[Re:] Mayr bashing

[Thomas Schlemmermeyer]

Sometimes, I wonder a little bit, whether this virtual competition
between historians of biology does make any sense.

Corizat's problems and ideas very clearly different from those of Mayr. So, is
there any need in comparing the significance of the personalities?

I know that Mayr wrote a lot of dispersal of birds and so on. But as far as I
know Mayr's significant contribution to biology was the formulation of genetic
drift (founder effect, bottleneck effect). A process which is clearly not
natural selection, but which contributes to maintainance of diversity.

Croizat's problem was the joint-evaluation of animal and plant distributions,
especially in regard to whether they are informative about Earth history.

  cheers   Thomas

On (         Wed, 17 Nov 1999 09:40:21 -0400),         John Grehan
<jrg13 at PSU.EDU> wrote:


>>Mayr's contributions to evolutionary biology and to the history of biology
>>need no defense.  They will remain standard works when Croizat is a mere
>>footnote.
>>
>>Does that qualify as a flame, or just a smoldering ember?
>>
>>Bill Shear
>
>This may well be true and I have no problem with it. Without a doubt Croizat's
>view of evolution is at variance with a majority of practioners and the
>situation
>may well stay that way. Since Mayr's contributions express viewpoints in the
>majority, they obviously need no defense and I would not presume otherwise.
>
>Interestingly, Mayr said that the reason he never critiqued Croizat (at
>least directly)
>was that Croizat was so wrong about everything that it was not worth the
effort,
>and history would be the judge of that decision.
>(I paraphrase here but that's more or less the jist of it).
>
>John Grehan
>


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Thomas Schlemmermeyer
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