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One can ask this question also in different terms. For instance, which books have had the greatest impact on current thinking? Inevitably, the Bible would have to be mentioned in the first place. Up to 1989, when the bankruptcy of Marxism was declared, Karl Marx’s Das Kapital would clearly have been in second place, and it is still the dominating influence in many parts of the world. However, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) must surely be mentioned in the next place. I hope to be able to show that this position is justified not only because Darwin more...

Ernst Mayr, a biologist who expanded upon Darwin's theory of evolution, died on February 3 at the age of 100. While he also earned acclaim as an ornithologist, naturalist, and historian of biology during his eight-decade career, Mayr will be best remembered as a champion of evolutionary theory.Mayr's major contribution came in 1942, when his book Systematics and the Origin of Species was published. Here, Mayr laid one of the cornerstones of the then new synthetic theory of evolution, which unified Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection with Gregor Mendel's theory of heredity. One of the shortcomings of...