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=================  the  non-constancy of species branching evolu-
tion gradual evolution natural selection  =================  Dear
Professor Mayr,

     Thank you for leaving with me a copy of your essay about
Darwin's Influence on Modern Thought.  I have read and reread it
with much interest.

     It has been several decades since I last read in the Origin
of Species; it left me, each time I looked at it, puzzled and
perplexed, aware that notwithstanding the simplicity of the
theory, it was, somehow, beyond my comprehension. That may be the
case because, as a physician, I have consciously striven to
restrain my judgment in the diagnosis and treatment of disease
from hypotheses which my own observation did not provide
opportunity to confirm and reconfirm.

     As I mentioned in our conversation, Darwin's thought has
long been a matter of great theoretical interest to me.  I avoid
the term "philosophical" as being unnecessarily pretentious.  I
reflect first of all on Darwin as a theologian, or if you prefer
as an anti-theologian, whose ideas severely limited the role of
deity in the devolution of natural events, whose teachings echo
in Nietsches flamboyant assertion: "Gott ist tot. Wir haben ihn
getoetet."  One may, if one wishes, identify Darwin as the most
conclusive contributor to the school of negative theologians who
over the centuries have purported to define deity by what it is
NOT.  At the same time, if I understand both theories correctly,
there is no contradiction between Darwins teachings about
evolution and Leibniz' hypothesis of a divinely ordained pre-
established harmony,

     I myself take no position with respect either to scientific
or to religious dogma.  Rather, I would like to try to take a
naturalists view of these matters, and to identify faith
(Glaube), whatever the reality or unreality of its divine object,
as an undeniable and inescapable character trait of human beings,
apparently essential to the emotional and intellectual existence
of many, if not of all humans, a trait which has, in the course
of centuries and millenia, alternately brought out the worst and
the best in mankind, a trait which may prove to have its own
evolutionary significance, and may in the end, if it leads to
global nuclear war, and the destruction of the human race,
provide conclusive empirical proof of the validity of Darwin's
theory of natural selection.

     My second comment concerns Darwins introduction of the
dimension of time into biological theory.  Should biology so
expanded be deemed history or cosmology?  Is there, or should
there be a distinction between the two?  Can one identify the
locus where history and cosmology merge into myth?  When I
observe my grandchildren playing with toy dinosaurs, I suspect
that in their imaginations these creatures of scientific
discovery play a role not too different from that which the
dragons of the Niebelungenlied played in mine.

     In trying to understand what history is, I turn unavoidably
to the history of my own life as that account of the past which
is most reliable, of which I can be most certain; and yet
precisely in this context I note how fragmentary and elusive my
memory.  If I were to compose an autobiography, (which I have no
intention of doing, ) I should discover myself, far from being
engaged in the recovery or even recapitulation of past
experience, instead to have embarked on something very different:
the creation, the invention, the synthesis of something whose
reality is not in the past but in the present: the telling of a
story.  How can the history of events remote from my experience
be more valid than the history of events that though I have
experienced them myself, they nonetheless strike me now as being
unreal.

     With respect to my perception of the history of my own life,
I am reminded of Hugo von Hofmannsthals Terzinen ueber
Vergaenglichkeit.  "Dies ist ein Ding das keiner voll aussinnt,
und viel zu grauenvoll als dasz man klage, dasz alles gleitet und
vorueberrinnt..."

As for the interpretation of events in which I am presently
enmeshed, I am reminded of the lines from Rilke: "Das was
geschieht hat einen solchen Vorsprung vor unserm Meinen, dasz
wirs nie einholen, und nie erfahren, wie es wirklich aussah."

     History is compelling not as apprehension of reality, but as
a communal, social representation of a pseudo-reality.  History
is not the past. History is the telling, the story of what
purports to be past....  but which is actually a variation of the
present that masquerades as the past.

     When Darwin recounts of the origin of species he leaves the
realm (Bereich) of natural science for that of what has been
called moral or cultural sciences, of most aptly, I think,
Geisteswissenschaften.

     Dawrwins theory is scientific in so far as it is observable;
in so far as it is demonstrable in the present.

     Die Vorstellung oder Behauptung, dasz ein Unternehmen, ein
Vorhaben wissenschaftlich sei, besagt (entails) dessen
gesellschaftliche Begruendung und Gebundenheit, Die Vorstellung
oder Behauptung, dasz ein Unternehmen, ein Vorhaben
wissenschaftlich sei, besagt dessen gesellschaftliche Begruendung
und Gebundenheit, besagt dessen Begruendung und Gebundenheit in
der Gesellschaft, in der Wechselwirkung der Menschen
untereinander.  Die Wirklichkeit welcher der wissenschaftliche
Satz entspricht ist anders als man zu meinen geneigt ist.  Die
Wahrheit (Wahrhaftigkeit) des wissenschaftlichen Satzes, der
wissenschaftlichen Ausfuehrung ist eine doppelte: erstens, dasz
sie wirksame Handlung ermoeglicht, und zweitens dasz sie einen
gemeinsamen Konsens darstellt.

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