What Makes Biology Unique? : Considerations on the Autonomy of a Scientific Discipline

Rating:
Summary: What Has Made Dr. Mayr Unique?
Review: I was glad to receive this book for Christmas from my brother, and I read it in two days. The book does exactly what it sets out to do: explain the difficulties of applying the theory of evolution to daily tasks of the biologist: discerning between different species and different populations of the SAME species.

The fact that makes biology a unique discipline is this: there is not one, but TWO causalities one need consider: the normal statistical-chemical causality all empirical scientists deal with, and the running of a genetic program, established by millenia of evolutionary happenstances, which provides the "why" which many authors have wrongly considered to be anthropomorphism. To quote Dr. Mayr (p. 90): "However, organisms are subject also to a second set of causal factors, the information provided by their genetic program. There is no activity, movement, or behavior of an organism that is not influenced by the genetic program."
He goes on to clearly explain that understanding this genetic program has only recently been possible through the collaboration of genetics, cytology and molecular biology.
Dr. Mayr goes on to review and critique many recent writers on biology, and to point to exactly which parts of the unique study of bology they have misread, confused, or misunderstood. It is all excellent entertaining reading -- and quite astonishing for a man 100 years old. It is not too much to say that the world owes this amazing man an inclaculable debt for the wisdom and clarity of his studies spanning eight decades. We will miss him.

Rating:
Summary: A great overview
Review: This is a great overview of evolutionary thought and history. The chapters are some of his past works improved upon. He explains why there has been such trouble between evolutionists, and shows many mistaken ideas presented by Dawkins and Gould.

I would recommend this book so the reader might correct any incorrect information he might have picked up from someone not as knowledgeable about philosophy/Biology as Mayr. He clearly presents his ideas with better force than many authors of books on Biology. Perhaps you may also gain more respect for Biology apart from Chemistry and Physics.

I would also recommend his book, What Evolution Is, because he covers a lot of things in much more detail than in this newer book -- due to a broader overview in the current title.

Rating:
Summary: Masterful encapsulation of biology's unique claims
Review: This work is a crowning survey of the claims of biology, defining it as an independent science, not a secondary offspring of physics and chemistry.
The role of a philosophy of biology is rescued and clarified; misconceptions about Darwinism (6 theories, not one), speciation, and variation, above all, natural selection are rectified. A final chapter offers a sobering assessment of the possibilities for finding extraterrestrial life, while exploring the utterly freak nature of intelligence. Another chapter ably dismisses the relevance of Thomas Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" for biological science. A minor quibble is a few references missing from sources' listings, but Mayr's delineation of the principles and principal, as well as lesser players in biology's emergence is magisterially unequalled. Probably the final book that this giant of modern biology will undertake, published in this Mayr's centenarian year.