Feb. 4 (Bloomberg) - Ernst Mayr, who helped develop the ``evolutionary synthesis'' that fused Charles Darwin's theories with the science of genetics, died. He was 100.
Mayr was called the ``greatest living evolutionary biologist'' by Stephen Jay Gould, his late colleague at Harvard University. He died yesterday at a retirement community in Bedford, Massachusetts, after a brief illness, the school said in a statement on its Web site.
During an eight-decade career that began the year after John Scopes was tried in Tennessee for teaching evolution, Mayr helped refine the definition of a species and explain how new species developed.
Mayr was the last survivor of a group of researchers who between 1920 and 1950 advanced Darwin's work on how life evolved by incorporating a genetic understanding of heredity.
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