Review: The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance , by Ernst Mayr

Abstract

2~ The place of biology in the sciences and its conceptual structure IT IS QUITE impossible to try to understand the development of any particular concept or problem in the history of biology unless one has first answered for oneself these questions: What is science? What is the place of biology among the sciences? And what is the conceptual structure of biology? Entirely misleading answers have been given to all three of these questions, particularly by philosophers and other nonbiologists, and this has greatly impeded an understanding of the growth of biological thought. To try to answer these basic questions correctly, then, is the first task of my analysis. It will provide a secure basis for the study of the history of specific concepts. THE NATURE OF SCIENCE From the earliest times on man has asked questions about the origin and the meaning of the world and frequently about its purpose. His tentative answers can be found in the myths characteristic of every culture, even the most primitive ones. He has advanced beyond these simple beginnings in two rather different directions. In one his ideas became formalized in religions, which proclaimed a set of dogmas, usually based on revelation. The Western world, for instance, at the end of the Middle Ages was completely dominated by an implicit trust in the teachings of the Bible, and beyond that, by a universal belief in the supernatural. Philosophy, and later science, is the alternative way of dealing with the mysteries of the world, although science was not strictly separated from religion in its early history. Science confronts these mysteries with questions, with doubts, with curiosity, and with ex-planatory endeavors, thus with a rather different attitude from religion. The pre-Socratic (Ionian) philosophers initiated this dif-ferent approach by searching for "natural" explanations, in terms of observable forces of nature, like fire, water, and air (see Chap-