Ernst Mayr: Biologist-historian

Ernst Mayr's historical writings began in 1935 with his essay Bernard Altum and the territory theory and have continued up through his monumentalGrowth of Biological Thought (1982) and hisOne Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought (1991). Sweeping in their scope, forceful in their interpretation, enlisted on behalf of the clarification of modern concepts and of a broad view of biology, these writings provide both insights and challenges for the historian of biology. Mayr's general intellectual formation was guided by the GermanBildung ideal, with its emphasis on synthetic and comprehensive knowledge. His understanding of how to write history was inspired further by the example of the historian of ideas Arthur Lovejoy. Some strengths and limitations of this approach are explored here through attention to Mayr's treatment of the French biologist J.-B. Lamarck. It is contended that Mayr's contributions to the history of biology are not restricted to his own very substantial historical writings but also include his encouragement of other scholars, his development of an invaluable archive of scientific correspondence, and his insistence that historians who write about evolution and related subjects acquire an adequate understanding of the principles of Darwinian biology.This paper was originally delivered at the biennial meeting of the International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology, held in Brandeis in July 1993, in the special session organized by John Greene on Ernst Mayr's contributions to systematics, evolutionary theory, and the history and philosophy of biology. The paper is presented here with only slight modifications of the original, oral presentation. As indicated in the text, a full assessment of Mayr's historical work, including situating that work in the context of Mayr's other work and contemporary developments in the history of science, would require a much more extensive study than I have been able to undertake here.     

The proximate/ultimate distinction in the multiple careers of Ernst Mayr

Ernst Mayr's distinction between “ultimate” and “proximate” causes is justly considered a major contribution to philosophy of biology. But how did Mayr come to this “philosophical” distinction, and what role did it play in his earlier “scientific” work? I address these issues by dividing Mayr's work into three careers or phases: 1) Mayr the naturalist/researcher, 2) Mayr the representative of and spokesman for evolutionary biology and systematics, and more recently 3) Mayr the historian and philosopher of biology. If we want to understand the role of the proximate/ultimate distinction in Mayr's more recent career as a philosopher and historian, then it helps to consider hisearlier use of the distinction, in the course of his research, and in his promotion of the professions of evolutionary biology and systematics. I believe that this approach would also shed light on some other important “philosophical” positions that Mayr has defended, including the distinction between “essentialism: and “population thinking.”     

Reminiscences from the first curator of the whitney-rothschild collection

Dr Ernst Mayr has been one of the seminal figures of 20th century biology. His essential contributions were in the development of the Modern Synthesis in evolutionary biology. His landmark book Systematics and the Origin of Species, was published in 1942 and has long been acknowledged as one of the key foundations of 20th century evolutionary biology. In many subsequent articles and books on evolution and the history and philosophy of biology during the past half century, he has continued to be a key contributor of ideas and inspiration to successive generations of evolutionary biologists. In the first of two ‘Roots’ articles, he describes the early stages of his career and the serendipitous events that furthered it. This article was first presented as a talk, on October 27, 1993, at the 50 year Jubilee celebration of the founding of the Whitney wing, the ornithological section, of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. In next month's ‘Roots’ article, Dr Mayr will describe the events that led to the founding of the Society for the Study of Evolution in 1946, in St Louis, Missouri.     

On the origin of the typological/population distinction in Ernst Mayr’s changing views of species, 1942–1959

Ernst Mayr’s typological/population distinction is a conceptual thread that runs throughout much of his work in systematics, evolutionary biology, and the history and philosophy of biology. Mayr himself claims that typological thinking originated in the philosophy of Plato and that population thinking was first introduced by Charles Darwin and field naturalists. A more proximate origin of the typological/population thinking, however, is found in Mayr’s own work on species. This paper traces the antecedents of the typological/population distinction by detailing Mayr’s changing views of species between 1942 and 1955. During this period, Mayr struggles to refine the biological species concept in the face of tensions that exist between studying species locally and studying them as geographically distributed collections of variable populations. The typological/population distinction is first formulated in 1955, when Mayr generalizes from the type concept versus the population concept in taxonomy to typological versus population thinking in biology more generally. Mayr’s appeal to the more general distinction between typological and population thinking coincides with the waning status of natural history and evolutionary biology that occurs in the early 1950s and the distinction plays an important role in Mayr’s efforts to legitimate the natural historical sciences.     

Higher taxa: Reply to cartmill

Ian Tattersall is a curator emeritus at the American Museum of Natural History. He has worked on lemur systematics and ecology as well as paleoanthropology, where his special interest is in hominid diversity and cognitive evolution.     

