Ernst Mayr: Biologist-Historian 1

RICHARD W. BURKHARDT, JR.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Department of History 810 S. Wright Urbana, IL 61801 U.S.A.

ABSTRACT: Ernst Mayr's historical writings began in 1935 with his essay "Bernard Altum and the territory theory" and have continued up through his monumental Growth of Biological Thought (1982) and his One Long Argument." Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought (1991). Sweeping in their scope, forceful in their interpretation, enlisted on behalf of the clarification of modern concepts and of a broad view of biology, these writings provide both insights and challenges for the historian of biology. Mayr's general intellectual formation was guided by the German Bildung ideal, with its emphasis on synthetic and comprehensive knowledge. His understanding of how to write history was inspired further by the example of the historian of ideas Arthur Lovejoy. Some strengths and limitations of this approach are explored here through attention to Mayr's treatment of the French biologist J.-B. Lamarck. It is contended that Mayr's contributions to the history of biology are not restricted to his own very substantial historical writings but also include his encouragement of other scholars, his development of an invaluable archive of scientific correspondence, and his insistence that historians who write about evolution and related subjects acquire an adequate understanding of the principles of Darwinian biology.

KEY WORDS: Arthur Lovejoy, Bernard Altum, Ernst Mayr, J.-B. Lamarck, history of biology, zoogeography, Bildung, scientific practice, speciation.

As someone who had the privilege of being one of Ernst Mayr's students some twenty years ago and who has continued to benefit immensely from interacting with him ever since, I consider it a special honor to have the opportunity to participate in a collective evaluation of Mayr's multifold contributions to systematics, evolutionary theory, and the history and philosophy of biology. Though each of the authors writing here has been asked to address a different aspect of Mayr's work, common themes are bound to emerge from our several analyses, for Mayr has never compartmentalized his activities. His contributions to these different areas have been mutually reinforcing, and he has applied the same remarkable talents and energies throughout.

The particular subject to be addressed here, Mayr's contributions to the history of biology, is not one that can be handled definitively in a brief paper. Mayr himself, in setting forth his 974-page historical masterpiece, The Growth of Biological Thought, acknowledged that the account he was offering there was necessarily streamlined and selective. 2 The same must obviously be the case for the present essay. A systematic, comprehensive, and properly contextualized

Biology and Philosophy 9: 359-371, 1994. © 1994 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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analysis of Mayr 's historical writings would require a monograph in itself. I must limit myself here to attempting to identify in broad outline some of the more salient features of Mayr's historical work.

Though it is Mayr's published historical work that will be the primary focus of my attention, I wish to underscore in beginning that Mayr 's publications represent only one dimension of his remarkable contributions to the fields we are collectively considering. His efforts in encouraging others in their own work have always been extraordinary. Anyone who has corresponded with him about a biological or historical topic knows not only how conscientiously, thoughtfully, helpfully, and expeditiously he responds to questions, but also how inspiring such responses can be. He has in fact been stimulating others in this way for decades. From my own study of the history of ethology in the twentieth century I can testify to just how important Mayr was in encouraging the founders of that field when it was still in the fledgling stage. Crucial for the future work of historians, furthermore, is the fact that Mayr has saved the bulk of his scientific correspondence, while many of his correspondents did not. I find, for example, that when it comes to charting the development of the career of Mayr 's good friend Niko Tinbergen, the letters that Mayr received from Tinbergen, now among the Mayr papers at Harvard, are much more extensive and instructive than are the papers in the Tinbergen archive at Oxford. In short, when one considers Mayr's contributions to the history of biology, one must keep in mind not only his prodigious and authoritative publications on the subject but also his encouragement of the work of others (including special efforts such as organizing the workshop on the evolutionary synthesis 3) and his establishment of an archive of scientific correspondence that will serve to enhance immeasurably our historical understanding of the development of major domains of biology over much of the twentieth century.

