Another great one gone -- Ernst Mayr. Thanks for spending a century with us, sir.

Ernst Mayr, 100; Biologist Explained Species Shifts in Darwin's Theory of Evolution

By Thomas H. Maugh II, Times Staff Writer

Ernst Mayr, the Harvard biologist who took the sweeping evolutionary claims of Charles Darwin and showed how the complex process actually works, died Thursday at a retirement community in Bedford, Mass., after a short illness. He was 100.

Mayr created the first working definition of what a species is and showed how genetics and population movements combined to create new species, an intellectual process known as evolutionary synthesis, which biologist Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard termed 'one of the half-dozen major scientific achievements of our century.'"

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