The creation of the essentialism story: an exercise in metahistory

The essentialism story is a version of the history of biological classification that was fabricated between 1953 and 1968 by Ernst Mayr, who combined contributions from Arthur Cain and David Hull with his own grudge against Plato. It portrays pre-Darwinian taxonomists as caught in the grip of an ancient philosophy called essentialism, from which they were not released until Charles Darwin's 1859 Origin of Species. Mayr's motive was to promote the Modern Synthesis in opposition to the typology of idealist morphologists; demonizing Plato served this end. Arthur Cain's picture of Linnaeus as a follower of 'Aristotelian' (scholastic) logic was woven into the story, along with David Hull's application of Karl Popper's term, 'essentialism', which Mayr accepted in 1968 as a synonym for what he had called 'typological thinking'. Although Mayr also pointed out the importance of empiricism in the history of taxonomy, the essentialism story still dominates the secondary literature. The history of the first telling of the essentialism story exposes its scant basis in fact.     

Alfred Russel Wallace

Alfred Russel Wallace The British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913), well known as co‐discoverer of the “Darwinian” principle of natural selection, came from an ordinary background. Wallace left school aged 14 and never attended University. He became a land surveyor and studied, in his spare time, the works of the most famous naturalists of his age. After extensive expeditions (Amazon, 1848–1852; Southeast Asia, 1854–1862), Wallace spent the rest of his life in England as a free‐lance science writer. His contributions to systematics (he discovered/described many new species), evolutionary biology, zoogeography, anthropology and other branches of the live sciences are summarized in his 22 books and ca. 700 papers. Since Wallace became an adherent of spiritualism and mixed up supernatural phenomena with scientific facts in some of his later books, he remains a controversial figure in the history of the life sciences.     

Ernst Mayr as community architect: Launching the society for the study of evolution and the journalEvolution

Ernst Mayr's contributions to 20th century biology extend far beyond his defense of certain elements in evolutionary theory. At the center of mid-century efforts in American evolutionary studies to build large research communities, Mayr spearheaded campaigns to create a Society for the Study of Evolution and a dedicated journal,Evolution, in 1946. Begun to offset the prominence ofDrosophila biology and evolutionary genetics, these campaigns changed course repeatedly, as impediments appeared, tactics shifted, and compromises built a growing coalition of support. Preserved, however, were designs to balance the community and journal with careful equation of status and explicit partitioning of responsibilities within the working coalition. Choice terms such as cooperation and unity carried a strong political message. Mayr's editorship ofEvolution provides a superb example of these balancing efforts. The mid-century infrastructural activities described herein also represented aggressive attempts to leverage control across several layers of community. Leaders of these campaigns sought: (1) to promote evolutionary studies as a modernized research discipline and place it at the center of American biology, (2) to promote evolutionary studies within existing disciplines — e.g. systematics, genetics, and paleontology, (3) to foster certain research styles within evolutionary studies, and (4) to emphasize certain solutions to prominent research questions. Throughout, Mayr interjected his priorities, tactics and energy.     

Darwin: Origin and Evolution of an Exhibition

Two hundred years after his birth, Darwin, originated by the American Museum of Natural History in New York, is the most important exhibition about the English scientist ever organized for the general public. This traveling exhibition has appeared in many versions worldwide, and a study of the relationships between local developers of the various editions of the exhibition underlines how a scientific exhibition and, more generally, science communication can succeed in striking a good equilibrium between universal content and cultural determinants.     

Species: Beasts of burden

Ernst Mayr (1904–2005) was the twentieth century's most influential writer to wrestle with the species problem. 1 - 4 The following draws heavily on his work, albeit without presumptuously claiming to mirror his thinking or present any original ideas. As a personal meditation, I am thinking mostly of platyrrhines. Following Mayr, I adhere to what is commonly called the Biological Species Concept (BSC) as a way of thinking about a species in the real‐world biosphere as a taxon. I also hold to the idea that the Linnaean category called species has the same function as other categories: a linguistic tool for organizing and retrieving information about biodiversity while embodying evolutionary hypotheses. In other words, alpha taxonomy, the area of systematics that involves identifying, naming, and classifying species, is not purely an exercise in either biology or inventory because it involves communication as well. The burdensome work of the species category stems partly from tension created by the several purposes associated with the concept: the objective observation and examination of a fundamental biological phenomenon, the collection and interpretation of data in a selective context of relevance, and the intention to deploy scientific decisions as a form of communication within a dynamic but highly structured language system.     

