3 The New York Years (1931–1953)

9
Ernst Mayr—the Man
Personality and General Views
Mayr was a born naturalist and observer. His parents took their three children on
nature walks nearly every weekend and taught them flowers, trees and animals.
He felt that his interest in theoretical aspects and basic principles in science was
due to his education at a German gymnasium: “They train students to ask critical
questions instead of just accumulating knowledge. […] I have always said that
my achievements are due to this heritage of culture of the German gymnasium”
(Shermer and Sulloway 2000).
Mayr lost his father when he was not yet 13 years old but he was lucky to
meet, through his birding activities, fatherly friends with whom he established
close personal relationships. First, during his high school years in Dresden, there
was Rudolf Zimmermann (p. 20) and later in Berlin he met Gottfried Schiermann
(p. 46) and Erwin Stresemann, the latter certainly the most influential man in his
life (pp. 39–42).
Contemplating himself in a lonely field camp in New Guinea in 1929, Mayr listed
the following attributes of his character: (1) quick perception, (2) critical judgment,
(3) management ability, (4) highly ambitious, (5) always pushing himself and (6)
well-developed self-confidence (Mayr Papers, notebook, Staatsbibliothek Berlin).
He felt that these characteristics occasionally led to his social isolation. “Ambition
is the father of all deeds,” he wrote to Stresemann on 13 December 1928. From
New Guinea he wrote to his younger brother Hans on 25 February 1929 (transl.):
“One must make the most of one’s chances, one must be able to work hard,
perform productive work and work on one’s own personality; one must have
certain basic principles, and definitive objectives […] and work like hell. The socalled
great men were almost without exception great and indefatigable workers.
Many of them worked daily 16–20 hours. Quite that much is not possible at our
age, but 10–12 hours of work are possible.”
In a letter to Dr. Stresemann from New Guinea (20 February 1929), Mayr
confessed to be “in some respects a terrible guy, pert, conceited, unpleasantly
ambitious”—while Stresemann emphasized in a letter to Hartert: “Mayr is quite
self-confident and has his own will. […] In the field one survives better with
a very secure, reckless, decided attitude than with a certain pliancy” (9 December
1928). From these and similar remarks the reader may get the impression that
Mayr, at least in certain respects, showed egotistical traits when, generally speaking,
the opposite was true. In his profession, he was more altruistic than many of