Here is a note or two towards creating a full critique of the book.
Ernst Mayr tries to make the case that Darwinism has matured. I would like to present the case instead that simple Darwinism has not such, but rather it is only a version of the relation between biodiversity and adaptability (evolvability) that has. He and others seem to have miss understood the “boundary” that is crossed when Wright discussed the difference of a point of equilibrium and a moving set of such points. Neither Provine nor Gould managed to exhume Wright’s intention in discussing individual adaptability.
Transmission of information from somatic to genetic programs is possible and the molecular clock may be a strictly teleomatic phenomenon providing phenotypic affects neglected by Mayr’s position or suitably resolved contrarily as historically old hat. Mayr’s division of Darwin’s work into 5 categories nullifies this new form of evolutionary thinking and biophilosphy. Mayr is not completely to blame. The history of math and logic is also at fault. Repetative DNA and the different kinds of genes reflect a new notion of open and closed programs, one that uses physics and math in ways however that are not at odds with Mayr’s intent on sustaining an autonomous biology. Mayrs’s focus on Mendelian saltationsim is strictly in order to situate the ostensively conceptual change that Gould attempted to introduce by relying on a Mayrian allopatry and a false logical reliance from formalism without proper algebra. Both migration/dispersal units in mendelian populations and loci particular theromostat parameters during irreversible mutations among alleomorphs have not been quantified nor conceptually adumbrated.
Kant
“Further, objective purposiveness, as a principle of the possibility of things of nature, is so far removed from necessary connection with the concept of nature that it is much oftener precisely that upon which one relies to prove the contingency of nature and its form. When, e.g. we adduce the structure of a bird, the hollowness of its bones, the disposition of its wings for motion and of its tail for steering, etc., we say that all this is contingent in the highest degree according to the mere nexus effectivus of nature, without calling in the aid of a particular kind of causality, namely that of a purpose (nexus finalis). In other words, nature, considered as mere mechanism, can produce its forms in a thousand different ways without stumbling upon unity in accordance with such a principle. It is not in the concept of nature but quite apart from it that we can hope to find the least ground a priori for this.” Page 206
91Kant “I do not wish to speak as yet of the ground of this satisfaction, which is bound up with a representation from which we should least of all expect it, viz. a representation which makes us remark it inadequacy and consequently it subjective want of purposiveness for the judgment in the estimation of magnitude. I only remark the if the aesthetical judgment is pure (i.e. mingled with no teleological judgment or judgment of reason) and is to be given as completely suitable example of the critique of aesthetical judgment, we must not exhibit the sublime where human purpose determines the form as well as the size, nor yet in things of nature the concepts of which bring with them a definite purpose (e.g. animals with a known natural destination), but in rude nature (and in this only in so far as it does not bring with it any charm or emotion produced by actual danger) merely as containing magnitude.”
One must take care NOT to allow statistical reasoning from allometery from usurping the place that changes in the measures of levels are divided differently between the mathematically and dynamically frames of pleasure and pain (regardless of the amount of happiness). Thus different kinematics no matter the dynamics may give different dispositions of pain for a granted pleasure of pure math accepted provisionally via layering that may suggest a difference in the way the biological hierarchy (levels of selection v.s levels of organization) is cut up or dissected. Levels of organization do not posses the same sufficiently chance history or contingency that levels of selection may. This bears on the concepts and the relation to intuition but is somewhat different algebraically than geometrically no matter the physics. Thus chemistry has been shorted since the Galvani-Volta dispute and Faraday’s work and no information transfer is preferred in thought from proteins to DNA. Mayr ends up mingling ALL of this despite his separation biologically of telos meanings.
