Ornithology, Evolution, and Philosophy 123

Philosophy of Biology 367
(3) Purposive behavior in thinking organisms; widespread in mammals and birds
(when, e.g., jays bury acorns and return later to these caches).
(4) [Adapted features: Mayr thinks that the word teleological would not seem
appropriate for phenomena that do not involve movements, like adapted features.]
(5) Cosmic teleology: Change in the world was assumed to be due to an inner force
or tendency toward progress and to ever-greater perfection (finalism). Modern
science refuted cosmic teleology during the first half of the 20th century. The
seemingly upward trend in organic evolution is explained by natural selection
that favors the rise of ever better-adapted species (Darwin). Whether this
upwardtrendisprogressisstillcontroversial.
Reductionism and Emergence
The analysis of biological phenomena in terms of chemical and physical laws is
called reduction. Mayr (1982d, 2004a) distinguished three categories of reductionism:
(1) Constitutive reductionism asserts that the material composition of organisms
is exactly the same as that found in the inorganic world. This, of course, is
accepted by modern biologists, none of whom is a vitalist.
(2) Explanatory reductionism claims that one cannot understand a whole until
one has dissected it into its smallest components at the lowest level of integration.
Biologists, however, know that dealing with the separated components
of a complex biological system yields no information about their interactions
(the whole is more than the sum of its parts). Emergent properties often appear
in the upper levels of complex biological systems (“emergence”).
(3) Theory reductionism postulates that the theories and generalizations formulated
in biology are only special cases of theories and laws formulated in the
physical sciences, in other words biological theories can be “reduced” to physical
theories. It is only in functional biology of proximate causations that theory
reduction is occasionally feasible, but no principle of evolutionary biology of
ultimate causation can ever be reduced to the laws of physics or chemistry.
Mayr concluded his discussions stating that reductionism can be ignored in the
construction of any philosophy of biology, at least in his rather restricted meaning
of this concept. Note here Mayr’s distinction between Explanatory Reductionism
and Analysis mentioned above (p. 365).
In a letter to the journal Nature, Mayr (1988b) objected to the claims of Steven
Weinberg that the SSC, the Superconducting Supercollider, would provide a much
greater understanding of the universe. Reduction into smaller and smaller parts is
a form of analysis, but it very rarely sheds much light on the nature of the higher
level systems (with which Weinberg agreed). Yet he still believed that a further
understanding of the nature of the atomic forces would be contributing to an
understanding of the deepest riddles of the universe. Mayr rejected this claim