This much said in the way of introduction, let us turn now to Mayr's historical writings per se. Mayr's historical writings span over half a century, from his rather little-known 1935 paper "Bernard Altum and the territory theory," through his monumental The Growth of Biological Thought (1982), up to (and now beyond) his recent One Long Argument: Charles DaJwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought (1991). Sweeping in their scope, forceful in their statement of themes and interpretations, characteristically enlisted on behalf not only of the clarification of modern concepts but also of a particular conception of biology, these historical writings provide not only special insights but also special challenges to the historian of biology. The breadth and depth of his contributions have been extraordinary, and Mayr has deservedly received the highest awards that the History of Science profession has to offer, most notably the History of Science Society's George Sarton Medal, which was awarded to him in 1986. It must be acknowledged, however, that it would be difficult to imagine a historian of science today selecting Mayr's work as a model of how to do the history of biology. This is in part because no historian brings to the task Mayr's breadth of view of the issues of modem biology. But it is also because the writing of history of science has changed over the past quarter century as the

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field has become professionalized and increasingly specialized, as the practitioners of the field have come to be lodged for the most part in history departments, and as earlier ways of doing intellectual history have been modified or replaced by approaches influenced by other fields, including sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, and so on. While Mayr's approach to the history of biology gives pride of place to the history of ideas and interprets the development of ideas in a largely internalist fashion, other approaches have become increasingly prevalent among historians of science, leading, among other things, to closer attention to scientific practice and to the social, institutional, and cultural dimensions of knowledge production.

Whichever of these approaches one happens to favor, a critical appreciation of Mayr 's contributions to the history of biology requires that we look at these contributions in their own historical context. That is, we need to consider the setting or settings in which he came to embrace the aims and methods characteristic of his historical work.

Mayr was raised in Germany in a highly-educated, middle-class, "mandarin" family fully embued with the Bildung ideal that was so central to the self- identification and life-goals of German intellectuals. His father, a judge in the Bavarian court system, had a library of several thousand volumes that was particularly strong in history and philosophy. Ranke, Mommsen and Burckhardt together with Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche were all there on the shelves, as was Haeckel 's Weltrdtsel, which Mayr devoured as a teenager. "Every 'gebildete' German was supposed to be very much interested in history," Mayr has reported to me, and this happened to suit Mayr himself very well. As would be expected for someone with his family background, Mayr was sent for his secondary education to a humanistic Gymnasium. 4

The significance of the Bildung ideal for German intellectuals has been analyzed by Fritz Ringer in his 1969 study, The Decline of the German Mandarins, and more recently by Jonathan Harwood in his important new book, Styles of Scientific Thought, published earlier this year. Harwood reveals how important the Bildung ideal was in shaping the intellectual commitments, the research programs, and indeed the very styles of thought of the majority of the leaders of a particular segment of the German biological community - the geneticists - in the first third of the twentieth century. Though Harwood's book does not seek to characterize other German biologists in terms of the "comprehensive" versus "pragmatic" styles of thought he finds among the geneticists, there seems no doubt where Ernst Mayr would fit in this scheme. The emphasis on synthesis rather than specialization, comprehensive knowledge rather than narrow expertise, achievement in intellectual or cultural rather than material or political realms - all these expressions of the Bildung ideal and manifestations of the comprehensive style of thought are amply displayed in Mayr's biological and historical work. Reading Mayr 's Growth of Biological Thought, with its focus on the long-term history of biological problems and concepts rather than on biographical, institutional, or social history, one gets the sense that this is more than a choice guided by his

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immense knowledge as a biologist and his willingness .to grapple with original sources; it is a consequence of a life-long commitment to the values embodied in the Bildung ideal of German intellectuals of the early twentieth century. 5

This much said about Mayr 's early intellectual formation, let us look at his earliest historical study. The first historical paper he wrote was published in 1935, before most of the historians of biology who are practicing today were born. Entitled "Bernard Altum and the territory theory," the paper appeared in the Proceedings of the Linnaean Society of New York. 6 It displayed a number of features that are worth noting here insofar as they have been to a greater or lesser degree characteristic of Mayr's historical writings ever since:

(1) It involved going back to primary sources and making excerpts from them available to the modem reader.

(2) It recognized that the key source in question, in this case Altum's Der Vogel und sein Leben, was conceived not simply as an account of what Altum had found in his own studies of nature but also in reaction to another work, Alfred Brehm's sentimental and anthropomorphic Das Leben der ViSgel (only a few years later Mayr himself would be reacting to a book, Richard Goldschmidt's The Material Basis of Evolution, and writing his own Systematics and the Origin of Species).

(3) It focused on those elements of Altum's work that represented what Mayr identified as "a remarkably modern point of view." It did not, in contrast, discuss the strong natural theological context of Altum's thinking. Though his choice of emphasis was certainly not atypical for history of science writings of the day, in more recent times historians have by and large been more disposed than Mayr has been to identify instances in which religious and scientific thought have been constructively interrelated]

(4) Finally, it used the discussion of Altum's work as an occasion for reviewing the inadequacies of contemporary definitions of territory. Following this review, Mayr proceeded to offer a definition of territory of his own: "Territory is an area occupied by one male of a species which it defends against intrusions of other males of the same species and in which it makes itself conspicuous." This constituted a self-conscious attempt on his part to sharpen current thinking on the subject of territory by providing a clear though admittedly tentative definition, the utility of which would have to be determined by testing it. Mayr 's first historical paper was thus not solely historical in purpose but also served to illuminate and advance a contemporary biological issue.

