Abstract
The Modern Synthesis can be regarded as an attempt to unify biology and to protect it from reduction to chemistry and physics, and thus to preserve the identity of biology as a discipline. Mayr was particularly sensitive to this aspect of the synthesis and developed a specific account of biological causation in part to separate biology from other disciplines. He published his case in 1961, making a distinction between proximate and ultimate causation. This distinction and Mayr’s model of causation have been heavily criticized by advocates of an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. In this chapter, I detail Mayr’s original argument and then core arguments from those opposing his view. I defend Mayr analytically, but I also make a comment on the possibility that Mayr and his critics are simply operating different forms of idealization to deliver on different tasks. If this is the case, I suggest, then Mayr’s view has not really been dismissed as false but rather positioned within specific task demands.
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- 1.
This point is related to some recent discussions about process ontology, and the idea of temporary stability, within the context of discussions about extending the synthesis (Dupre 2017). Dupre also argues that scientists cannot help but adhere to some metaphysics, even if they are naturalistic, or mechanistic. Smocovitis might claim, then, that Mayr’s efforts to defend the individuality of biology caused him to embrace some metaphysical principles.
- 2.
Mayr does not give a species.
- 3.
I take it that this is Mayr dismissively chasing out vestiges of metaphysics.
- 4.
Here Mayr is committing to a form of design thinking.
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- 6.
Ho M-W, Saunders PT (1984) Beyond Neo-Darwinism: An introduction to the new evolutionary paradigm. Academic Press.
- 7.
It was this paper to which Laland et al. (2013) were reacting.
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- 9.
I am indebted to my father, David Dickins, for coining this term. It captures the age-old problem of which came first, the chicken or the egg? If this question were posed to an evolutionary theorist, they would say the egg, as chickens descended from dinosaurs. If it were presented to a developmentalist, they would also say the egg as they would be referring to a specific individual chicken. But if it were presented to an essentialist then there would be much dithering as she failed to find a reason to prioritize one or other essential type.
- 10.
For clarity, I am not using the term function here as Mayr does in his 1961 paper. Rather I am referring to a neutral brand of functionalism that is focused upon the role of mechanisms, rather than the mechanistic detail of their operation.
- 11.
This traditional-radical distinction strikes me as slightly premature in the great scheme of the history of science. To be radical is to suggest change, a break from the tradition. But to be a successful radical one has to make a truly alternative offer. The main thrust of my analysis is that criticism of the proximate–ultimate distinction does not amount to a true alternative and so this claim is, presently, somewhat overwrought.
- 12.
Mayr’s reference is to Waddington’s 1942 conception of the epigenotype (Waddington 2012) which discusses the role of genes in influencing the many concatenated process of development. This is a pre-methylation, pre-histone modification, etc. view of epigenesis. It is clear from this paper that Waddington understands development to have important elements of genetic control, but also that it is not simply a situation of direct coding.
- 13.
It is possible that what really concerns Laland and colleagues is the idea that Mayr’s view of natural selection, or ultimate causes, are in some way supervenient upon proximate actions and their effects, whereas they prefer to see them as emergent. This is never expressed in Laland’s many writings on this topic, as far as I can see, but Mayr (1982) is avowedly in favor of emergentism.
- 14.
De Regt goes on to discuss criteria for judging intelligibility in terms of the ability of scientists to derive qualitative judgements about that theory without having to pursue exacting calculations.
- 15.
Factive denotes a verb that assigns the status of an established fact to its object (Stevenson 2010). In scientific accounts the verb to know is factive.
- 16.
De Regt (2017) makes the claim that his model of scientific understanding incorporates the core communicative aspect of science, as intelligibility implies communication.
- 17.
Throughout the various papers about Mayr, in the context of this topic, the fact that Mayr attacked bean-bag genetics as overly simplistic and reductionist, in part to protect biology from total reduction to chemistry, is never mentioned. The one thing Mayr’s view of causation did not do is privilege the gene (Rao and Nanjundiah 2011; Smocovitis 1992).
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Dickins, T.E. (2021). Causation. In: The Modern Synthesis. Evolutionary Biology – New Perspectives on Its Development, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86422-4_4
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