Allopatric Speciation and Vicariance

Abstract

In evolutionary biology in the 20th century few intellectual figures stand out like Ernst Mayr. His contributions are so numerous that it would be impossible to present them in this book’s limited format. However, chief among them was certainly his dogged devotion as a tireless advocate for the prevalence, in fact, the near universality, of the role of geographic isolation in speciation. He has numerous publications demonstrating the phenomenon of geographical speciation that predate his Systematics and the Origin of Species (Mayr, 1942), which is one of the three great documents of the evolutionary synthesis, but that book stands alone as a remarkably clear description of the phenomenon and its relevance to evolutionary biology.