3 The New York Years (1931–1953)

Philosophy of Biology 365
were not new—for example, ornithologists had previously distinguished between
proximate and ultimate causations–these aspects were articulated more forcefully
than in the earlier literature. Simpson (1963) used Mayr’s article and also made
a vigorous plea for the recognition of the fact that the principles of the physical
sciences are simply inadequate for the explanation of the phenomena of life.
In his “Introduction” to a facsimile of the first edition of Darwin’s Origin (1959)
Mayr (1964l) pointed out that Darwin had been not only an extraordinary scientist
but also a great philosopher. His refutation of creationism, teleology, essentialism,
and deterministic physicalism were fundamental contributions to a philosophy of
biology, as mentioned above (p. 348). During the AAAS meeting in December 1965
Mayr strongly urged the development of a philosophy of biology in a deliberately
provocative manner (not published until 1969g).
Mayr’s continuing preoccupation with the methodology and conceptual framework
of biology is reflected in two further articles (1969c,d) where he discussed
the genetic program which controls the development of individual organisms, but
does not, as such, participate in the development. This machinery of translating
the genetic program may be considered a general theory of development. Development
is nothing but the decoding or translation of the genetic program of the
zygote interacting with the environment in the making and subsequent life of
the phenotype, the individual. Functional phenomena can be dissected into their
physical-chemical components, but their integration to achieve novel insights at
a higher level or organization is mostly unsuccessful. Reductionism as a philosophical
approach, either to lower levels of organisms or to the physical sciences,
is totally unimportant for a study of nearly all evolutionary problems. When Mayr
objected to reductionism to the lower levels of organization, he did so in the general
philosophical approach and not as the useful method of analysis which he termed
simply as “analysis.” Unless one makes this distinction between philosophical reductionism
and analysis (usually also called simply reduction in the philosophy),
Mayr’s position can be misunderstood.
In a series of publications (1982d, 1985c), Mayr continued to discuss the various
ways in which biology differs from the physical sciences arguing for an extension
of the philosophy of science to embrace biology as an independent branch of the
sciences at least equal to physics and chemistry. The experiment is not the only
method of science—observation, comparison, and the construction of historical
narratives are also legitimate as are the important methods in the physical sciences
(astronomy, geology, oceanography, meteorology) and in the biological sciences
(comparative anatomy, systematics, evolutionary biology, biogeography, ecology,
ethology). Experiment and observation have both their place in the sciences. Of
course, all processes in living organisms are consistent with the laws of physics
and chemistry. Special aspects of the world of life are uniqueness and variability,
reproduction, metabolism, the possession of a genetic program, historical nature,
and natural selection. In retrospect every biological process or behavior pattern
can be explained causally, but in reality looking forward there are always several
possibilities. For Mayr causality is an a-posteriori process (1985c: 49). He was explicit
in his criticism of logical positivism, essentialism, physicalism, and vitalism.