| | In my quest to find some relevant quotes from Ernst Mayr on why species don't have essences I purchased his last work (he died in 2006 at 101) and wrote the following review which I have already posted to amazon. I would appreciate any feedback on the review itself.
What Makes Biology Unique? Considerations on the Autonomy of a Science
by Ernst Mayr
The Last, but not Best, Work of a Great Mind,
I wish to preface my review, which is generally critical of this last of Ernst Mayr's works, with the statement that as a biologist, systematist, and historian and philosopher of biology, the late centigenarian has always had my greatest intellectual respect. His "Growth of Biological Thought" is an excellent history of the subject, his "Toward a New Philosophy of Biology" is both biologically and scientifically rigorous and both works deserve long lives in print. As with his mature publications, but unlike some of the works of his final decade, they are accessible to the amateur without suffering the faults of 'popularizers'. They represent seminal yet what is now consensus thought in their fields. Unlike the valuable but controversialist works of Gould, Sagan, and Dawkins, they continue to influence not only the thoughtful layman, but also the quiet scholar and the conscientious academic. Unfortunately, this title, for various reasons, chief among which is likely the age of its author at publication, does not live up to the standards of his works from the 1940's until the late 1980's. Out of generosity, I have listed given this title a rating of three stars out of five. Were a more nuanced system available, two and a half stars would be more just.
Before my analysis, a brief description. The hardcover edition of 2004, xiii and 232 pp, including index, consists of 12 chapters, each basically a stand-alone essay, with the first ten addressing the subject mater of the title, and the last two, "The Origin of Humans" and "Are We Alone in this Vast Universe?" added on to what the author himself reflects in the preface will be his last work. All except chapters 1, 4, 6, and 10 are revised from previous publication. There are no illustrations, diagrams, maps or any other graphic additions to the text. Except for the glaring misspelling of the names of J. B. S. Haldane and Jared Diamond on the first page of the "Acknowledgments" and the obvious error on p 215 that "The Hominid lineage originated 300 million years after the origin of life" (which is either off by several billion years, or meant to refer to the emergence of vertebrates on dry land) the text is mercifully free of typographical or other production mistakes.
The chapter titles from one to ten as given in the Contents are: Science and sciences, The autonomy of biology, Teleology, Analysis or reductionism? Teleology, Darwin's influence on modern thought, Darwin's five theories of evolution, Maturation of Darwinism, Selection, Do Thomas Kuhn's scientific revolutions take place? and Another look at the species problem.
Some brief comments, and then some critical comments on selected chapters. Again, the major flaw of this work is the results of it being what the author himself began in his nineties and admitted was his final book. Unlike "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory" Stephen Jay Gould's prolix 1454 pp 'ultimum opus' this work errs on the side of brevity and exclusion rather than an uncritical inclusion of the author's every desperate last thought. Too often we read Mayr saying that he will either omit or not repeat arguments he has made elsewhere and will refer us to works by himself and others for crucial arguments. This tendency has the unfortunate effect of making the better chapters of his work incomplete outlines of his total thought. Since most of that thought is elsewhere available, the reader may wish he had purchased those publications instead, many of which are still either in print or readily available. Also, while it would be unfair to criticize this great man of ignoring the state of affairs in biological thought into his ninth and tenth decades, it is obvious to the close and current student of biology that, as in his otherwise valuable and unobjectionable "What Evolution Is" little new theoretical thought and cutting edge science is either integrated or addressed.
Of particular value, and the reason for which I gave the book three, rather than only two stars, are the following chapters. In "the autonomy of biology" Mayr addresses the fact that while the physical sciences which deal with subjects such as physical constants and chemical substances which do not vary in time, and thus admit of what he admits are properly characterized as laws, he here says that for the most part biology is contingent, historical, and rather than law-governed, it is "concept" oriented. Concepts, rather than laws, admit more easily of exceptions. As with the Neogrammarians, we might object that every "exception" demands its own rule. But his point is well-taken. He also criticizes the "determinism" of physicists or "physicalists" (for which some, if not most, current theoretical physicists might find sympathy) but he means here not quantum fluctuations or other forms of unpredictability but rather that in biology results are contingent and that such things as which of a pair of chromosomes goes into which cell during the reduction phase of gametogenisis is not "determined" by any higher principle. He is not saying that such events are physically undetermined, but that they are undetermined so far as the results are concerned. The is a very weak form of anti-determinism, yet again is also a point well taken.
