On Mayr

Evolgen has a has a nice little post poking fun at the late Ernst Mayr. A few comments. 1) R.A. Fisher, J.B.S. Haldane and J.M. Smith were trained as mathematical/physical scientists before their biological days. Fisher did work in statistical mechanics before he went off to Rothamsted. Physical scientists can and do say stupid things about biology, but that is only when they aren't biologists. 2) I think what Mayr was getting at was denigrating "bean baggery" and "reductionism." Theoretical population geneticists break down complex evolutionary dynamics to analytically tractable parameters (Mayr flourished before in silico). Mayr was trained as an ornithologist with a naturalistic bent, and so the modelers were aliens to him. Will Provine has argued that some of the opinions of Mayr regarding theoretical evolutionary genetics in the 1950s were founded in large part on ignorance, and later on he appreciated the nuances of Sewall Wright's ideas in regards to the adaptive landscape. 3) Mayr, though assimilated into the Anglo-Saxon biological tradition, still seemed to exhibit a sense of gestalt and intuitive understanding, and resisted the dominance of reductionism. This can be seen in his opinions regarding evolutionary systematics, which are based on specialized knowledge and authority as opposed to a 'hypothetico-deductive' paradigm. 4) Verbal arguments are fine, and Mayr presented many of them, but it would have been nice for him to show a little appreciation for mathematical heavy lifters. Mayr had some interesting ideas about "genetic revolutions" in regards to speciation, but later workers had to work out the analytic details (and in the process show where Mayr's verbal descriptions failed to capture the dynamics). 5) Mayr was crucial in fostering the career of Robert Trivers, who is a classically algebraic thinker (so to speak), so it isn't like he was a humanist. The moral is that Ernst Mayr was a great evolutionary biologist, but the conditional credibility meter should twitch a bit when he opines on topics outside his purview. Addendum: Fisher himself was cautious about analogizing between physical and biological dynamics (e.g., diffusion equations), though he himself dreamt of an "ideal gas law" for evolutionary biology.