Ernst Mayr, architect of modern evolutionary theory, dies

Apparently losing Max Schmeling and Ossie Davis in the course of one day wasn't bad enough.  Ernst Mayr, the evolutionary biologist who first linked Darwinian natural selection with Mendelian genetics and in doing so laid the foundation of modern evolutionary theory, has died. He was 100.

Link here (registration required), and excerpts and reflection below the jump.

Dr. Ernst Mayr, the leading evolutionary biologist of the 20th century, died on Thursday in Bedford, Mass. He was 100.

Dr. Mayr's death, in a retirement community where he had lived since 1997, was announced by his family and Harvard, where he was a faculty member for many years.

He was known as an architect of the evolutionary or modern synthesis, an intellectual watershed when modern evolutionary biology was born. The synthesis, which has been described by Dr. Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard as "one of the half-dozen major scientific achievements in our century," revived Darwin's theories of evolution and reconciled them with new findings in laboratory genetics and in field work on animal populations and diversity ...

"He was the Darwin of the 20th century, the defender of the faith," said Dr. Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis, a historian of science at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

People often forget that Darwin's theory (first published in 1859) was in disfavor by the 1930s, for lack of a plausible mechanism -- there had to be a substrate for natural selection, and none was readily apparent.  (Creationists like to use this fact to discredit Darwin.)  Mayr's "New Synthesis" of 1942 proposed that the passing on of favorable genes, and the elimination of unfavorable ones, could account for natural selection.  Eleven years later, Watson and Crick solved the structure of DNA, providing a molecular mechanism for inheritance.  It wouldn't be a stretch to say that these two ideas are the twin foundations of all of modern biology.

Mayr and Stephen Jay Gould were probably the two most famous evolutionary biologists not named Darwin -- Mayr was the academic, while Gould, although an accomplished academic in his own right, was better known for his brilliant scientific essays explaining Darwinism to the layman (and decrying its misuse, e.g., "The Bell Curve"). Now we've lost both in the space of a few years.

I can only hope that the red-state obits won't give him the Edward Said/Susan Sontag treatment, but I'm not optimistic.