3 The New York Years (1931–1953)

342 11 History and Philosophy of Biology—Mayr’s Third Synthesis
synthesis and, more broadly speaking, to the current concepts of evolutionary
biology. Unfortunately, Jordan published most of his theoretical discussions as
parts of entomological monographs rather than in separate articles.
Mayr was “filled with admiration bordering on awe when one compares Jordan’s
discussions around 1900 on the subjects of the mode of speciation, the existence
of natural selection, and the meaning of mimicry and polymorphism with those
ofmostofhiscontemporaries.Jordan’sworkismostimportantforthehistorian
of biology because he developed many concepts in the 1890s and the first decade
of the 20th century which modern authors think to have originated during the
evolutionary synthesis or even later. Sometimes some of these were ascribed to me
and I was particularly anxious to establish Jordan’s priority.”
We should note here that there is a difference between having the priority for
first talking about certain ideas and really being influential. K. Jordan may have
had priority in this case but very few people actually followed him.
The Darwin centennial. In 1959, the centennial year of the publication of Darwin’s
Origin, various societies, academies, and universities organized symposia
celebrating this event. As a result Mayr undertook several historical studies and
published discussions of the role of “Isolation as an evolutionary factor” (1959a),
on “Darwin and the evolutionary theory in biology” (1959b), “Agassiz, Darwin
and evolution” (1959c), and “The emergence of evolutionary novelties” (1959d).
Writing to J. B. S. Haldane:
“No one seems to give us poor evolutionists a chance to be lazy and inert in
this year 1959. Traveling from one evolution conference to the next, I feel like the
old-time Vaudeville performer who traveled from convention to convention and
from county fair to county fair. At least he had the advantage of showing the same
tricks to ever-new audiences, while I am supposed to say something new each time
because every word I utter is going to be published” (April 13, 1959).
The Darwin year of 1959 was decisive in initiating Mayr’s third career, that of
a historian-philosopher of biology (Burkhardt 1994; Junker 1995, 1996), although
the transition was gradual beginning with his move to Harvard in 1953. The first
contribution just mentioned, was presented at a Centennial symposium organized
during the annual meeting of the American Philosophical Society in April 1959. It
isahistoricalanalysisontheviewsofthepioneersofevolutionontheimportance
of geographical isolation, with an emphasis where they were “right” and where
they“missedtheboat”andwhyasseenfromthecurrentperspective.Itisastudyof
the life-history of an idea. Whereas Darwin, Wallace and Weismann minimized the
role of isolation, Moritz Wagner thought that isolation is a conditio sina qua non for
evolution to take place. When Mayr wrote this article in 1959, Darwin’s Notebooks
were still unknown which later showed that he had supported geographical speciation
between 1837 and the 1840s (Sulloway 1979). Mayr’s comments on Darwin’s
principle of divergence were tentative and are superceded by his later article of
1992(n). The first author who made a clear distinction between phyletic evolution
and multiplication of species (through geographical isolation of populations) was
the ornithologist Henry Seebohm (1887) who discussed these problems in a thoroughly
modern manner. The concept of species as an interbreeding community