3 The New York Years (1931–1953)

11
History and Philosophy of Biology—
Mayr’s Third Synthesis
During the last quarter of his life, Ernst Mayr contributed importantly to the fields
of history and philosophy of biology based on his previous work in systematic
and evolutionary biology. The titles of his major books documenting these contributions
are The Growth of Biological Thought (1982d), Toward a New Philosophy
of Biology. Observations of an Evolutionist (1988e), This is Biology. The Science
of the Living World (1997b), and What Makes Biology Unique? Considerations on
the Autonomy of a Scientific Discipline (2004a). With these accomplishments he
became a foremost historian of biology and one of the leaders of a modern philosophy
of biology. According to Mayr in biological science, especially evolutionary
biology, most major progress is made by the introduction of new concepts like
the concepts of natural selection, geographical variation and isolating mechanisms
rather than new facts or discoveries. This illustrated for him that biology
differs in several important ways from the physical sciences. In biology probabilistic
generalizations, “rules” and concepts exist rather than laws as in the physical
sciences which are dominated by essentialistic philosophy. In biology population
thinking is all-important emphasizing the uniqueness of individuals. Other characteristics
of living organisms are complexity and organization, the possession of
a genetic program, and their historical nature. Since the late 19th century biology,
for Mayr, struggled to become autonomous and independent from the physicalist
approaches.
History of science explores the history of scientific problems and their solutions
as well as the controversies in current biology. According to Mayr it functions as
a tool for concept analysis and clarification of the structure of biology. He saw
the development of science as an increasing emancipation of scientific knowledge
from religious, philosophical and other ideological beliefs. The close connections
between the past and the present are one of the main characteristics of Mayr’s
historical approach (Junker 1995, 1996). As an evolutionary biologist he applied
Darwinian principles to the study of developmental historiography, the study of
those aspects of the past that help our understanding of the science of the present.
Mayr’s approach thus differed in many ways from lexicographic, chronological,
biographical or sociological histories of science; he (Mayr 1990c) did not see his
analysis of biology as Whig history as others had claimed. When he read, in 1958,
Arthur Lovejoy’s Chain of Being (1936), he “suddenly saw a theme for how to deal
with history that goes way beyond being descriptive, namely that in the history of
science there are certain themes, concepts, problems, ideas, and they all have an
evolution just exactly like organisms have an evolution” (1994m: 373).