p. 13: But if Mayr himself was an unconscious 'physicalist', why did he argue so forcefully against the machine theory of life? In part his dissatisfaction with this approach can be explained as a residue of earlier experiences. When he started to argue for the autonomy of biology in the early 1960s, the unique, emergent characteristics of organisms were ignored by the philosophy of science which was dominated by physics (Greene 1994; Hull 1994). In this situation Mayr not only criticised (...) this particular neglect as reductionism, but questioned the usefulness of the physicalist approach for biology in general. In recent decades this situation has clearly changed and this was also due to Mayr's relentless fight for the recognition of the unique aspects of biology. Nevertheless he stuck to his broad rejection and ignored developments toward a more sophisticated view (cf. Emmeche, Koppe and Stjernfelt 1997). But there is probably more to it. His second motivation is an emotional aversion against connotations and implications of the word 'machine'. The view that organisms-including humans!-are 'survival machines', 'robot vehicles' programmed to preserve their genes conveys a deterministic and mechanistic view that is perceived by many persons as a gross 'narcissistic insult' (Freud 1917, pp. 6, 7). It is a view that Mayr definitely did not appreciate. (shrink)

The relatively late acceptance of Darwinism in German biology and paleontology is frequently attributed to a lingering of Lamarckism, a persisting influence of German idealistic Naturphilosophie and Goethean romanticism. These factors are largely held responsible for the vitalism underlying theories of saltational and orthogenetic evolutionary change that characterize the writings of many German paleontologists during the first half of the 20th century. A prominent exponent of that tradition was Karl Beurlen, who is credited with having been the first German paleontologist (...) to present a full-fledged theory of saltational evolution and orthogenetic change. A review of Beurlen's writings reveals motives and concerns far more complex, however, and firmly rooted in contemporary völkisch thought and Aryan Science. Beurlen's mature theory of evolution can indeed be understood as his own contribution to Aryan Geology and Biology, tainted as it was with National-Socialist ideology. Evolutionary biologists of the time who opposed the theories of Beurlen and likeminded authors, i.e., idealistic morphology, typology, saltational change, orthogenesis and cyclism did so on Darwinian principles, which ultimately prevailed. But at the time when the battle was fought, their adherence to the principle of natural selection was likewise ideologically tainted, namely in terms of racial theory. National-Socialist ideology was unable to forge a unity of evolutionary theory in Germany even amongst those of its proponents who endorsed this ideology. (shrink)

The German synthesis of evolutionary theory that grew out of opposition to idealistic morphology has been anchored in the systematic work at the species level and below pursued by the Berlin School around Erwin Stresemann (involving Bernhard Rensch and Ernst Mayr), in the 1939 German translation of Dobzhansky’s Genetics and the Origin of Species, and in a 1943 anthology on evolution edited by Gerhard Heberer. The latter volume opened with a philosophical essay written by Hugo Dingler that was intended to (...) provide the theoretical foundation for the theory of descent. Dingler and Heberer not only shared a commitment to the Darwinian evolutionary mechanisms of random mutation and natural selection, but also drew from Darwinism the justification for racial hygiene and eugenics. Dingler’s “unequivocal-methodological system” is a meta-scientific construct that offers no ontological grounding of evolutionary theory. Dingler’s voluntarism is subjectivist and stipulative and for those reasons ineffective in a critique of idealistic morphology. Dingler claimed descent with modification as a historical fact, but dealt only marginally with evolutionary mechanisms, and did not touch on issues of phylogeny reconstruction. (shrink)

During the early twentieth century, the Swiss Zoologist Adolf Naef (1883–1949) established himself as a leader in German comparative anatomy and higher level systematics. He is generally labeled an ‘idealistic morphologist’, although he himself called his research program ‘systematic morphology’. The idealistic morphology that flourished in German biology during the first half of the twentieth century was a rather heterogeneous movement, within which Adolf Naef worked out a special theoretical system of his own. Following a biographical sketch, we present an (...) English translation of a previously unpublished typescript from Naef’s estate, which Naef intended as the introduction to a textbook on Comparative Anatomy for which he was unable to find a publisher before his sudden death in 1949. The typescript contains Naef’s mature thoughts with unprecedented conciseness, focus, and clarity. The density of Naef’s text warrants a historical and contextual explication of its content. (shrink)