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Dear Professor Mayr,

     My wife and I have much occasion to thank you for your
generous invitation, for the exquisitely tasteful meal,
(schmackhaft und geschmackvoll) and of course for the
conversation, an event in my life rare as a solar eclipse, and by
the same token unforgettable. I am acutely aware of the value of
your time, and correspondingly grateful to you for your
willingness to lavish so much of it on our discussion.  Your
rejection of my ideas and indeed of my way of thinking do not
trouble me at all. Indeed, I consider disagreement between us to
be an index of mutual veracity, for in this both you and I agree
with Charles Darwin, that no two individuals are alike, and
therefore no two individuals can have the same ideas, and if they
cannot have the same ideas, no two individuals will agree, else
in purporting to agree they would be deceiving themselves or
lying to each other. The paradox implicit in my proposal to agree
that we cannot and that we must not try to agree does not escape
me, but I know not what to make of it.

     I am afflicted with staircase wit (Treppenwitz) and the most
compelling arguments come to mind on the way home from or on the
morning after the conversation. I admit that my writing them down
is an exercise in narcissism, I send them to you with my
apologies.  But the letter is the least intrusive instrument of
communication, it can so easily be laid aside or even discarded
unread; I do it myself, habitually and without prompting, to
escape distraction; and I respectfully invite you to do the same,
- and without prejudice to our relationship, to read no further.



                                  Sincerely,






























                           Post Script

     The following comments are a summary of my reflections
subsequent to our conversation. I am uncertain whether or not it
would be helpful to you to read them. I conclude, however, that
as a matter of probity I should leave this decision to you.  If
you read them, please interpret what I say in the context of my
ignorance.

     I am fascinated by the echos of Darwinism which I think I
hear reverberating from pre-Socratic antiquity: I read in
Darwin's inconstancy of species a parody of Heracleitus "All
things flow", in Darwin's randomness of variation, the
acknowledgement of Anaximanders belief that chaos
(indeterminateness) is the foundation of being, and in Darwin's
natural selection of competing individuals, corroboration of
Heracleitus dictum that strife is the origin of all things.

     The randomness of variation postulated by Darwin seems to me
to have important, if inapparent connotations.  In so far as he
describes the genesis of the most exquisite and intricate
structures as a matter of chance, Darwin denies the existence of
a scheme, a plan, a program by which they come into being, he
describes their appearance as something unpredictable, hence
unexplained, perhaps inexplicable and unknowable; which is
exactly the semantic expression employed for centuries by so-
called negative theology, which postulated that the essence of
God was that he was objectively unknown, a negative theology
which has its radical reference in the taxonomic denial of the
God of the burning bush, who when asked for his name, refused,
replying to Moses "I am that I am", thus founding the tradition
of negative theology, a skepticism which holds that deity exists
in not being definable.  Clearly the God who is not definable
could not be held responsible for creating the world.  That is
alright with me, and it surely circumvents the problems that
creationism poses for the evolutionist.

     As I read your lecture, "Die Autonomie der Biologie",
reprinted in the Naturwissenschaftliche Rundschau, it occurs to
me that there is some hazard that your claim for separate
criteria of truth applicable uniquely to the life sciences
represents an inadvertent lapse into vitalism, whose proponents,
if I understand correctly, insisted not on a specific "will"
(elan) or even on a special life "force", but merely pointed out
that an account of life requires certain unique descriptors which
are inapplicable to the physical sciences. The task that presents
itself, as I understand it, is to specify why, or in what
respects, the bio-criteria postulated by yourself, evolution,
population, and historical process, should not be deemed a
variation on the postulates of vitalism.

     It occurs to me also that the validity of Darwin's theory
does not depend upon a specific numerical time factor.  It is
immaterial whether an evolutionary process entails a billion, a
million, a hundred thousand, or even as little as a thousand
years, and there is no obstacle to shrinking the evolutionary
time-frame to an intuitively manageable dimension, to a social
and political present (Gegenwart); a thought-experiment that
leads unavoidably, as I understand it, to Social Darwinism, a
political orientation which if I am not mistaken, you also find
unpalatable.  I am reminded also that Darwin's influential
predecessor in population studies was the Reverend Thomas
Malthus, whose notions that the world's overpopulation must be
cured by famine and or disease is anathema to the Christian
belief in the benevolent God whose affection for the world and
its inhabitants is summarized in the word "agape".  I suspect
that as a prerequisite for the development of Darwin's theory,
the repudiation of the benevolence of God rivals in importance
the denial of his role in creation. And I suspect it is the
Malthusian indifference to (human) suffering and death which
offends biologists like Richard Lewontin and encumbers their
work.  It seems to me that it is only the enormous periodicity
allotted to evolution that makes it seemingly compatible with
humanistic ethics of any sort; as soon as the time-frame of
evolution is shrunk to intuitively manageable dimensions, the
destructiveness of natural selection becomes inescapable, and
this is the case even where the individual is protected by the
altruism of his immediate associates.  If ethical imperatives
different from those espoused by Nietzsche are required, they
must be imported from without historical biology and engrafted
upon Darwinism.  I am not sure where one would find them or how
one would go about reconciling them to Darwinism. But here (as
everywhere else) I may be speaking from ignorance, since I remain
unfamiliar with the writings of sociobiologists.

     Your rejection of a reductionist view of nature also gives
me to think.  Not that I have a vested interest in reductionism.
When employed by clumsy minds, it can be a very destructive
intellectual tool.  But I see it as an essential characteristics
of human thought, and I take satisfaction in trying to understand
it.  We have no alternative but to try to reduce experience to a
limited set of notions, because our minds are incapable of
grasping its complexity without reducing that complexity to a
finite, and in fact to a very small number of patterns. Is not
the very concept of evolution itself, an explanatory reduction of
a vast and literally unsurveyable panorama to a single, uniform,
typical process?