It is not clear precisely when Mayr began to think about doing more extensive historical work. In papers in 1940 and 1946 he commented on the interest of the history of the species concept. 8 In 1954, reviewing Walter Zimmermann's book on the history of ideas of evolution, Evolution: Die Geschichte ihrer Probleme und Erkenntnisse, he commented on the importance of the evolutionary synthesis and stated: "If I were to write a history of this field [italics added], I

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would try to show how growing maturity in the contributing fields eventually

permitted this synthesis. ''9 In 1955 he published a long paper on the conceptual

contributions of a man with whom he felt a great professional and intellectual affinity, the taxonomist Karl Jordan. A non-experimentalist working with natural

populations, Jordan had promoted the cause of systematics, clarified the understanding of evolution, and contributed greatly to the conceptual development of modem biological thought. Mayr set himself the task of making Jordan's contributions to biology more widely known. 10

If any year was a watershed in Mayr 's development as a historian, it was 1959. It was in this year, the centenary of the publication of the Origin of Species, that he produced his first two papers on Darwin: "Darwin and the evolutionary theory in biology" and "Agassiz, Darwin, and Evolut ion." 11 It was

in the latter paper that he first referred to the work of Arthur O. Lovejoy, the founder of the discipline of the history of ideas. It was Lovejoy, he later said,

who aroused his interest in the history of science and who inspired him "to think that history of science should be a history of ideas. ''12 1 suspect that this did not

represent a conversion experience for Mayr so much as a confirmation of the

way he was already thinking. Lovejoy's approach, as Lovejoy himself explained it in 1936, differed from

the history of philosophy primarily with respect to the "character of the units

with which it concerns itself." As Lovejoy put it,

In dealing with the history of philosophical doctrines, for example, it [the history of ideas approach] cuts into the hard-and-fast individual systems and, for its own purposes, breaks them up into their component elements, into what may be called their unit-ideas. The total body of doctrine of any philosopher or school is almost always a complex and heterogeneous aggregate - and often in ways which the philosopher himself does not suspect .... One of the results of the quest of the unit-ideas in such a compound is, I think, bound to be a livelier sense of the fact that most philosophic systems are original or distinctive rather in their patterns than in their components. ''13

Those familiar with Mayr 's argument that Darwin 's theory of evolution by natural selection was not a single theory but rather a composite of five separate theories will recognize the Lovejoyian spirit of this claim.14 Mayr specified his

debt to Lovejoy in his Growth of Biological Thought and characterized his own approach as follows:

In the case of the history of science, the focal points are problems rather than ideas, but the approach of the historian of science is not much different from that of a historian of ideas such as Lovejoy. Like Lovejoy, he attempts to trace the problem back to its beginning and to follow up its fate and its ramifications from such a beginning either to its solution or to the present time.t5

While taking inspirat ion in 1959 from Lovejoy ' s Great Chain of Being, Mayr at the same time evidently found a different sort of inspiration in reviewing the book, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution, written by the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb. He found this book to be competent in historical and biographical matters but seriously lacking in terms of its

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understanding of evolutionary biology, for it failed to distinguish sufficiently between earlier notions of organic mutability and Darwin's theory and it showed no appreciation of the theory of natural selection, including its modem- day status. Likewise, whenever it was that he first consulted Nordenski61d's History of Biology, the single most extensive treatment of the history of biology available, he found that it too was flawed by its treatment of Darwinian biology. There was evidently a role for a biologist to fill when it came to writing about the history of modern biology. 16

Mayr 's publications on the history of biology in the following years included, among others, his introduction to a facsimile of the first edition of the Origin of Species, published in 1963, his important paper entitled "Lamarck revisited," published in 1972, and his volume co-edited with William Provine, The Evolutionary Synthesis, which appeared in 1980.17

In 1982 he published his extraordinary tour de force, the Growth of Biological Thought, which treated at length the three broad areas of diversity, evolution, and heredity. The approach he called for there aimed, at least ideally, to "portray the complete life history of each problem of biology." How well he succeeded in this regard there and in his other writings will continue to be discussed for some time. There is no doubt that The Growth of Biological Thought is a brilliant and at the same time a very personal book, so much so in the latter regard that George Gaylord Simpson playfully characterized it as "autobiology. ' 'Is In the book Mayr pounds home the themes that have been so central to his own career: the significance of population versus typological thinking and hard versus soft inheritance, the paramount role that naturalists have played in the history of biology, the fact that the individuals of the 1930s and 1940s who most successfully integrated genetics with the major problems of evolution had backgrounds as taxonomists, the distinctive nature of the problems of biology, and so on.

