Mayr: Physics, biology, teleology

What Makes Biology Unique? : Considerations on the Autonomy of a Scientific Discipline by Ernst Mayr

This is a very clear summary of the state of Darwinian theory from one of the founders of the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis. Mayr's career stretches almost the full century of the emergence of the second phase of Darwinism after its eclipse in the generation after Darwin. Despite the excellent summary of the overall terrain Mayr's account brings home the limits of current biological and evolutionary thought. For even as he insists, rightly I think, on the autonomy of biology with respect to physics, the key issue in that regard, teleology, is rejected in the name of the very physicalism he criticizes. Mayr's several critical references to Kant and his well-known third Critique of Judgment show a defensive quality, and it is ironically just there that the key to the methodology Mayr is seeking might be found. It is true that Kantian thinking tends to refect the stage before modern biology when the science of Newton was dominant. But this Newtonian side to Kant is matched with precisely that critique of the limits of physics that Mayr is struggling with. The whole point of Kant's critique was to explore the terra incognita of the 'organism' as opposed to the physical object. In general there is an irony to Darwinism. It proceeds dialectically against teleological thinking, only to be forced to rediscover it sooner or later, in a form shorn of the metaphysical baggage that has obscured the breakdown to a sound biological methodology. Otherwise,a useful and interesting work.