3 The New York Years (1931–1953)

368 11 History and Philosophy of Biology—Mayr’s Third Synthesis
and said that whatever would be found on the components of the atomic nucleus
would not shed any light on the so-called middle world (mesocosmos), the world
between the atom and the solar system. At the same time this article recorded
Mayr’s objection to the expenditures which the White House was willing to make
for the study of physicists. The SSC would have probably cost ten billion dollars
and the small result that was expected, in Mayr’s opinion, did not justify this large
sum. His objection may have contributed to the later disapproval of this project
by the U.S. Congress. The same campaign against excessive government spending
led Mayr later to object to the project of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
(SETI), as mentioned below (p. 374).
The Roots of Dialectical Materialism
Mayr’s essay on the Rootsofdialecticalmaterialism(1997j) was written as a contribution
to a memorial festschrift of the Russian Marxist theoretician K. M. Zavadsky
who, during the 1960s, had asked the American historian of biology Mark Adams
whether Ernst Mayr was a Marxist (which he was not), because “his writings are
pure dialectical materialism.” This remark had puzzled Mayr ever since and he
began searching for the reasons of Zavadsky’s comment. Mayr’s essay (1997j) was
the result of that search which showed certain similarities between the thinking of
the naturalists and that of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx explaining Zavadsky’s
remark.
Dialectical materialism, a general philosophy of nature, was founded by Engels
andMarxinthelate19thcentury,inpartasaresultoftheirownthinkingandin
part based on the analogous thinking of the contemporary naturalists, especially
Darwin regarding evolutionary thoughts. Among the principles of this philosophy
are many with which Mayr had been familiar, since his youth, as principles of
natural history. He listed six of them:
(1) “The universe is in state of perpetual evolution. This, of course, had been
an axiom for every naturalist at least as far back as Darwin but as a general
thought going back to the age of Buffon.
(2) Inevitably all phenomena in the inanimate as well as the living world have
ahistoricalcomponent.
(3) Typological thinking (essentialism) fails to appreciate the variability of all
natural phenomena including the frequency of pluralism and the widespread
occurrence of heterogeneity.
(4) All processes and phenomena including the components of natural systems
are interconnected and act in many situations as wholes. Such holism or
organicism has been supported by naturalists since the middle of the 19th
century.
(5) Reductionism, therefore, is a misleading approach because it fails to represent
the ordered cohesion of interacting phenomena, particularly of parts of larger
systems. Feeling this way about reductionism I have for many years called
attention to the frequency of epistatic interactions among genes and to the