To summarize from Francis Dov Por's "The Road to the International Society of Zoological Sciences" "Zoology ... was among the very first disciplines to build an
international organization. Congresses of Zoology started in 1889 on the initiative of the
Société zoologique de France on the occasion of the
International Exposition in Paris. Congresses were then held at regular intervals and attendance increased from congress to congress, from a few tens in Paris and in Moscow to 700 in
Budapest in 1927. The London Congress set a target of 1000 and in Washington the number reached 2500. The Congresses were also growing in complexity, resulting in part because of the emerging
specialization of different fields of zoology. In London in 1958 there were eight to nine daily parallel sessions. In Washington an attempt was made to organize
symposia instead and there were no less than 29: the problem of unifying subjects became more important than the numbers of participants. The Washington Congress decided that the Board of the Division of Zoology of the newly founded
IUBS, would assume in the future the role of the 'Comite Permanent' and would be responsible for ensuring the continuity of Zoological Congresses. This did not work and the new International Congresses of Systematic and Evolutionary Biology (ICSEB) took over the role of the Zoological Congresses. A gallant effort was made in 1972 by
Vaissiere and French colleagues to convene a XVII International Congress of Zoology in
Monte Carlo. However, attendance was poor and the proceedings were never published. A long hiatus then began. An international focus became the problem of
vanishing species. Instead, what followed in the next two decades was the vanishing of zoology from the international academic agenda. The names of university departments and research centers were rapidly changed in order to avoid use of the word 'zoology'. With the aid of
modern communications and technology a reunification of the fractured specialties of zoology became possible. The concept of an integrative zoology, synthesizing data and results ranging from
molecular biology to
behavior, gained wide acceptance. The XVIII International Congress of Zoology was held in
Athens in Greece in August 2000. The symposium program of the Congress presented a cross-zoological picture of the many levels of zoological inquiry, both horizontal and vertical. Attendance in Athens was far from the incommunicable thousands in the last congresses, but was considered by all as an unmitigated success. Subsequently, the IUBS approved the (re)formation of an international zoological body (the ISZS) as proposed by Zhibin Zhang, John Buckeridge and Francis Dov Por in Beijing in 2004, and an executive committee was elected and charged with organizing International Congresses of Zoology and providing a global voice for zoologists." == Structure ==