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See F. Churchill, “Weismann's Continuity of the Germ-Plasm in Historical Perspective,” Freiburger Universitätsbl., Heft 87/88 (1985), 107–124. See also idem, “Weismann, Hydromedusae, and the Biogenetic Imperative: A Reconsideration,” in A History of Embryology, ed. T. J. Horder, J. A. Witkowski, and C. C. Wylie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 7–33.
T. H., Morgan, Embryology and Genetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934). See B. Ephrussi, “The Cytoplasm and Somatic Cell Variation,” J. Cell. Compar. Physiol., 52 (1958), 35–53; at p. 36 Ephrussi recalls a discussion he had with Morgan at Woods Hole in 1934 about this book: “I said I found the book very interesting, but I thought that the title was misleading because he did not try to bridge the gap between embryology and genetics as he had promised in the title. Morgan looked at me with a smile and said ‘You think the title is misleading! What is the title?’ ‘Embryology and Genetics,’ I said. ‘Well,’ he asked, ‘is not there some embryology and some genetics?” This passage was originally called to my attention by Jap Sapp, who discusses it interestingly at pp. 131–132 of Beyond the Gene: Cytoplasmic Inheritance and the Struggle for Authority in Genetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Earlier versions of the views expressed in Mayr's new essay may be found in chap. 2, “The Place of Biology in the Sciences and Its Conceptual Structure,” of Ernst, Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 21–82; and in idem, “How Biology Differs from the Physical Sciences,” in Evolution at a Crossroads: The New Biology and the New Philosophy of Science, ed. D. Depew and B. Weber (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 43–64. The former source offers a fuller account of Mayr's philosophy of biology than that found in Toward a New Philosophy of Biology. The new book, however, contains detailed conceptual analyses of the sort that, Mayr claims, do the real work in philosophy of biology.
See pp. 101–103, where Mayr argues that “the individual as a whole rather than each separate gene is the target of selection” (p. 101) and that this reflects “the primary importance of the individual” (p. 101).
This is the key to “population thinking,” which is characterized in various ways in the book, not all of them satisfactory. In this first essay, drawing on Lewontin, Mayr connects the concept of a biopopulation to the distinction between “transformational” and “variational” evolution. The former, modeled on ontogeny, pertains to those evolving systems which are either programmed to reach some end state on fated to do so by laws governing the system in question. The latter concerns the selection of unique (and, Mayr should have added, reproducing) individuals from a population of varied individuals. The variation among the individuals in such a population is the basis for Mayr's familiar attacks on “essentialism.”
Mayr distinguishes three principal sorts of evolution: saltational, transformational, and variational (p. 457). The latter is Darwin's distinctive contribution; it treats evolution as entirely opportunistic, operating on “variable populations of unique individuals” (p. 15).
There is no essentialist connotation in the use of “sort” here; the term is meant to capture the claim of variational theories of evolution that one starts with a stock of distinct entities in order for evolutionarily effective change to occur.
Other reforms, in contrast, will pose the problem even more strongly. That is the effect (and the intent) of D. Hull's, R. Brandon's, and others' generalization of the genotype/phenotype distinction in terms of replicators and interactors (and, in the case of Hull, lineages).
Variations on this theme have played a central role in Mayr's work at least since “Change of Genetic Environment and Evolution,” in Evolution as a Process, ed. J., Huxley, A. C., Hardy, and E. B., Ford (London: Allen and Unwin, 1954), pp. 157–180. In the present volume, Essay 21, “Processes of Speciation in Animals”, surveys this topic and provides further references.
Indeed, at p. 536 he lists punctuated equilibria as a stage in the modification of Darwinism, which he dates, roughly, to 1954–1972: 1954 is, of course, the date of the paper cited in n. 9 above; 1971 is the date of Niles Eldredge's first paper on punctuated equilibria (“The Allopatric Model and Phylogeny in Paleozoic Invertebrates”, Evolution, 25 [1971], 156–167), and 1972 the date of the well-known paper by Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould that usually is thought to mark the first proclamation of punctuationism. Mayr's unfortunate tendency to describe positions in subsequent terminology is not restricted to this case. For instance, in his essay on Weismann, pre-1900 writings of the latter are translated using such terms as “gene flow” (p. 497) and “genetic factors” (p. 508), and Weismann's views are described in the terminology of searching for the “target of selection” (p. 503) and recognizing the importance of “genetic recombination” (p. 510). I fear that the use of subsequent terminology may bias the interpretation of the material under examination. In this respect, Mayr's otherwise valuable use of historical material is often suspect (sometimes needlessly) and calls for a reexamination of the original sources.
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Ernst Mayr, Toward a New Philosophy of Biology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).
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Burian, R.M. Essay review: Toward a new philosophy of biology . J Hist Biol 23, 321–328 (1990). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00141474
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00141474