The clarity with which Mayr states his interpretations and the vigor with which he defends them quite naturally invite debate, and he indeed intends them to do so. The positions he has taken with respect to what was essential for Darwin's thinking, for example, including how important Darwin's broader cultural milieu (including religious thinking) was or was not for the development of Darwin's evolutionary theorizing, deserve themselves to be the subject of a major article. Such an article would need to examine how Mayr 's own experience as a naturalist has informed and shaped his appreciation of Darwin. Rather than enter here the complicated contest over how Darwin should be constructed (and deconstructed), however, I should like to comment briefly on what Mayr has had to say about the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.

Mayr's first work on Lamarck, his 1972 paper entitled "Lamarck revisited," was an elegant and insightful piece that demonstrated just how much a modern evolutionary biologist could bring to the historical understanding of Lamarck's own evolutionary theorizing, particularly once the inheritance of acquired characters was no longer a subject of debate in modern science. Mayr stated

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succinctly the goals of his paper: (1) "to bring out as clearly as possible what Lamarck actually thought and said; (2) to show where Lamarck got himself entangled in contradictions, in part because his findings as a zoologist were in conflict with his philosophical concepts; and (3) to point out problems that are in need of further research." He was also explicit about what the paper was not intended to accomplish. It was not intended to chart Lamarck's intellectual development over the course of his career. Nor did it aim to address Lamarck's non-evolutionary writings. 19

This paper succeeded very well within its self-imposed limits. Identifying Lamarck as "the first author to devote an entire book primarily to the presentation of a theory of organic evolution" and "the first to present the entire system of animals as a product of evolution," Mayr did a masterful job identifying what Lamarck said - and did not say - about organic mutability. He quite rightly discounted the notions that Lamarck had endorsed the idea of direct environmental induction and that "wishing" on the part of an organism had any role to play in Lamarck's theorizing. With regard to Lamarck's understanding of species, Mayr 's analysis was particularly incisive. Mayr is entirely correct in saying that with respect to the mutability of species, Lamarck treated species typologically and this conceptualization provided him with no opportunity for conceiving of natural selection. Lamarck was certainly aware of individual variability, but, as Mayr points out, Lamarck's view supposed that all the members of a species vary in the same way as the result of the new habits they adopt upon being subjected to the same environmental changes. As Mayr further observed, Lamarck said little about the multiplication of species. For him species change was simply phyletic evolution. 2°

Mayr 's analysis is particularly instructive with respect to how Lamarck's thinking compares with modern biological concepts. Mayr also has a shrewd observation to make with respect to how Lamarck's practice as a naturalist may have affected his concept of species, namely, that Lamarck's idea that species seem to merge into one another as collections became increasingly complete "was presumably strongly influenced by [Lamarck's] studies of molluskan variability. ''21

One wishes, however, that Mayr had reflected even further on Lamarck's practice as a naturalist and the ways in which this practice might have been different from that of naturalists of the present. Had he done so, he might not have expressed amazement at "the fact that Lamarck was so totally blind to the drastic difference between the situation he described for geographically variable polytypic species and the sharp, bridgeless gaps of coexisting, sympatric species, such as the working naturalist encounters everywhere. ''22 Lamarck was a working naturalist, to be sure, but his workplace was the naturalist's cabinet, not the field. In such a setting, the bridgeless gaps between coexisting, sympatric species can only be evident if the provenance of the specimens has been painstakingly specified by the individual who collected them. When Mayr himself, as a gifted young field naturalist in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands in the late 1920s, took care to label quite explicitly where he had

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collected the bird specimens he was sending back to Ernst Hartert, the director of the Rothschild Zoological Museum at Tring, he did so because of explicit instructions from Hartert. These instructions reflected the importance that biogeographical information had come to possess for Hartert 's work and for biologists of that period. 23 In Lamarck's day, in contrast, collectors were by and large not expected to provide any more than the most general sort of information regarding where they found their specimens.

