The Equally Wonderful Field: Ernst Mayr and Organismic Biology

Abstract

Biologists in the 1960s witnessed a period of intense intra-disciplinary negotiations, especially the positioning of organismic biologists relative to molecular biologists. The perceived valorization of the physical sciences by "molecular" biologists became a catalyst creating a unified front of "organismic" biology that incorporated not just evolutionary biologists, but also students of animal behavior, ecology, systematics, botany - in short, almost any biological community that predominantly conducted their research in the field or museum and whose practitioners felt the pinch of the prestige and funding accruing to molecular biologists and biochemists. Ernst Mayr, Theodosius Dobzhansky, and George Gaylord Simpson took leading roles in defending alternatives to what they categorized as the mechanistic approach of chemistry and physics applied to living systems - the "equally wonderful field of organismic biology." Thus, it was through increasingly tense relations with molecular biology that organismic biologists cohered into a distinct community, with their own philosophical grounding, institutional security, and historical identity. Because this identity was based in large part on a fundamental rejection of the physical sciences as a desirable model within biology, organismic biologists succeeded in protecting the future of their field by emphasizing deep divisions that ran through the biological sciences as a whole.

Making sense of essentialism

“…These details are significant, because Hull's contribution to the nascent field of philosophy of biology presented Mayr with a challenge and an opportunity alike. As Erika Milam has pointed out, Mayr began to engage with the philosophy of science in the early 1960s ‘to argue for the uniquely biological value of the evolutionary approach to understanding the living world’ . What was at stake here was not merely the mutual relationship of sub‐disciplines within biology, but the dangerous idea that biology as a whole could and should be superseded by physics and chemistry, a view that quite a few philosophers of science subscribed to.…”

Forces, friction and fractionation: Denis Walsh’s Organisms, agency, and evolution

“…Yet whether the synthesis occurred in the manner that Walsh suggests, with the features that he highlights, has been strongly challenged by historians of science (e.g. Milam 2010 ; Sepkoski 2012 ).…”

Reciprocal Causation and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis

“…Perhaps the most congenial narrative to the optimists' historical framing comes fromProvine (1971), though Provine himself denied the centrality of population genetics to evolutionary theory, for instance, as seen in his (1980) work. Other historians have also challenged the idea of a single event that could be called the Modern Synthesis, such asSmocovitis (1996),Cain (2009), andMilam (2010).…”