Nature, Freedom, and Responsibility: Ernst Mayr and Isaiah Berlin - eminent scientists from early 20 century - Abstract

Social Research, Winter, 2000 by Strachan Donnelley

As moral beings, we humans are faced with an increasingly urgent theoretical and practical task for which we are singularly ill prepared: thoughtfully considering as one human communities, nature, and our long-term ethical responsibilities to the human and natural future. Sociobiology aside, for too long humans and wider animate nature have been examined apart from one another and not in their essential interactions, whether in the biological and ecological sciences, the social sciences, philosophy and ethics, theology, or practical policy and action. To counter this trend and squarely face the philosophical and moral challenge, I want to undertake a comparative study of Ernst Mayr and Isaiah Berlin.

Why bring together Ernst Mayr, the eminent twentieth-century evolutionary biologist and theorist, and Isaiah Berlin, the equally eminent political philosopher and historian of ideas? What might they jointly contribute to an articulation of a moral worldview for the future? More than we might expect, given that one is a professional naturalist, the other a "human culturalist"--two camps often, if not invariably, at loggerheads, the first mainly concerned with the natural evolution of organic life, the other with the expressions and social institutions of human beings. Yet if deep and fundamental analogies and commonalities--as well as differences--can be found in the thought of Mayr and Berlin, our philosophical and moral ears ought to prick up. Humans and nature are brought closer together in philosophical understanding and at least the outlines of a timely and comprehensive moral worldview may come into sight.

To start, Mayr and Berlin share certain biographical coincidences that are, in the end, significant. Both were born in Europe--the one a Christian (if not avowed atheist), the other a Jew. Both lived through most of the twentieth century, with its fateful and cataclysmic events, in Anglo-American countries: Mayr in the United States, Berlin in Great Britain. Both had European-style educations and sensibilities, particularly an authentic and central interest in the history of ideas, the one chiefly biological and philosophical, the other cultural and philosophical. And both, as their writings demonstrate, are convinced that ideas matter, whether in scientific exploration, human history, or everyday life.

Mayr and Berlin believe in the power and constitutive necessity of worldviews in human affairs. Mayr is straightforwardly concerned with developing and articulating a Darwinian worldview that comprehends not only animate nature but also human life, which, as a scientist and naturalist, he conceives to be carried out within evolutionary and ecological parameters. Berlin in his own more or less indirect or "fox-like" way explores the foundations or lineaments of a politically liberal worldview.

What is striking and important, as we shall see, is that Mayr and Berlin have common intellectual enemies or antagonists and are lured and animated by analogous features of natural and human reality. Both cast a relentlessly critical eye on all forms of cosmic teleology (purpose), crude determinism (scientific or other), and metaphysical mischief (simplistic forms of a priori, rationalistic thinking). Both focus their intellectual attention and ethical concern on fundamental themes of diversity, pluralism, community, and the significance, practically and morally, of individuals, human or other.

Ernst Mayr

We may begin with Ernst Mayr and the broad strokes of his account of the Darwinian revolution in biology, which he considers so profound and far reaching that it moves well beyond scientific theory and constitutes a genuine shift in philosophical and moral outlook, whether or not most of us have made this shift or adequately fleshed out its implications (Mayr, 1991: 101).

Mayr's claim is that Darwin's theory of the evolution of all life by common descent, behavioral and genetic variation, and natural selection challenges core Western cultural and intellectual traditions that trace their roots back to Plato, the pre-Socratics, and beyond, calling into question central and fundamental presuppositions.

According to Darwinian thought, evolution is an eminently natural process, marked fundamentally by historical dynamisms, causal contexts, contingencies, and the particularity and uniqueness of biological entities. The first great pillar of Western tradition to fall is cosmic teleology: nature conceived as the straightforward grand design of a grand divine designer (Mayr, 1991: 50). Rather, nature in passing engenders its own forms of organic order--genetic, organismal, communal (populational), ecosystemic, bioregional, and biospheric. There is a recurring evolutionary two-step--genetic variation (genetic mutation and sexual recombination) and natural (and sexual) selection--that favors those who can survive to reproduce (by whatever means: adaptive advantage, luck, or other; singly or in combination) (46, 68 ff.). The evolutionary two-step challenges, of course, central Judeo-Christian traditions and theologies in which creation of the world is intelligently (rationally) directed.