This last point is nicely illustrated by a letter of 1804 from Frangois P6ron, the French naturalist responsible for most of the zoological specimens collected on the Baudin expedition to the South Seas, to l~tienne Geoffroy Saint Hilaire, professor of birds and mammals at the Museum of Natural History in Paris in the spring of 1804. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire had just been despatched to Port de l 'Orient to take over the transportation of the collections to Paris. P6ron had been especially impressed by biogeographical phenomena in the course of the expedition. In his journals he had noted carefully the geographical provenance of the thousands of different specimens he had collected, and he had coded the specimens to his journal entries with numbers indicating the packet and box in which each specimen was preserved. He was painfully aware that all the biogeographical information represented in the collections would be lost if the specimens were mixed up. He therefore pleaded with Geoffroy: "My dear Monsieur Geoffroy, I beg you as much as possible, please leave my boxes intact. ''24

The point of this brief story is straightforward. If the importance of zoogeographical information was so unappreciated in 1804 that Peron had to express to Geoffroy the concerns that he did, and if Lamarck himself was not a field naturalist, there is no reason to be amazed that Lamarck did not appreciate the distinction between the case of geographically variable polytypic species on the one hand and the case of clearly distinguishable coexisting, sympatric species on the other. Mayr is absolutely correct in saying that Lamarck's conceptual system was not focused on the problem of speciation. By focusing as exclusively as he does on the conceptual structure of biology, however, Mayr does not provide all the insights he might on the ways in which a naturalist's practice and theorizing may be interrelated.

In The Growth of Biological Thought Mayr adopts the idea that the consideration of fossil and living species of mollusks was critical in Lamarck's conversion to the idea of species mutability, but he goes too far in assuming that the shells at Lamarck's disposal enabled him to establish "virtually unbroken phyletic series. ''25 Here again one needs to consider more closely the evidence that was actually available to Lamarck in his own day. Though comparing fossil and modem shells was instrumental in Lamarck's coming to believe in species mutability, he in fact did not have any compelling phyletic series he could offer in support of the idea of species change. 26

Pursuing the subject of "practice" further, if one also includes under this rubric (1) pedagogy and (2) the need to justify the importance of one's own field of study, there are additional insights to be gained concerning the energization

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of Lamarck's intellectual projects. It is certainly not rare in the history of science to find an investigator making a special virtue out of subjects and conditions of practice regarded by other investigators as too limiting. That is precisely what Lamarck sought to do after the reorganization of the Jardin des Plantes moved him from the role of "Botanist attached to the King's Cabinet" to that of "Professeur of insects, worms, and microscopic animals." Lamarck initially won'ied that "there was much more to be gained and more interest to be excited in the demonstration of the characters, manners, and habits of the lion than of the earth-worm. ''27 He soon was reassuring himself and his students, however, that the study of the invertebrates had major advantages over the study of the vertebrates. He proceeded to maintain that the simpler animals displayed more clearly than did the more complex animals what the essence of life actually was. He argued further that the simpler animals revealed more clearly than did the more complex animals the course (la marche) nature had followed in bringing all the different forms of life successively into existence. His desire to affirm the importance of the study of the invertebrates and his elaboration of his zoological philosophy effectively went hand in hand. 28

I believe there is an important parallel here between Lamarck's defense of the importance of invertebrate zoology and Mayr's defense of systematics, field studies, ornithology, ecology, and so on in his assessment of what is essential to understanding evolutionary biology and what was crucial, historically, for the emergence of the evolutionary synthesis. It would appear that a good deal of Mayr 's writing has been energized by his sense that the serious work of naturalists has been unjustly considered either pass6 or of marginal importance with respect to such enterprises as genetics and molecular biology, the "glamour" fields that have succeeded in commanding the largest share of the resources allotted to the biological sciences. 29

In sum, I would characterize Mayr's treatment of Lamarck as a sympathetic one that is quite successful in portraying Lamarck's thoughts on the mechanisms of evolution. In Lovejoyian style, it extracts from Lamarck one part of his thinking, leaving aside questions of the whole of his thinking; the broader intellectual, social, and cultural context of the intellectual goals he set for himself; and the relations of his biological thought to his actual practice as a naturalist.

