3 The New York Years (1931–1953)

National and International Recognition 313
Each panel wrote its own report, the one on biodiversity was jointly composed
by Ernst Mayr and the botanist William Steere (1907–1988), director of the New
York Botanical Garden (Mayr 1970h). The other 4 members made minor contributions.
Mayr was one of the 29 members of the whole committee and took part in all
of its joint meetings and editorial sessions. The 4 years during which the 526-page
report 2 was composed (1967–1970) required a great deal of hard and time consuming
work and travel. Mayr scrutinized the reports of all the other panels and
eliminated or corrected misleading statements about organismic biology made by
the biochemists and other non-biologists.
Philip Handler picked Mayr as his major consultant on organismic biology and
it was for these services to the National Academy that Handler nominated him
for the National Medal of Science in 1969. This was only one of the committees
Mayr served over the years. For instance, he was a member, and later chairman, of
the Divisional Committee of the National Science Foundation (NSF), after many
years’ work on several review panels of the NSF. Although himself a biochemist,
Handler recognized the importance of organismic biology and always supported
Mayr when it came to doing things for systematics or evolutionary biology. As
Mayr recalled: “He was a brilliant person, a wonderful diplomat, and a reliable,
honest human being. That he had to die so young from lymphoma was a great loss
for American science and for me personally.”
National and International Recognition
Due to the steady stream of his taxonomic publications on South Sea island birds
during the 1930s Ernst Mayr became known worldwide among ornithologists. This
reputation was reinforced by his books on the birds of the southwestern Pacific and
the Philippines. Many societies elected him to honorary membership beginning
with the German Ornithological Society in 1941.
The Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia awarded him the Leidy medal
in 1946 for his important book, Systematics and the Origin of Species (1942e).
Recognition in evolutionary circles outside the United States followed, when this
book became more widely known after 1945, when World War II had ended. Scandinavian
zoologists in particular recognized, at an early stage, Mayr’s contribution
to the evolutionary synthesis by his clarification of the concepts of species and
speciation, i.e., the origin of organic diversity.
During an extended visit to Europe in the summer of 1951, Mayr was invited
to and lectured at various universities in Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark
andFrance.HewaselectedaHonoraryMemberoftheRoyalAcademyofSciences,
Uppsala (Sweden) in 1955 and, at the celebration of the 250th birthday of Linnaeus
in 1957, was awarded his first honorary degree by the University of Uppsala together
2 The Life Sciences. The World of Biological Research. National Academy of Sciences, Washington,
D.C. 1970. Philip Handler (ed.) BiologyandtheFutureofMan. Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 1970; also in The Environmental Challenge, NewYork,Holt,Rinehart
and Winston, p. 20–49, 1974.