Ernst Mayr Interview (page: 6 / 8) The Darwin of the 20th Century	Print Interview

If Charles Darwin were here today and you could ask him one or two questions, what would you want to ask him?

Ernst Mayr: It would be a lot of personal questions. I would ask him why, after he had developed such an interesting and modern species concept, under the guidance of various zoological consultants, as represented in his notebooks, he suddenly, under the influence of botanists, switched back to a strictly topological species concept, which got him in all sorts of troubles and prevented him from solving what had been the object of The Origin of Species, namely the problem of speciation, which is not solved in that book. "Why did you believe the botanists in all these things, when all the information they gave you was wrong? Didn't you see that what they said was in conflict with what you knew from the zoological observations? Why did you follow the botanists instead of the zoologists?" That's a question, of course, he wouldn't like to hear.

Do you think his friendship with Joseph Hooker led him astray in that regard?

Ernst Mayr: It wasn't so much Hooker. It was a number of others, a man by the name of Watson and two or three other botanists who completely gave him wrong information on species and varieties. Darwin confused the two kinds of varieties: populations that are different and individuals that are different. It wasn't Hooker actually, but he certainly was surrounded by botanists. One reason perhaps was that his principal zoological consultant, Strickland, got killed in an accident. He lost his major zoological consultant and that undoubtedly played a role in this.

When you were doing your field work in New Guinea, did it ever occur to you that you would become the world famous biologist you are today?

Ernst Mayr: I had no idea. In fact, I'm still a little bit puzzled when people say I am a world famous person. I just do my work and publish it and have a wonderful time, and I have never tried to catch public attention by going to the media and doing the things some of my colleagues do. I will not mention any names. So no, it never occurred to me and I don't think my family realizes it. I was interviewed about three or four years ago by Ms. Yoon of The Washington Post, and I mentioned that I had two daughters. She interrupted me and said, "Did they realize how famous you are?" And I said to her, "I hope not." And I really mean that. You see, I basically deal with relatively unspectacular kinds of things. The people that deal with the spectacular issues, of course, are much more famous. I am famous among my peers but I'm not famous among the general public.

Lots of people have great minds and great potential but they don't succeed. Why do you think you've succeeded where others have not? What abilities of yours made it work so well?

Ernst Mayr: I have been thinking about this question myself. One of the answers is that...

Very often I see a statement made by somebody which clearly to me is wrong, and then I work out what is the real right answer, and this happens to me very often. Of course, some of these answers that I find are already in the literature, but sometimes I am the first one who makes that discovery and I think this attention to wrong statements and endeavor to correct them is part of the answer. I always think about things, and if something puzzles me... Well, that of course was one of Darwin's secrets. Whenever something puzzled him, he tried find a theory. He made a conjecture, as (Karl) Popper would call it, and see if it worked out and that's true even today. I go walking with a friend every day and constantly he's amazed at me. I see something and I begin to ask questions. Why are these big rocks here? There shouldn't be any big rocks here, you know. Things like that. I like to ask questions and I think that is part of the secret of my success, that I'll ask questions and occasionally I'll find a very good answer.
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What would you most like to be remembered for a century from now?

Ernst Mayr: Well, this has changed in the course of my life. In my early career, my development of the so-called new systematics was the thing I was very proud of, and at the species level everybody followed my idea. The latest thing I'm most proud of that has not yet been fully appreciated by the philosophers is my development of the philosophy of biology.

I am the first one who clearly has said that there are aspects of biology that have nothing to do with vitalism that are so different from anything in the physical sciences that biology simply requires a separate philosophy. For instance, biopopulation, the whole concept of biopopulation, is something that is alien to anybody in the physical sciences and yet it is one of the basic philosophical concepts of biology. The idea that in the physical sciences anything that happens has only one causation and that's the natural laws. In biology everything and anything that happens has two sets of causations, the natural laws and the genetic programs. That's just two of these really fundamental differences between biology and the physical sciences and I'm the first person that has really made this clear and has pointed this out.
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Is this the famous distinction between ultimate causes and proximate causes?

Ernst Mayr: That is another aspect of the same distinction, exactly. Another thing is that theories in the physical sciences are always based on natural laws. Natural laws like they have in the physical sciences, we don't have in biology. No specific ones. We have regularities that are sometimes referred to as laws, but they're not the same as the natural laws of the physical sciences. Theories in biology are invariably based on concepts, whether it is the concept of natural selection or "resources" or whatever you name selection. It's a concept that is the basis of any biological field.

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