Mayr asserts that Wright’s “landscape model” did nothing for the geographic notion of speciation he ascribes to changes in biological thought since the 30s. This criticism applies only to the geometric and not the algebraic manipulations from data. Thus he was lead to misuse Galelio in his characterization to the difference of reduction and analysis. There is no question , for me, that reduction fails (so far) in the subatomic realm generally for biology, but Mayr refuses to consider that physical laws, (since biology is an open system) may themselves influence the contigent acquisition of closing programs formerly open AND opening programs already closed. So while there may be no “information” transfer from protein to DNA as per Mayr there may be information transfer from somatic to genetic programs and this constitutes a possibility that opens for the lebenskraft a commotion that may or may not be used by man as purposive.
Again THAT may or may not be effected finally supersensibly as well. This small probability is roundly written away by Mayr. There is a “negative” influence of math to biology-taxonomy that Mayr did not use. Instead he suggested a philosophy of emergence. Rather than attempt to coopt changes in math in the past 100yrs Mayr decides that Kant had a “dilemma”, that he was “frustrated” and that deceprecatory (if you don’t have anything positive to say don’t say anything negative at all . ) view is not needed. It is not needed indeed unless it was already necessary.
Mayr encapsulates his attempt to extripate the bad old days such-15 “Yes, God was the cretor of this world either directly or through his laws he was responsible for everything that existed and occurred. Science for Galelio and his followers was not an alternative to religion but an inseperable part of it, and this remained true from the sixteenth century to the first half of the nineteenth century and was accepted by the great philosophers of that period including Kant. Yet the vigourously expanding science of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was vbale to find a natural explanation for one phenomenon after the other that previously had required invoking God’s presence, Eventually, only lip service was paid to Galelio’s claim about the dominant role of mathematics in science.”
Galelio’s claim however depends on the existence of kinematics a different from mechanics and if one follows Figenbaum’s suggestion that any dynamics must be grounded on a prior kinematics it matters somewhat importantly for the EXPANSION of the measure of magnitude (4 or 10 units for Kant) but this can not be appreciated for biology as autonomous unless one recasts Malthus’ thought process interms of exponentiation and arithematization of transfinites and one relocates the notion of emergence in the concept of ordertypes and different sets of the reals as used to organize genetic data. It will be found that a developed phenomenological theromodynamics enables the place that this philosophy of biology desires to go (to). Mayr mistook the reflective with the newer determinable causality, always in process in science. The debate between Kuhn etc and SETI is nothing but a distraction. Darwin’s single diagram CAN be understood from the geometric perspective of quaternions (tension and torsion) and it does matter to biology whether Kant was “right”(page 14 Mayr) Noticing that there is an issue with extracting hierarchical structure from data and creating a program to do it are two different things. Mayr has ovesimplied the changes in religious interest in evolution and took some of Kant’sreferences to Newton out of context. Kant said there would be no Newton of a blade of grass “that had not been designed” because he had distiguised the subjectivity of design vs no design. Chance in a program however IS a design of sorts.
Thus Mayr was offbase to suggest deflunking Kant p16 “When Kant (1790), in his Critique of Judgment, was quite unsuccessful in explaining the phenomena of the living world with the help of Newtonian laws and priciples, he solved his dilemma by ascribing biological processes to teleology.”
Mayr says this despite the fact that he recognizes p43 that Kant confirmed a common view (from Aristotle) that truly goal-directed and seemingly purposive processes occur only in living nature. Mayr was of the opinion that Kant “concluded” that biology -evolution (however Kant had it) is different than the physical sciences requiring a philosophical factor not used by Newton. Mayr associates whatever that is to his difference of proximate and ultimate causation via Aristotle’s final cause but he seems for the sake of the autonomy of biology to be afraid of opening the door here and sacrifices too little in his pains to differentiate biology from physics. Mayr even noticed that there were different religiously motiviated suggestions about origins other than separate creation which Darwin addressed and yet he refuses to see there is any possibility otherwise than perfection for a design wherein inheritance begats without absolutely invoking vitalism for those actions conation (goal seeking) wise (point vs end finis). One can reject the experiments to find a vial principle in life and yet not delete interest theoretically in combinations of attractions and repulsions that may physically bring about different uses for the same form in nature, whether by man or in the destinations of plants and animals. Mayr refuses to go here because this smacks of typology but to that Mayr had clearly subsititued a chemistry to be with a math that was. This can be dicussed particularly in the the notion of thermal currents today in creatures out of the Volta-Galani Debate which bears on the time dependence of Kant’s notion of Leibniz and wolff logically. It will not be the case that Quine is correct that Darwin “refuted” Aristotle’s final cause, only that we do not have a notion of the history of logic asequentially enabled to engage a renewed philosophy of biology.
