3 The New York Years (1931–1953)

11.0 History and Philosophy of Biology—Mayr’s Third Synthesis 339
Mayr rejected the view of the present being the inevitable outcome of a triumphant
historical process. The scientific process obeys the principles of Darwinian
variational evolution without teleological components. In his interpretation,
the process of “natural selection” applies to the evolution of scientific concepts,
because there is an interplay between variation and selection in the history
of ideas as it is in organic nature.
While histories of several individual biological disciplines were available, no
developmental historiography existed for biology as a whole. To fill this gap in the
literature was the object of Mayr’s historical handbook, The Growth of Biological
Thought (1982d), which covers evolutionary biology in the first volume, but also
functional biology in the form of genetics. A second volume was to cover physiology
and other functional areas of biology, but did not appear (see below). Mayr
emphasized that the treatment of the development of concepts dominating modern
biology does not necessitate exploring every temporary development or blind
alley that left no impact on the subsequent history of biology. He was particularly
interested in the history of scientific problems and their solutions, in tracing an
idea, concept or controversy back to its sources devoting sufficient attention to
the general context of different time levels to cast additional light on the varying
surrounding situations. Mayr began his work on the history of biology from the
perspective of someone who had been very active in shaping that history. Some
historians have faulted this approach to history, even labeling it as “whiggish,”
a criticism that was rejected vehemently by Mayr (1990c) from his personal point
of view. He defended and summarized his historical methods as follows:
– Developmental historiography requires an understanding of the present, but
each time period is also studied in its own merits;
– Errors of earlier authors should be pointed out as in any scientific discussion
and evaluation of their work is permitted;
– Historians of ideas must be selective in order to follow the history of particular
ideas or concepts. They must also break complex systems into their components;
– Developmental historiography must be historical or “vertical” rather than “horizontal,”
the latter describing the events of only a single moment of time or very
narrow time period.
Since the professionalization of the history of science during the mid-20th
century, there are “historical” historians (mostly trained in the humanities or social
sciences) and “scientific” historians (trained in the natural sciences, specifically
in the life sciences in our case). The former state that the only legitimate way
of doing historiography is that of describing each period in great detail, trying
to present the total picture including the social and economic situation, whereas
the “scientific” historiographer is interested in the development of ideas, from
their origin through all their permutations up to the present day. As Mayr (1990c)
stated, if the term “whiggishness” is used to describe the nature of historical work,
it should be applied only to genuine cases of whiggishness sensu Butterfield (1931)
and not to developmental historiography which certainly counts as genuine history.