Though Mayr is an ardent champion of writing the history of science as the history of scientific ideas, it deserves to be noted that his approach to the history of biology has not been as monolithic as some of his own statements suggest or as the above commentary has perhaps made it out to be. In addition to the work represented in his Growth of Biological Thought and One Long Argument, he has engaged in other forms of historical writing and has been extremely skillful in doing so. For example, in his articles for the Dictionary of Scientific Biography and in the obituary notices he has written of friends and colleagues, he has displayed a keen sense of many of the personal, practical, social, and institutional dimensions of science that tend to get omitted in writing the history of biology as a history of ideas9 Likewise, in the chapter entitled "Materials for the history of American ornithology" that he appended to the English translation

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he brought out of Erwin Stresemann's History of Ornithology, he provided a wealth of information that would allow one to write a history of ornithology in America that was not just a history of ideas but a history that paid attention to the diverse institutional settings of ornithological research in the United States over time; the significance of expeditions, journals, textbooks, and the acquisition of particular collections; the role of ornithological societies; the contributions made by women; the role of amateurs; the special kinds of characteristics of birds that make them particularly good for the study of certain problems but not others; the significance of certain technical developments such as bird-banding and photography; and the benefits and problems caused by increasing specialization and professionalization. 31 Anyone wishing to take a Latourian rather than a Lovejoyian approach to American ornithology in the twentieth century could rightfully rejoice in the kinds of historical materials Mayr has assembled on the history of American ornithology.

I am not convinced that Mayr's tendency to phrase issues starkly always serves the purpose he wants, insofar as it sometimes does not do justice to the complexity of historical circumstances and it sometimes puts readers off. I am likewise not convinced that he always succeeds in treating historical figures in their own contexts as successfully and sympathetically as he thinks he does, but that is a problem for anyone writing history. If it is true that Mayr sometimes brings modern insights to bear on problems of the past in a way that makes some historians anxious, I believe it is also true that more than anyone else he has demonstrated to modern historians how critical it is to gain a thorough understanding of the biological issues involved in Darwinian biology, the evolutionary synthesis, and so forth. 32 Furthermore, at a time when historians have been producing more detailed, localized and chronologically confined studies, his work has properly reminded us of the importance of more synthetic and general histories and the value as well as the difficulties of trying to look at scientific change over extended periods of time. Even if we choose not to embrace the exact same history of ideas model that Mayr has set forth in his Growth of Biological Thought, we owe him our thanks for the extraordinary example of dedicated, passionate, and lucid intellectual inquiry that he has set before us.

In his classic paper of 1940, "Speciation phenomena in birds," Mayr began by explaining how each different branch of biology - cytology and genetics, ecology and biogeography, paleontology and taxonomy - was contributing its share to the understanding of evolution. "All these branches must cooperate," he wrote, "and the worker in each field must try to apply an approach to the problems of evolution that is particularly suitable to the methods of his special field. ''33 The same sort of observation undoubtedly should be applied to our various efforts in studying the history, philosophy, and sociology of biology. That Ernst Mayr's work has occasioned this particular session should serve as a reminder to all of us in the Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology how much we have to learn from each other, as well as, of course, how much we owe to Ernst Mayr himself.

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NOTES

t This paper was originally delivered at the biennial meeting of the International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology, held in Brandeis in July 1993, in the special session organized by John Greene on Ernst Mayr's contributions to systematics, evolutionary theory, and the history and philosophy of biology. The paper is presented here with only slight modifications of the original, oral presentation. As indicated in the text, a full assessment of Mayr's historical work, including situating that work in the context of Mayr 's other work and contemporary developments in the history of science, would require a much more extensive study than I have been able to undertake here. 2 Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought. Diversity, Evolution and Inheritance (Cambridge,

Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 17. 3 The results of the workshop on the history of the evolutionary synthesis are to be found in Ernst

Mayr and William Provine, eds., The Evolutionary Synthesis (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1980). 4 Letter from Mayr to the author, June 9, 1993.

Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890-1933 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1969); Jonathan Harwood, Styles of Scien@c Thought: The German Genetics Community 1900-1933 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). I gladly acknowledge a conversation with Richard Burian on the importance of the Bildung ideal for German biologists and its likely importance for Mayr's own intellectual formation. o Ernst Mayr, "Bernard Altum and the territory theory," Proceedings of the Linnaean Society of

New York, nos. 45 and 46 (1935), 24-38. 7 The literature here is immense, but see for example John C. Greene's review of Mayr's One Long

Argument." Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought in The Times Higher Education Supplement, May 29, 1992. s Ernst Mayr, "Speciation phenomena in birds," The American Naturalist, 74 (1940), 249-278, see

esp. pp. 250-256; "The naturalist in Leidy's time and today," Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, 98 (1946), 271-276, esp. p. 273: "To follow the history of the changes in the species concept is a fascinating endeavor since it sheds a good deal of light on the general principles of the growth of a scientific idea." 9 Ernst Mayr, review of Walter Zimmermann, Evolution." die Geschichte ihrer Probleme und