     I share your reservations about mechanistic interpretations;
and yet I see them also as unavoidable.  The alternative to the
machine is the "black box" whose function is defined by its input
and output, a function we are at a loss to duplicate except we
mechanize it, a function that must be translated into machine
language if it is to become comprehensible and susceptible to
being imitated by human effort.  The characteristic of a machine
is its accessibility.  It consists of discrete identifiable parts
whose interactions are evident to us.  We can manufacture the
components and place them in relationships that function, that
work, that get something done.  We can accomplish this only when
the parts are discreet and accessible, when their actions upon
one another are clear to us.  Once the parts lose their
discreteness and the relationships lose their transparency, the
engine won't start, the automobile won't move and we have to
walk.

     Although traditionally the parts of a machine are physical
objects, such as gears, wheels or pistons which transmit
mechanical forces and motions to each other, the mechanistic
principle applies equally to electrical circuits and to the
modulation of electrical impulses by computer programs. The
reduced, indivisible element, the "atom" in this situation, is
the presence or absence of an electrical pulse of minimal
duration; the processing of these impulses occurs by means of
integrated semiconductor circuits, the output of which are the
diverse functions which computers are able to perform.  I
interpret the digital computer to be a machine par excellence and
one of great complexity and power, the ultimate of machines that
have been built thus far; and the computer software, the programs
which determine its processes, are integral and essential parts
of the functioning machine.

     To argue that the living organism is controlled both by
physical causality and by a genetic program, but is not
susceptible to mechanistic interpretation, seems to me to ignore
the circumstance that we in fact conceive of the genetic program
as a parody of the program of a digital computer; and it seems a
contradiction to assert at one and the same time that the living
creature is not subject to a mechanistic interpretation but that
its development is determined by a program which can be
interpreted only as the logical control-mechanism of a machine.
I interpret the sequencing of genes to be the collection of data
that serve as integral and essential parts of a machine model,
and the identification of the genes themselves as the
designations of parts of a machine large portions of which remain
to be described.

     A Metabiology

     If I remember correctly, one of the most salient differences
of opinion between us became obvious when I considered the claims
and representations (Vorstellungen) of (historical) biology in
the context of how little I know about even contemporary history,
and most specifically, how evanescent my memory, how fragmentary
my reconstruction of my own past life.  If I in fact do not have
access to my own past, if my own past is inaccessible to me, what
does it mean when I purport to entertain a biological theory
which goes back not a hundred or a thousand years, but which in
fact presumes to declare what it was that happened millions of
years ago.

     It is necessary therefore for me to make an explicit
accounting of the limitations of my knowledge, and to reconcile
this limited knowledge with the presumption, and indeed with the
need, to venture to make global judgments.  I have referred to
the presumptuousness, given how little I "know", of purporting to
make any comments at all on these difficult and complex
questions.  Yet there seems to me to be no absolute criterion by
which one might determine how "much" knowledge or for that matter
what kind of knowledge is requisite to forming any opinion at all
on the subject matter in question.

     It seems to me self-evident that the "knowledge", no matter
how we think of it, possessed by any individual is unavoidably
limited.  Complete and comprehensive knowledge is an ideal, which
is surely approached far more closely by the professional than by
the dilletante; but which is truly attained by no one.  Hence,
with respect to the incompleteness of the knowledge on the basis
of which we reach conclusions, we are all of us, more or less, in
the same boat.  It is unavoidable that we should think and judge
in the absence of comprehensive knowledge.  We have no
alternative but to think and to judge from the standpoint, from
the perspective of relative ignorance: indeed interpretation of
thought in the shadow of ignorance might ultimately prove to be
more valuable, because ignorance is so much more prevalent than
perfect or near perfect knowledge, to say the least.  Relative
ignorance is universal; while the comprehensive all inclusive
knowledge that we idealize is nonexistent.

     Therefore, as I think, I must accept the limitations of my
knowledge, and try to make a virtue of necessity.  I observe that
what little I know invariably suffices to expand, like a gas
filling the vessel that contains it, and that knowledge, a little
or a lot fulfills for me the same important functions.

     My knowledge satisfies me, by enabling me to orient myself;
it makes me confident of my surroundings; it makes me feel at
home. It enables me to understand what would otherwise have
puzzled me. It enables me to accomplish what would otherwise have
seemed beyond my powers.  And the obvious defects in my knowledge
no longer trouble me.  The qualification to which all my
knowledge is subject, namely that even where it is not downright
erroneous, it is incomplete, this inescapable limitation
precludes me from being dogmatic and requires that I consider all
my conclusions to be tentative.

     Idealization, de-idealization and "meta" science.

     Your lecture Die Autonomie der Biologie also raises in my
mind important issues about a conceptual process which I refer to
as idealization: the propensity of our thought to represent
(consider) what is named as an entity, a propensity which, if I
remember correctly, was considered in some detail by Plato,
especially in his dialogue, the Sophist. The purported
"identification" of biological species seems to me an eminent
example of idealization as does the enumeration of areas of
knowledge as specific sciences, as Naturwissenschaften oder
Geisteswissenschaften. Idealization is an unavoidable consequence
and an integral component a) of processes of perception,
specifically of vision and hearing, - but about that elsewhere,
and b) of all processes of communication.  To idealization is
attributable much of the efficacy of perception and
communication; and certain inconsistencies and incongruities in
perception and communication may be made explicit (profiled) by
identifying the idealization process and rescinding its
dialectically, for purposes of logical experiment. The rescission
of ideals, be it in perceoption of in communication, I refer to
as de-idealization.

     Where idealization leads to order, de-idealization leads to
disorder to the dissolution of order.

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