In "analysis or reduction, " perhaps the best chapter of the book, he cogently explains that while reductionists claim that all phenomena are best understood by being described at the lowest level (i.e., smallest possible scale) of description, and that all higher level "laws" such as the putative laws of genetics and presumably psychology can and should be reformulated in terms of lower level laws, he correctly points out that not only has every attempt to do this failed, it is also ridiculous and doomed to failure. He gives Huxley's example of the obvious fact that the wetness of water cannot be reduced to the properties on their own of hydrogen and oxygen which are gasses. He explains that one must accept the validity of "emergent" properties which depend upon the organization (read form) of more complex entities rather that from the mere additive properties of their constituents (read substance). He claims, quite plausibly, that not only are emergent properties "true novelties" they are even more strongly "unpredictable" in principle. He explains that analysis, rather than reduction, is and always has been the proper term for the proper methodological procedure of the sciences. He gives the example of a hammer, and asks beyond describing a hammer as a useful combination of a striking weight and a handle, what is the purpose of analyzing the microscopic or molecular structure of the handle itself? Indeed, beyond specifying that as a "handle" it needs to be made of some strong and preferably light-weight material, but can be made of any such suitable material, what is gained then in the understanding of a hammer as a hammer by describing the cellular structure of wood? Likewise, he asks what use anyone could make toward guessing the function of a kidney by being given a list of the molecules comprising one? Description below a certain level does not only result in diminishing returns, it is perverse and positively unhelpful. Analysis is a description which proceeds to the lowest meaningful level, and no further. Reduction, he says, is a term which should be dropped from the canon of the sciences. He argues that holism is essential to biology and that the anti-reductionist "opponent" of the proponents of reductionism has never been more that a skeptical non-reductionist mistreated as a straw man. Most convincingly, he asks what can any lower level of description such as particle physics or chemistry have to tell us about such meaningful (at their level) biological concepts such as "territory, speciation, female choice, founder principle, imprinting, meiosis, competition, courtship and struggle for existence [?]"
In other chapters, such as "teleology" he gives a clear and non-controversial explanation that while goal-oriented action does occur as a result of natural selection, it is neither a cosmic orthogenetic principle nor based on any "occult vis vitalis." In "Darwin's influence on modern thought" he argues that much more so than relativity and particle physics, Darwinism, by making theistic explanation of the origin of species unnecessary, has had a much more profound effect on all educated Western thinkers except for those with "religious commitments." (He overreaches in ascribing bilical literalism to "all" orthodox Christian sects before Darwin. He perhaps is ignorant of the medieval Catholic scholastic teaching that books must do not reveal themselves, but must be interpreted.) In Darwin's five theories of evolution, he explains that Darwin originated many separate and equally important theories such as 'common descent' and 'natural selection' which each count on their own as vital discoveries and that some ideas of his such as sexual selection took until as late as the 1970's to be widely understood and accepted, while, at least among scientists, 'common descent' was accepted without controversy and almost immediately. In "do Thomas Kuhn's scientific revolutions take place?" he explains that at least in its strong form, and at least for biology, Kuhn's famous "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" makes overly broad generalizations which are false if applied to biology. In this, as in many other circumstances, he refrains from criticizing what he sees as "physicalist" pre-occupations (saying that Kuhn was, after all, a physicist) when the reader might even have agreed with a broader attack on such theories for factual, philosophical and epistemological reasons. But when discussing the effects of taxonomical concepts on biology and of biological discoveries on taxonomy he remains strangely silent regarding the currently ascendant Hennigian cladistics. He has been cogently critical of cladistics elsewhere when it is moved from its proper place as a methodological tool to an overarching ideology such as it is today. One gets the impression he did not want to bite off more than he could finish chewing, and I would have loved to hear his Onithologist's criticism of those who reduce all amniotes to either reptilians or mammalians, with birds being reduced to reptilians, (indeed, maniraptorians) while the scale covered egg-laying Dimetrodon is promoted to a mammalian. No such nonsense would have been made had the Dimetrodon been described by an alien visitor before the mammals evolved and the trditional dinosaurs went extinct. Only with the 'forethought' of ideological hindsight do we make that distinction about the Dimetrodon, not on its merits during its time, but perhaps on a sense of our own.
