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Some of these views can be found in Mayr's collection of his articles in Evolution and the Diversity of Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976).
J. Lakatos, “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes,” in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge ed. I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 115–116.
Something like a competing research program model, for example, would have enabled Mayr to make the same points without some of the difficulties his study presents. For example, such a model would have provided a useful means for dealing with the revival of the “saltationist” option by Eldredge and Gould, whereas Mayr simply ignores this challenge to orthodox neoselectionism. See N. Eldredge and S. J. Gould, “Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism,” in Models in Paleobiology, ed. T. J. M. Schopf (San Franciso: Freeman, Cooper, 1972), pp. 82–115; S. J. Gould, “Is a New and General Theory of Evolution Emerging?” Paleobiology, 6 (1980), 119–130. For a Lakatosian model, for instance, the competition of the saltationist and neoselectionist research programs could be analyzed in terms still supportive of Mayr's neoselectionist position, at the same time acknowledging the possibly recovering vitality of a “degenerating” program.
See comments on this in the reply by Walter J. Bock and Gerd von Wahlert to Marjorie Grene's “Two Evolutionary Theories,” Brit. J. Phil. Sci., 14 (1963–64), reprinted in Man and Nature, ed. R. Munson (New York: Delta, 1971), p. 171.
See M. Hesse, “A Network Model of Universals,” in her Structure of Scientific Inference (London: Macmillan, 1974), pp. 45–73. See also D. Gasking, “Clusters,” Aust. J. Phil., 38 (1960), 1–36, and Morton Beckner's influential adoption of Wittgenstein's family resemblance concept to taxonomy in The Biolocical Way of Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), chap. 2.
The fundamental issue is whether organisms (or for that matter taxa) are typically encountered as simply networks of disconnected properties in ways satisfying the conditions of Wittgenstein's famous example of the “Churchill face.” It should be noted that a similar position was adopted by taxonomists in the eighteenth century to defend the existence of a graded chain of forms between which all boundaires were blurred, a position consistent with the resemblance theory but surely not with the neoselectionist attention to the objectivity of the biological species. See, for example, M. Adanson, Familles des plantes (Paris: 1763), I, clxxxix; J. B. Lamarck, Flore française, 2nd ed. (Paris: 1795), I, xcviii.
M. T. Ghiselin, “A Radical Solution to the Species Problem,” Syst. Zool., 23 (1975), 536–544; D. L. Hull, “Are Species Really Individuals?” Syst. Zool., 25 (1976), 174–191; idem, “A Matter of Individuality,” Phil. Sci., 45 (1978), 335–360. See the reply by D. B. Kitts and D. J. Kitts, “Biological Species as Natural Kinds,” Phil. Sci., 46 (1979), 613–622.
In his recent defense of the antiessentialist aspect of neoselectionism, Elliot Sober has kept this issue admirably clear. See his “Evolution, Population Thinking, and Essentialism,” Phil. Sci., 47 (1980), 350–383.
See the recent charge of S. J. Gould's “essentialism” in T. J. M. Schopf and A. Hoffman, “Punctuated Equilibrium and the Fossil Record,” Science, 219 (1983), p. 438.
For anyone in the genuine Kantian tradition, the status of the transcendental ideals was always regulative and never constitutive. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. K. Smith (London: MacMillan, 1963), pp. 308–311, 532–549. The fact that some of the Naturphilosophen saw the transcendental ideal as also real is a legitimate target of Mayr's critique, but not a valid criticism of the Kantian use of Plato in this respect.
R. Owen, “Report On the Archetype and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton,” Brit. Ass. Adv. Sci. (1946), 169–340; issued separately in 1848.
See F. J. Sulloway, “Darwin's Conversion: The Beagle Voyage and Its Aftermath,” J. Hist. Biol., 15 (1982), esp. pp. 367 ff., for an updating of the entire question.
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Sloan, P.R. Essay review: Ernst Mayr on the history of biology. J Hist Biol 18, 145–153 (1985). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00127960
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00127960