What Makes Biology Unique?: Considerations on the Autonomy of a Scientific Discipline
Abstract
This book, a collection of essays written by the most eminent evolutionary biologist of the twentieth century, explores biology as an autonomous science, offers insights on the history of evolutionary thought, critiques the contributions of philosophy to the science of biology, and comments on several of the major ongoing issues in evolutionary theory. Notably, Mayr explains that Darwin's theory of evolution is actually five separate theories, each with its own history, trajectory and impact. Natural selection is a separate idea from common descent, and from geographic speciation, and so on. A number of the perennial Darwinian controversies may well have been caused by the confounding of the five separate theories into a single composite. Those interested in evolutionary theory, or the philosophy and history of science will find useful ideas in this book, which should appeal to virtually anyone with a broad curiosity about biology.
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The summary representation of any emotion category is an abstraction that need not exist in nature.
“The summary representation of any emotion category is an abstraction that need not exist in nature”
From The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization (2016) · cites this paper as Mayr, 2004
All basic life processes remain in principle explainable within the constraints of normal physics and chemistry.
“Despite some of life’s unique features (Mayr, 2004) all basic life processes remain in principle explainable within the constraints of normal physics and chemistry.”
From Phenomenal Consciousness and Emergence: Eliminating the Explanatory Gap (2020) · cites this paper as Mayr, 2004
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“…Cartwright, 1983; Costa & French, 2000; Dhar & Giuliani, 2010; Dupré, 1993; Elgin, 2006; Feynman, 1992; Hanson, 1965; Lloyd, 1988; Lorenzano, 2006; Mayr, 1982, 2004; Murray, 2001; Pickover, 2008; Pigliucci & Muller, 2010; Rosenberg, 1985; Ruse, 1973; Smart, 1963; Fraassen, 1989; Waters, 1998;…”
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“According to Mayr [33], paradigm is too strong a concept in order to understand the theoretical fluidity and the heterogeneous basis of empirical facts that we find in natural history.”
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“Nevertheless, he always considered reproductive isolation primary for the definition of the species category (Mayr, 1982) and, in the end, concluded that species taxa of sexual organisms and species taxa of strictly asexual organisms are incomparable phenomena (Mayr, 2004).”
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“Ernst Mayr (1988, 2004) has discussed several characteristics he believes distinguishes the biological from the physical sciences.”
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“The requirement that any adequate definition must include clean necessary and sufficient conditions for membership in a category may not seem unduly strict when discussing electrons (though even here there are complications), but it is been argued that biology is fundamentally different in this regard (Mayr 2007; Rose…”
Background
- Authors
- Mayr, E.
- Affiliations
- Harvard University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Mayr, Ernst
- Venue
- Cambridge University Press eBooks
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press
- Published
- 2004-08-09
- OpenAlex
- W2889338382
- Cited by
- 486
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
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- FWCI
- 57.45
- Type
- book
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Cambridge University Press eBooks (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › Philosophy and History of Science
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › Evolution and Science Education
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Genetics › Evolution and Genetic Dynamics
- Keywords
- evolutionary theory, history of evolutionary theory, philosophy of biology, natural selection, common ancestry, allopatric speciation, Darwinian evolution, Ernst Mayr
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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