Vol. 19 No. 19 · 2 October 1997
pages 37-38 | 3530 words
Reconstituted Chicken
Philip Kitcher
- This is Biology by Ernst Mayr
Harvard, 340 pp, £19.95, April 1997, ISBN 0 674 88468 X
Ernst Mayr is one of the century’s pre-eminent Darwinian evolutionists, who, in the past two decades, has published a magisterial history of biology and many seminal philosophical essays. From the title of this new book, one might expect a tour of the current state of the life sciences, made accessible to non-specialists. His selection of topics, and his way of writing about them, suggest, however, that he is less interested in communicating substantive pieces of biology than in cultivating a particular way of seeing the subject – an attitude that would appear to derive from a pre-occupation with the ideas and controversies of the past. Specifically, Mayr wants to oppose the view that biology is a science inferior to physics, to campaign for philosophical and historical approaches to the sciences that do not see all science in the image of physics, to advertise the vitality of particular branches of biology, and to defend the view that the sciences can be understood in terms of reason and progress.
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Letters
Vol. 19 No. 22 · 13 November 1997
From Reviel Netz
Arguing for the reality of a continuous progress in science, Philip Kitcher (LRB, 2 October) dismisses as follows what he sees as the hiatus of the Copernican revolution: ‘we can take comfort in the fact that [Ptolemaic] tradition was not particularly successful: thus, if the concern is that an apparently successful scientific tradition can be overthrown by something radically different, the right response is to emphasise the differences between the successes of current sciences and those achieved by medieval astronomers.’ Someone ought to speak up for medieval astronomers. In what sense could Ptolemaic tradition be considered ‘unsuccessful’? It gave very good predictions. It was mathematically deep and elegant. Modern propaganda notwithstanding, it was even economic. Compared to most current science, it must be considered near-perfect. Of course it was wrong, but so are we all. Kitcher is probably unduly impressed by the fact that the Earth moves around the Sun and not vice versa, but this is not a very important feature of the geometry of the solar system (motion is, after all, relative). It is now a commonplace among historians of astronomy that Copernicus was not so different from Ptolemy; nor Tycho Brahe so different from Copernicus, nor Kepler from Tycho Brahe, nor again Newton from Kepler: there is no need to insult the medievals in order to get a proper sense of progress in science.
It is true that during this gradual process the nature of the question has altered. Today, we understand solar theory as a study not so much of the structure of the heavens, but of their workings. Thomas Kuhn was intrigued by such sea-changes, but one can only agree with Kitcher that, however fascinating, such changes in the choice of question leave many continuities in science untouched.
Reviel Netz
Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge
