Volume 49, Number 11 · June 27, 2002
A Bird's-Eye View of Evolution
By Tim Flannery
The Birds of Northern Melanesia: Speciation, Ecology, and Biogeography
by Ernst Mayr and Jared Diamond
Oxford University Press, 492 pp., $55.00
What Evolution Is
by Ernst Mayr, with a foreword by Jared Diamond
Basic Books, 318 pp., $26.00
But for an errant pair of pochards, Europe might have made a fine physician out of Ernst Mayr. As it was, his sighting of the red-crested diving ducks in central Germany in 1923—the first in over seventy years—led to a career in ornithology and evolution that has seen him hailed as one of the world's greatest biologists. Now in his ninety-eighth year, Mayr has published two major works that are the culmination of his lifelong scientific career. The Birds of Northern Melanesia (written with Jared Diamond) provides a detailed picture of one of Mayr's principal fields of research—how birds develop into different species ('speciate') on island archipelagos. The second, What Evolution Is, concerns the other grand theme of his researches—the elucidation of evolutionary theory—here presented in a form accessible to the general reader.
Review, 3647 words
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