An excellent overview of a great man’s thoughts on his field
Review of What Makes Biology Unique?: Considerations on the Autonomy of a Scientific Discipline. Posted to Amazon on 24 August 2010 under the headline above. Five stars.
After more than three-quarters of a century as an evolutionary biologist, Ernst Mayr offers us, in his final book, his thoughts spanning the most important issues he’s struggled with over his career. This is as much a book on the philosophy of science as on particular scientific issues within biology.
Of special interest are Mayr’s thoughts on how biology differs from other physical sciences (as the title indicates), and on various issues within biology such as the “species problem.” Mayr applies an Aristotelian approach to these issues that preempts some of the stranger conclusions arrived at by lesser minds in the philosophy of biology such as Richard Dawkins, for instance the idea that species, including homo sapiens, differ only by degree and not by kind, and the implications of that view. (For Mayr, differences in degree great enough amount to differences in kind, which applies to the difference between biology and other sciences as well as to the species problem—but this is only a taste of his insightful, multi-layered analysis.)
Whether you are interested in biology specifically, or the philosophy of science in general, this is a work not to be missed.