Now we reach to the place that modern interpreters of this history of biology are attempting to establish a cannon of interpretation. Mayr said, “Eventually, one invoked this cause for all phenonmena in the cosmos that lead to an end or goal. Kant in his Critique of Judgment at first tried to explain the biological world in terms of Newtonian natural laws but was completely unsuccessful in this endeavor. Frustrated, he ascribed all Zweckmassigkeit (adaptedness) to teleology. This was, of course, no solution. A widely supported school of evolutionists, for instance, the so-called orthogenesists, invoked teleology to explain all progressive evolutionary phenomena. They believed that living nature there is an intrinsic striving (“orthogenesis”) toward perfection. Here belongs also Lamark’s theory of evolution, and orthogenesis had many followers before the evolutionary synthesis. Alas, no evidence for the existence of such a teleological principle has been found, and the discovers of genetics and paleontology eventually totally discredited cosmic teleology.”p24
There is a whole new theoretical biology which uses the advance made by Kant and mathmatized by Cantor which Kaufmann did not enter. It is a new philosophy of biology that is going in the direction of a greener future generally. But besides that in the realm of the objective it functions where only peferect progress or utopia was formely contemplated replacing this with a logical data wharehouse of potential orthoselections obeying linear extensions of thermodyanamics no matter the reduction through a rejection of analogy between biology and language and anticipating different metrics for the measure of level magnitudes across sciences. It is not that this new is a whole “greater” than the parts summed but only that the frame has been enlarged socially where the parts are ALL in the holes. Orthoselections may be subject to algebraic manipulations that orthogeneis (no matter the allometery) may not be geometrically. This is the principle insight that changes the dynamic of the discussion and opens the way for the introduction of cantorian math where Scottish economic analogies and Victorian sexism reigned in the past biological praxis.
Mayr had diagnosed a problem, the inability of current logistics or physics based philosophical inspirations to compass the contributions of biology to science over across the past 200 years yet he has not asked specifically why this is so. Why was it that physics based and logic inspired approaches appeared available for biologists and yet there was no intellectual structure built to encompass the most forward thinking aspects of theoretically and practically minded biologists? The answer is not that Bohr attempted to inspire physics influence or that positivism was simply too great an effect but rather it was the disagreement among Cantor, Poincare, and Russell never was resolved in application, the pure nature remained unresolved and instead the 60s revivial of creationism filled this void that was ostensibly being piled in with the new linguistic hopes of post-Chomskian thought. No one ever did Wittegenstein any better and the simple guide of contradiction was never taken back to the Liebniz Kant issue in actual scientific praxis and science got a meta discussion instead of help philosophically in specialized areas. Realistic conversation about chemistry as an exemplar of science as a whole missed what was being done day to day.
Dauben wrote, “Still, it is suggestive in light of his reliance upon the Divine Intellect as the “certain repository of the Transfinitum.” .
We can now realize that Darwin was mistaken because with transifinte framing of Malthus’s food supply issue we see that there are two different kinds of quantites confused into a single economic thought. The set of all ordinals is not thinkable but the set of all cardinals may be ever larger. We get a third notion here of ordertypes that was not within the discussion of Dariwian cave, soft and hard men. Thus with different ordertypes we can see that where the arithmetical limits bounds an over-multiplication a different ordertype of the same cardinality may indeed permit growth where Darwin ONLY concluded competition or wedge. This will depend however on the Mendelian nature of the past hereditary constitution brought along to this boundary
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