http://www.sermonaudio.com/newsimages/18701.jpg [SIZE=1]In a 2001 photo, evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr reflects inside his office at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. "I have worked hard all my life," he said at the time. Mayr died Thursday at the age of 100.[/SIZE]

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - Ernst Mayr, a Harvard University evolutionary biologist called “the Darwin of the 20th century,” has died, the school said Friday. He was 100.

A member of the Harvard faculty for more than half a century, Mayr was considered the world’s most eminent evolutionary biologist. He almost single-handedly made the origin of species diversity the central question of evolutionary biology that it is today, Harvard said.


In an interview with The Boston Globe before his 100th birthday last year, Mayr said he always had “tremendous curiosity” and balked at suggestions he stop working.


“People say to me, ‘Why don’t you retire?’ I say, ‘My God, why should I retire? I enjoy what I’m doing,”’ he told the Globe.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6914624/