Erkenntnisse, Scientific" Monthly, 79 (no. 1) (1954), 57-58 (quote on p. 57). ~0 Ernst Mayr,"Karl Jordan's contribution to current concepts in systematics and evolution," Transactions of the Royal Entomological Society of London, 197 (195), 45-66. If the language Mayr used in this article tended to emphasize how modern or ahead of his time Jordan's work was, it must be remembered that such language was common to history of science studies in this period, when "precursors" were given nearly as much attention as the scientists whose work was believed to have been anticipated. i i Ernst Mayr, "Darwin and the evolutionary theory in biology," in Evolution and Anthropology: A Centennial Appraisal (Washington, D. C.: Anthropological Society of Washington, 1959), pp. 3-12; "Agassiz, Darwin, and evolution," Harvard Library Bulletin, 13 (1959), 165-194. The latter paper was dedicated to Erwin Stresemann on his 70th birthday. Having asked Mayr whether his own decision to write history was inspired in part by the example of his teacher, Stresemann, I learned, to the contrary, that Stresemann undertook his history of ornithology at Mayr's prodding (Mayr to the author, June 9, 1993). i2 In The Growth of Biological Thought Mayr states (p. 18): "My own interest in the history of science was aroused by reading A. O. Lovejoy's The Great Chain of Being ... I have learned more from this one volume than from almost anything else I have read. Others who have attempted a similar approach are Ernst Cassirer and Alexander Koyre." The statement that Lovejoy inspired Mayr to think of the history of science specifically in terms of the history of ideas appears in a letter from Mayr to the author, June 9, 1993. 13 Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Stud), of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1936). The quote here is taken from the 1960 Harper and

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Row Torchbook edition, p. 3. It should be recalled that four of Lovejoy's papers on evolutionary thought were republished in Bentley Glass, Owsei Temkin, and William L. Straus, Jr., eds., Forerunners of Darwin, 1745-1859 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959). 14 See for example Mayr, One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991), which identifies "evolutionism," common descent, multiplication of species, gradualism, and natural selection as five separate theories. See also The Growth of Biological Thought, pp. 505-510. 15 Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought, p. 18. (Mayr went on to say (p. 19): "It is the principal objective of this volume to discover for each branch of biology and for each period what the open problems were and what proposals were made to solve them; the nature of the dominant concepts, their changes, and the causes for their modification and for the development of new concepts; and finally, what effect prevailing or newly arising concepts had in delaying or accelerating the solution of the open problems of the period. At its best this approach would portray the complete life history of each problem of biology." 16 Ernst Mayr, review of Gertrude Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution, Scientific American, 201 (November, 1959), 209-216. For Mayr's comments on E. Nordenski61d, The History of Biology (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1928), see Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought, pp. 547-548,861. 17 See Ernst Mayr, "Introduction," in On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. A Facsimile of the First Edition (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. vii-xxvii; "Illiger and the biological species concept," Journal of the History of Biology, 1 (1968), 163-178; "Open problems of Darwin research," Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 2 (1971), 273-280; "The nature of the Darwinian revolution," Science, 176 (1972), 981-989; "Lamarck revisited," Journal of the History of Biology, 5 (1972), 55-94; "Sexual selection and natural selection," in Bernard Campbell, ed., Sexual Selection and the Descent of Man (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1972), 87-104; "Essay review: the recent historiography of genetics," Journal of the History of Biology, 6 (1973), 125-154; "Materials for a history of American ornithology," in E. Stresemann, Ornithology from Aristotle to the Present (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1975), 365-396, 414-419; "Darwin and Natural Selection," American Scientist, 75 (1977), 321-327; The Evolutionary Synthesis (edited with William Provine) (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1980). Mayr's historical papers after the appearance of The Growth of Biological Thought in 1982 (in addition to the biographical memoirs and the study of American ornithology mentioned below) include: "Weismann and evolution," Journal of the History of Biology, 18 (1985), 295-329; "Joseph Gottlieb Kolreuter's contributions to biology," Osiris, 2 (1986), 135 176; "Darwin's principle of divergence," Journal of the History of Biology, 25 (1992), 343-359. ts George Gaylord Simpson, "Autobiology (review of Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought)," The Quarterly Review of Biology, 57 (1982), 437-444. Other reviews include A. J. Cain, "Porcupine biology," Nature, 297 (l 982), 707-709; W. F. Bynum, "On the written authority of Ernst Mayr," Nature, 317 (1985), 585 586; and Philip R. Sloan, "Essay review: Ernst Mayr on the history of biology," Journal of the History of Biology, 18 (1985), 145-153. Sloan is particularly helpful in his identification of the way Mayr enlists history in the service of conceptual clarification. For an extended critique of Mayr's book published a decade after the book appeared, see John C. Greene, "From Aristotle to Darwin: reflections on Ernst Mayr's Interpretation in The Growth of Biological Thought," Journal of the History of Biology, 25 (1992), 257-284. 19 Mayr, "Lamarck revisited," p. 57. 20 I have noted Mayr's sensitive handling of Lamarck's treatment of species in Richard W. Burkhardt, Jr., "Lamarck and species," in Scott Atran et al., Histoire du concept d'esp~ce clans les sciences de la vie (Paris: Fondation Singer-Polignac, n.d. [1987]), pp. 161-180 (see p. 177, fn. 42). Most of what Mayr says of Lamarck's comments on species in his Philosophie zoologique applies to the rest of Lamarck's writings as well. However, Mayr's claim that Lamarck displayed a "lack of interest in species" is ambiguous. Not only in his early career as a botanist but also in his later years as an invertebrate zoologist, Lamarck took great pains to describe and classify new species. Furthermore, in presenting his ideas on organic mutability he quite explicitly contrasted his position with the traditional and dominant opinion that the species of the present had remained unchanged

