John C. Greene and Ernst Mayr, Dueling Philosophies of Science
January 30th, 2010 — -I am just reading this: Debating Darwin – Adventures of a Scholar, by John C. Greene.
A wonderful mind. I regret that I didn’t look him up in 2007, when I first picked up the book…
Of all the writing in this book, his correspondence zings loudest and clearest, (as it does with many of us – we know our audience, and are trying to make our point with wit and force). His mind so nicely, cleanly and lucidly understands and separates the biologists’ fiction of having it both ways: That we have a supernaturally all-powerful, choosing, remaking, selecting and altering “nature,” always spurring on life to ‘greater’ accomplishment and ‘higher’ levels of expression; which we also and simultaneously must, by definition regard as a dead, ‘chance-driven’ evolutionary machine.
The book takes the form of several essays, together with long excerpts from considerable correspondences with two evolutionary biologists, Theodosius Dobzhansky, and Ernst Mayr. Below is an excerpt from one exchange with Mayr.
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