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312 9 Ernst Mayr—the Man
person and very much concerned in the integration of biology. He felt strongly
that the old divisions into zoology, botany, and psychology and bio-chemistry,
etc., had lost most of their usefulness; and he was in part responsible for the new
classification of the subdivisions of biology subsequently adopted by the National
Science Foundation.”
A conference, “Concepts of Biology” organized by the Biology Council, was
held at Lee, Massachusetts, in October 1955. Paul Weiss wrote in the “Foreword” to
the conference proceedings (edited by R.W. Gerard): “Concepts are the structural
elements of the growing body of knowledge. […] The following conference report
centers on the question of whether present-day biology is paying too little attention
to its conceptual maturation and, if so, why.” Ernst Mayr’s active participation in
the discussions during this conference is documented in the condensed and transcribed
proceedings (Mayr 1958n). Here he spoke about alpha, beta, and gamma
taxonomy (already mentioned in Mayr et al. 1953a: 19), on proximate and ultimate
causes in almost any natural phenomenon, and about the increasing significance
of time (history) as one moves up the levels of integration. A species, its adaptation,
its structure, its behavior are understandable almost entirely in terms of its evolutionary
history. He emphasized also that all biological phenomena are basically
population phenomena, whereas the older philosophies were all typological, going
back to Plato’s eidos, the proper thing: “I believe that this gradual displacement
of typological thinking by population thinking in the last [19th] century has been
one of the most profound intellectual and conceptual revolutions in biology” (see
here p. 362). The Biology Council was active between January 1954 and October
1956, when it held its last meeting. It formally suspended operations in June 1957
(Appel 2000: 127).
The 1960s were the period when molecular biology achieved primacy among the
biological sciences, with numerous consequences. Two of them were particularly
troublesome: The rather low support of organismic biology, particularly compared
to the lavish support of the physical sciences, and the relatively low ranking of
biological disciplines. But owing to the drastic changes in biology in the preceding
40–50 years nobody any longer had a good grasp what biology really was. For
instance, the biochemists located in chemistry departments, were usually extreme
Cartesians and not open for organismic biology.
At this point biochemist Philip Handler (1917–1981) of the National Academy
of Sciences in Washington and Chairman of the Committee on Research in the Life
Sciences, decided to undertake a survey of the status of Biology among the sciences.
This Committee was appointed in 1966. It had a very difficult assignment owing
to the heterogeneity of life sciences. In order to have complete coverage 22 panels
were established, each responsible for a particular field of biology. The original
list of panels was developed by cellular-molecular biologists and had four panels
for molecular biology but was badly deficient for organismic biology. Mayr fought
hard for the addition of new panels dealing with the biology of whole organisms
and was in part successful. The creation of a panel on biodiversity was a special
victory for him.