationship. I am told that he was quite upset when coming to the
University of California at Berkeley about the secondary role he played there. Having
been the director of a Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, practically being the Pope of
German biology, it was a terrible let down for him to be only one professor in
a large department.
He had a peculiar tendency always to come out with unorthodox biological
theories. This was true not only for speciation, but also for sex determination, for
gene action, and I don’t know what other subjects. Invariably almost everybody
opposed him, and as history shows, he was almost always completely wrong. However,
he himself was fully convinced that he was right, and he would say, ‘Well, this
will probably not be adopted in my lifetime, but I am perfectly sure that eventually