3 The New York Years (1931–1953)

Personality and General Views 291
way was discontinued. Pictures of Moritzburg and Dresden adorned the walls of
his corner room at The Farm.
Coming from Germany Mayr was able to draw from the extensive European
literature and to combine this knowledge with what he gathered in North America.
Settling in two different cultures gave him a much broader approach to problems
and has been one of the major reasons for his success (Mayr 1994a). The training
he had received from Professor Stresemann was clearly significant in establishing
the research strategy and analytic methods used (Bock 1994a:281). When he was
asked “How would you like to be remembered as a scientist?” Mayr answered:
“One of the things that most people don’t see me as is that basically I am a modest
person. They think that I am a great egotist and pusher of my own ideas. But I am
a humble man. I just want to understand nature and make a contribution to the
body of knowledge about the natural world. And nothing else. I will add that except
for losing my father when I was 12, and my wife a few years ago, I have been an
extraordinarily lucky person” (Shermer and Sulloway 2000). Further, Ernst Mayr
was generous with his time and the attention he gave to students and to colleagues;
generous with the money he received for academic prizes which he gave to purposes
of education and conservation. He was tolerant regarding racial, religious
or ethnic differences and he appreciated the unknown in science and religion and
therefore did not speculate about things that we do not know. His driving enthusiasm
for his work until the last month of his life was remarkable. Asked in an
interview as to what had given him particular pleasure in his ornithological work,
he answered: Having been ahead of his competitors like, e.g., when he discovered
a sibling species of Asian birds which had been overlooked by several experienced
ornithologists (p. 161). He was also very pleased with himself and proud
when, after 10 years of hard work, he had finished his List of New Guinea Birds
in 1941, the basis of all later publications on this avifauna (Bock and Lein 2005;
CD-ROM).
An outstanding feature of Mayr’s thinking has been, from his student days on,
adeepconcernforgeneralizations. In his publications he emphasized the “broad
picture,” i.e., the underlying general concepts and ideas but, at the same time,
he was always very accurate with the details. There are hundreds of painstaking
descriptions of subspecies with many thousands of measurements. He spent about
10 years studying the birds of New Guinea and did not finalize his book (1941f)
until he had seen and compared the types of all questionable taxa and most other
forms and consulted all the publications of the preceding 60 years attempting
to identify every species however insufficiently described. His tendency to draw
general conclusions directed him to philosophy and the theoretical framework of
biology. In his scientific work, Mayr usually adopted multi-factor rather than single
factor interpretations, as shown by the following quote: “For me phenomena such
as territory, clutch size, niche partitioning, or species number on an island were
rather the phenotypic compromise between several selection pressures, different
for each species and different for each locality” (1973j: 434).
During his professional life Mayr dictated most of his letters and manuscripts,
but corresponded with handwritten letters in German with his friends in Germany.