ERNST MAYR: BIOLOGIST-HISTORIAN 371

since the original creation. It is not that Lamarck was not interested in species, but rather that he did not necessarily see the formation of species as they key problem in a theory of organic change, to say nothing of the broader zoological philosophy that he was constructing, which involved not just a discussion of organic mutability but also a consideration of the nature of life, the construction of a truly natural system of classification, the emergence of higher faculties as more complex systems of organization were successively produced, and so forth. 21 Mayr, "Lamarck revisited," p. 65. 22 Mayr, "Lamarck revisited," p. 67. 23 See Ernst Mayr, "Ernst Johann Otto Hartert," The Auk, 51 (l 934), 283-286. 24 Francois Perron [sic] to Monsieur Geoffroy, 29 Germinal an XII (April 19, 1804), in Archives Nationales, Paris, MS AJ/15/592. 25 Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought, p. 346. 26 Richard W. Burkhardt, Jr., "The inspiration of Lamarck's belief in evolution," Journal of the History of Biology, 5 (1972), 413438 ; The Spirit of System: Lamarck and Evolutionary Biology (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1977). 27 This, at any rate, is what Lamarck recalled in his "Discours d'ouverture pour le cours de 1816," in Max Vachon, Georges Rousseau, and Yves Laissus, Inddits de Lamarck (Paris: 1972), p. 28. 28 See Burkhardt, The Spirit of System. 29 The sentiments Mayr expresses in his editorial, "The new versus the classical in science," Science, 141 (1963), 765, are to be found in many of his historical as well as his scientific writings. 3o Ernst Mayr, "Alden Holmes Miller," Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, 43 ( 1973 ), 177-214; "Robert Cushman Murphy," American Philosophical Society Yearbook ( 1973), 131-135; "C. O. Whitman," Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 14 (1976), 313-318; "In Memoriam: Jean (Theodore) Delacour," The Auk, 103 (1986), 603-605; "Sir Charles Alexander Fleming," Biographical Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society (1989), 159-163; "D. (Delbert) Dwight Davis, "Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 17 (Supplement II) (1990), 211-213; "Karl (Heinrich Ernst) Jordan," Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 17 (Supplement II) (1990), 454-455; "Gladwyn Kingsley Noble," Dictionary of Scientific" Biography, 18 (Supplement II) (1990), 687-688; Alfred Sherwood Romer," Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 18 (Supplement II) (1990), 752-753; "Karl Patterson Schmidt," Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 18 (Supplement II) (1990), 788-789; "Erwin Stresemann," Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 18 (Supplement II) (1990), 888-890. 3i Ernst Mayr, "Materials for a history of American ornithology," in E. Stresemann, Ornithology from Aristotle to the Present (Cambridge, Massachussetts: Harvard University Press, 1975), 365-396, 414419 . 32 Mayr has responded to reviewers who have characterized his work as "whiggish" in Ernst Mayr, "When is historiography whiggish?" Journal (~[the History ofldeas, 51 (1990), 301-309. 33 Ernst Mayr, "Speciation phenomena in birds," The American Naturalist, 74 (1940), 249-278, quote on p. 249.