The peregrination of Alcide d’Orbigny's Foraminifera Collection at the Museum of Natural History,Paris: From the creation of a Palaeontology chair to the advent of Micropalaeontology

Alcide d’Orbigny made his mark in the history of French Palaeontology by becoming, in 1853, the first holder of the chair of Palaeontology at the Museum of Natural History, Paris. His work on foraminifera made him one of the pioneers of Micropalaeontology. Today, his original collection of foraminifera, bought by the Museum after his death, represents one of the most prestigious collections of the institution. However, for more than a century, it had been relegated to the reserves and to the good will of a few enthusiasts, while the priority of research study was given to the large vertebrate fossils. It survived the conflicts that affected the Palaeontology department, and was moved in response to construction works, wars and natural accidents such as the great flood of 1910. These different events, combined with inappropriate storage conditions, probably caused the fragility of the specimens. In order to better understand this phenomenon, known as Byne's decay, research has been undertaken to reconstruct the various storage points of the collection from its acquisition to the present day. This article aims to demonstrate the close link between the Foraminifera Collection and the history of the chair of Palaeontology, through evidence drawn from the archives of the Palaeontology laboratory and the Museum of Natural History.     

双尖齿兽科(Didymoconidae)一新种及有关地点地层问题

本文记述了内蒙古二连盆地“马捷茨营地”(Camp Margetts)地区中始新世阿山头组产出的一种古双尖齿兽:Archaeoryctes borealis sp. nov.。该种为中国北方及中亚一带已知双尖齿兽科中形态最为原始、出现时代最早的分子。它使中国南方早期的双尖齿兽科成员与北方较晚期的成员建立了某种关系。文中对与该种产出地点及地层有关的问题进行了讨论。     

Styles of scientific reasoning: Adolf Remane (1898–1976) and the German evolutionary synthesis

Adolf Remane is widely considered to have been one of the most influential German zoologists of the 20th Century, yet Ernst Mayr persistently characterized him as an idealistic morphologist, that is, a typologist unable to understand population genetics or indeed Darwinian theory. This stands in sharp contrast to Mayr's praise for Bernhard Rensch as one of the most important German contributors to the Modern Synthesis of evolutionary theory. Remane's style of scientific reasoning is analysed in his writings on microsystematics, ecology, comparative morphology and phylogenetics and found to be highly consistent throughout these varied fields of research, while differing fundamentally from the eminently statistical foundations of both population genetics and natural selection theory that were embraced by Mayr. A comparative analysis of Rensch's understanding of science in general, and biology in particular, shows him to share core values with Remane, both authors rooted in the Mandarin tradition of the German professoriate. Biographical and socio‐political factors appear to have influenced Mayr's contrasting perception of Remane and Rensch, one that would influence later biologists and historians of science.     

Ronald Brady and the cladists

Ronald Brady was the first philosopher to defend pattern cladistics as an independent scientific field. That independence was achieved through the decoupling of biological systematics from phylogenetics––that is, inferred evolutionary processes (e.g. character transformation). Brady saw parallels between biological systematics and Wolfgang von Goethe's Morphology, an empirical scientific field that incorporates human observation and perception to discover coherent morphological structures. Goethe's Morphology and pre-Darwinian systematics were independent from evolutionary narratives, a tradition that continued into the 20th Century through the work of biologists such as Agnes Arber. Most importantly, Brady provided the philosophical and historical foundations to an independent systematics by demonstrating the links between phenomenology, Goethe's Morphology and comparative biology.     

Mach's phenomenalism and the British reception of Mendelism

The assimilation of Mendel's paper into Britain took place in an Edwardian social context. This paper concentrates on the interplay of empirical and philosophical issues in this reception. A feature of the British reception of mendelism, not duplicated elsewhere, was the role of phenomenalist philosophies of science as developed by the physicist-mathematician and scientific methodologist Karl Pearson from the philosophical positions of Austrian physicist Ernst Mach and British mathematician William Clifford. Pearson's philosophy of science forms the background to his subsequent collaboration with the zoologist W.F.R. Weldon. In this collaborative work, Pearson developed powerful statistical techniques for analyzing Weldon's empirical data on organic variation. Pearson's statistical analysis of causation and his rejection of hidden entities and causes in the explanation of evolutionary change formed the philosophical component of this program. The arguments of Pearson and Weldon were first brought to bear against the pre-Mendel 'discontinuist' analyses of variation of William Bateson. The introduction of Mendel's paper into these empirical and methodological debates consequently resulted in mathematically sophisticated attacks on Mendel's claims by Pearson and Weldon. This paper summarizes this history and argues for the creative importance of this biometrical resistance to Mendelism.     

Ernst Mayr's 'ultimate/proximate' distinction reconsidered and reconstructed

It's been 41 years since the publication of Ernst Mayr's Cause and Effect in Biology wherein Mayr most clearly develops his version of the influential distinction between ultimate and proximate causes in biology. In critically assessing Mayr's essay I uncover false statements and red-herrings about biological explanation. Nevertheless, I argue to uphold an analogue of the ultimate/proximate distinction as it refers to two different kinds of explanations, one dynamical the other statistical.     

