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Christina Cunnane's picture

Mayr's Evolution

Throughout Mayr's book, he continually praises evolution like it was practically his own child. He idolizes Darwin and probably has a shrine to him somewhere in his house. He has written over a dozen books, most of which are about biology and evolution. What Evolution Is is filled with quotes such as "What made Darwin such a great scientist and intellectual innovator? He was a superb observer, endowed with insatiable curiosity." and the evidence shows "how remarkably congruent are the conclusions drawn from the most diversified branches of biology, which all support evolution. Indeed, these findings would make no sense in any other explanation." It is quite obvious that Mayr believes that evolution is fact. Truths must exist and evolution is a truth. He mentions several times throughout the book that all other stories to explain this set of observations are unfit and just plain crazy. It is quite obvious from this book that Mayr is in love with evolution, Darwin, and himself.

However, in the last chapter of the book, The Frontiers of Evolutionary Biology, Mayr doesn't give evolution enough credit. He explains how amazing evolution is because it can explain everything in science. He mentions only how science can benefit from evolution and nothing else. Even Professor Grobstein who doesn't believe in truths, and therefore, doesn't believe evolution can be the truth, gives evolution more credit. We are learning in class that evolution can explain almost everything, especially literature. Everything is constantly evolving. Even our discussion about science vs art was an example of evolution, when we didn't even get to address it.

I think that if Mayr was to adopt this method of thinking about evolution, he'd be even more in love with the idea. He would be able to explain everything, and write infinitely more books about evolution, and maybe this time, he'd have original ideas in them! And not just citations from his previous books.

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