The hole in the whale - The philosophy of biology
About the autonomy of biologyMatthias Glaubrecht, Psychology Today, July 2004 The text is a double review together with That is evolution by Ernst Mayr ….. Together with Darwin, he decisively shaped the evolutionary biology of the just past ]century and is probably the most important and influential biologist of his time. In addition, Mayr is regarded as the grand seigneur of his profession: an ornithologist, systematist and zoogeographer with a passion, and at the same time a biology historian and biophilosopher, he has become known in the professional world as one of the "fathers" of the synthetic theory of evolution. In the 1930s and 1940s, he brought together previously conflicting findings in systematics, biogeography, genetics, and paleontology under the umbrella of neo-Darwinism and reconciled them with Darwin's concept of natural selection. Since then, Mayr's fundamental work on systematics, in particular on the concept of species, and his considerations on speciation through spatially isolated founder populations, as well as his philosophical explanations on essentialism, have shaped generations of researchers. The journalist Christian Göldenboog also explores this new philosophy of biology and the question of why it differs fundamentally from physics in his book with the idiosyncratic title The Hole in the Whale. His reading book in the best sense fills a gap; for briskly written, unlike Mayr's heavily condensed work, it is easy to read. Göldenboog vividly describes what is special about biology. In five conversations and discussions with important scientists - the physicist Etienne Klein, the population geneticist Francisco Ayala, the evolutionary geneticist John Maynard Smith, the sociobiologist Bert Hölldobler and Ernst Mayr - Göldenboog vividly describes what is special about biology. While it is currently the ambition of many physicists to find the ultimate world formula, with which they even hope to be able to recognize "God's plan", and yet only address dead matter, Göldenboog fathoms the most important findings of life science. It bothers him too, that the ideas of physics dominated philosophy for over 300 years. While the theories and perspectives of Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr and many other physicists led to impressive knowledge about the structure of atoms and the universe, for a long time there was no need for independent ideas of a philosophy of biology. In an entertaining way, Göldenboog explains that it was Darwin and evolutionary biology that truly completed the Copernican revolution by including life and the most complex beings on our earth in the analysis. The key figure here is, of course, Ernst Mayr and his idea of the autonomy of biology.
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