3 The New York Years (1931–1953)

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He felt optimistic about the future of systematics, because environmental biology,
behavioral biology and even molecular biology all pay increasing attention to
organic diversity. In 1983, when the American Ornithological Society celebrated
its hundredth jubilee, molecular biology was at the height of its prestige. In his
invitation lecture Mayr (1984a) tried to emphasize that other branches of biology,
for instance ornithology, also had contributed to our understanding of the living
world, e.g., systematics, evolutionary biology, speciation, evolutionary morphology,
biogeography, ecology, population biology, the study of behavior, physiology,
migration and conservation. In another article Mayr (1989c) listed specifically all
the concepts that ornithology has contributed to biology and showed which particular
ideas and processes were first recognized and explained by ornithologists.
He also emphasized repeatedly the importance of museum collections and the
need for their continuing financial support (1955g). 1 Having been published by
the National Research Council this paper had a certain amount of authority and
was later frequently quoted when support was asked from the National Science
Foundation. A second objective of this report was to recommend more up-to-date
methods, since Mayr was quite dissatisfied with the curatorial practices in many
museums and herbaria.
Classification
Ernst Mayr’s most general and comprehensive contribution to the fields of systematics
and classification is his textbook which appeared in three versions. The first
was titled Methods and Principles of Systematic Zoology (1953a, with E.G. Linsley
and R.L. Usinger); the second version was published under the title Systematic
Zoology (1969b) by Mayr as sole author and the third version (1991a) by Mayr and
P. Ashlock (the second edition of Systematic Zoology). While Mayr was working
on the manuscript of this textbook around 1950, Linsley and Usinger in California,
preparing a similar text, heard of his project. They agreed on coauthorship and
the volume was widely adopted. This book, about half of which written by Mayr,
dealt comprehensively with the fundamentals of both the theory and practice of
taxonomy. He emphasized here for the first time in print the “population concept”
(“population thinking,” Mayr 1959b):
“The taxonomist is no longer satisfied to possess types and duplicates; he attempts
to collect large series at each of many localities throughout the range of
a species. Subsequently, he evaluates this material with the methods of population
analysis and statistics. This type of study was commenced almost simultaneously
by ornithologists, entomologists and malacologists in the second half of the nineteenth
century. The new systematics has brought recognition of the true role of
taxonomy and placed it at the very heart of modern biology” (1953a, p. 11, 15–16).
1 As to the co-authorship of this report, Mayr explained: “Owing to poor editing Richard
Goodwin is listed as co-author but he was actually to prepare a report on living materials,
a report he never did.”