In "another look at the species problem" which addressed the differences between asexual species, sexual species, and typological species, as well as taxonomical species and natural kinds, he overburdens what should be a clear discussion of the difference between the special status of a sexually reproducing species as an entity of a unique nature in biology (the nexus where evolution actually occurs) and other levels of taxonomy such as the genus or the phylum with confusing jargon and says much less eloquently and fully what he had said much better decades before. Higher taxa are basically classificatory tools which are to some extent artifacts of the classifier's tendencies to lump and split. How can one compare whether genera among the ants, and genera among the turtles are truly of the same ontological rank? The species, which, as an isolated but interbreeding population, is defined not on the basis of perceived similarity or typology, but on the empirically verifiable presence or absence of interbreeding and of isolating mechanisms, is of the same ontological rank wherever identified. Indeed, many biologists and philosophers of biology would refer to species as particulars, not as kinds. As particulars, they do not admit of being treated as "platonic classes." They are not static groups with essences, which cannot evolve except by "saltum facere" They are variable populations identified by the sole criterion of interbreeding. Their nature changes in time, while the dead objects of the classifier lie pinned and encased, if not in museums, then in fossil strata. But all Mayr wishes to say here remains a confusing jumble. He resorts to confusing formulations and acronyms. He gives few examples, except for the enlightening Paramecium aurelia, which while on typological grounds had been thought to be one species, has on deeper inspection been shown to be 14 different sibling or "crypto" species. Likewise, animals which to all appearances should be "classified" as multiple kinds end up being shown to interbreed, producing a polytypic species where many individual monotypic species might have existed. As in other chapters, he addresses only the newest objections, and refers the reader elsewhere for better formulations and previously made arguments.
Finally, a brief comment on the last two chapters. In "the origin of humans" Mayr makes a few interesting points, implying apparently that human hairlessness may be a by-product of the subcutaneous baby-fat of humans which is not found in the more developed babies of other great apes who, with their smaller brains, are relatively more mature at birth. He comments that he rejected the proliferation of hominid genera ideological grounds long before Java Man and Sinanthropus were demoted from their own genera to the level of conspecific variants of Homo erectus. He remarks that Sahelanthropus tchadensis is a fossil to watch out for, perhaps a link between the chimps and man. But from his description of it as having brow ridges that would do a gorilla proud, one wonder why he describes it as a possible link between chimps and Australopithecines, when it would be less unchronological to describe it as a possible link between or sister to all the African apes, including man.
And last, and most disappointing to me, was his chapter on the foolishness of the SETI program. While his conclusion that money spent on SETI, which he described as amounting to the hundreds of millions, would likely never be rewarded by an unlikely radio response, can hardly be denied simply given the vast distances of space (which he did not mention) and the brief historical period for which man has had an "electronic" civilization, he makes objections which seem more politically than scientifically motivated. He asks whether, if intelligence were such a good thing, why it had not evolved many times on Earth, given the "rudimentary" intelligence of parrots, ravens, elephants, primates, carnivores, and dolphins. He does not consider that since biology is indeed historical, there had to be, like the first flying insect, the first pterodactyl, the first bird, the first bat, some pioneer. Given the totality with which we have wiped out all but the most remotely cloistered of our relatives, the few surviving great apes, all of which face almost immediate extinction in the wild, and which represent at a modest count only some twentieth, if not one hundredth of all the diversity among the hominids and great apes since our origin, why would we not also wipe out, or at least prevent the rise of dominance of other "intelligences." Is not the niche full? Should we reach other planets, will we not then begin our own great evolutionary radiation? And is it not conceptual language-mediated intelligence which is currently unique, while the trend toward intelligence itself is plain to see, at least among the mammals, which have trended steadily higher in their encephalization quotient since the end of the Cretaceous? If man were to go extinct, yet the other "rudimentary" intelligences he listed to live on, is there a foregone reason to argue that some distant descendant of the meerkat or the elephant might not attain the conceptual faculty? He argues that extraterrestrial intelligences might be auditory, or even "olfactory" (I admit, this one is beyond even my imagination) but that then they would never develop the electronic culture necessary to discover radio. As if radio were visible to our senses, or as if the deaf might never discover science. Again, if one acknowledges the conceptual nature of our thought and culture, what makes it obvious a priori that alien minds, whatever their sense modality, might not make the same essentially conceptual discoveries that we have? The arguments he makes are weak and perfunctory. And why would the money (whose money?) spent on SETI be better spent on protecting or cataloguing vanishing biodiversity, as if such research money cannot be privately raised, and as if human endeavors are a zero-sum game? SETI may be doomed. Perhaps we are the first. Perhaps they are too far away in space and time. But why not look at SETI as "pure research" or bemoan the amount of money spent on scented air-refresheners or body-piercings, or homeland security pork-barrel for dubious targets in Wyoming and Nebraska or to build unwanted bridges to nowhere in Alaska? Fatuitously, Mayr asks if "there is intelligent life on Earth?" These are not the most propitious words for the last chapter of the last book of a great mind.
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