Proper names in twin worlds: Monophyly, paraphyly, and the world around us

This paper addresses the theoretical relevance of monophyletic, paraphyletic and polyphyletic groups under the paradigm of sophisticated scientific realism. The doctrine of metaphysical realism is introduced using the philosophy of Karl Popper as an example, which is then contrasted with scientific realism. A discussion of the nature of causal relations presents an account of counterfactual conditionals. The current state of art casts the theory of phylogenetic systematics in a stark contrast of classes (universals) and individuals (particulars). In practice, however, individuals piggyback on classes, or sets. Natural kinds are introduced in order to overcome this deep dichotomy. The theoretical relevance of natural kinds lies in their explanatory value, and that may change with changing context. It is for this reason that non-monophyletic groups can have explanatory value (their members can function as tokens of causally relevant kinds) within certain domains of evolutionary biology. Explanatory value is maximized by integration of the genealogical hierarchy of species and monophyletic taxa with other areas of evolutionary biology.     

Heterotopic Dissonance in the Museum Representation of Pacific Island Cultures

Two exhibits, the Margaret Mead Hall of Pacific Peoples at the American Museum of Natural History (1971) and Traveling the Pacific at the Field Museum of Natural History (1989), are compared. Foucault's concept of heterotopia is used to examine why, in spite of major recent changes in museum philosophy and technology, the subtexts of the two exhibits remain remarkably similar. Both confuse spatial distance with temporal flow, creating an incoherent framework of disjunctive orders.     

Two New Species of Interstitial Marine Triclads from the North American Pacific Coast, with Comments on Evolutionary Trends and Systematics in Tricladida (Turbellaria)

Holmquist, Ch. and Karling, T. G. (Section of Invertebrate Zoology, Swedish Museum of Natural History, Stockholm, Sweden.) Two new species of marine triclads from the North American Pacific coast, with comments on evolutionary trends and systematics in Tricladida (Turbellaria). Zool. Scripta 1(3–4): 175–184, 1972.–Two marine triclads, Oregoniplana opisthopora gen. et sp.n. and Pacificides psammophilus gen. et sp.n. are described from the Pacific coast of USA. They are inhabitants of sand in the surf zone. They are provisionally included in the family Procerodidae but their anatomy is aberrant in several respects; they elucidate some evolutionary trends as well as some unsatisfactory points in the systematics of the aquatic triclads.     

A pervasive denigration of natural history misconstrues how biodiversity inventories and taxonomy underpin scientific knowledge

Embracing comparative biology, natural history encompasses those sciences that discover, decipher and classify unique (idiographic) details of landscapes, and extinct and extant biodiversity. Intrinsic to these multifarious roles in expanding and consolidating research and knowledge, natural history endows keystone support to the veracity of law-like (nomothetic) generalizations in science. What science knows about the natural world is governed by an inherent function of idiographic discovery; characteristic of natural history, this relationship is exemplified wherever an idiographic discovery overturns established wisdom. This nature of natural history explicates why inventories are of such epistemological importance. Unfortunately, a Denigration of Natural History weakens contemporary science from within. It expresses in the prevalent, pervasive failure to appreciate this pivotal role of idiographic research: a widespread disrespect for how natural history undergirds scientific knowledge. Symptoms of this Denigration of Natural History present in negative impacts on scientific research and knowledge. One symptom is the failure to appreciate and support the inventory and monitoring of biodiversity. Another resides in failures of scientiometrics to quantify how taxonomic publications sustain and improve knowledge. Their relevance in contemporary science characteristically persists and grows; so the temporal eminence of these idiographic publications extends over decades. This is because they propagate a succession of derived scientific statements, findings and/or conclusions - inherently shorter-lived, nomothetic publications. Widespread neglect of natural science collections is equally pernicious, allied with disregard for epistemological functions of specimens, whose preservation maintains the veracity of knowledge. Last, but not least, the decline in taxonomic expertise weakens research capacity; there are insufficient skills to study organismal diversity in all of its intricacies. Beyond weakening research capacities and outputs across comparative biology, this Denigration of Natural History impacts on the integrity of knowledge itself, undermining progress and pedagogy throughout science. Unprecedented advances in knowledge are set to follow on consummate inventories of biodiversity, including the protists. These opportunities challenge us to survey biodiversity representatively—detailing the natural history of species. Research strategies cannot continue to ignore arguments for such an unprecedented investment in idiographic natural history. Idiographic shortcuts to general (nomothetic) insights simply do not exist. The biodiversity sciences face a stark choice. No matter how charismatic its portrayed species, an incomplete ‘Brochure of Life’ cannot match the scientific integrity of the ‘Encyclopedia of Life’.