EDGE: How does that pertain to Darwin?

MAYR: Well Darwin showed that such essentialist typology was absolutely wrong. Darwin, though he didn't realize it at the time, invented the concept of biopopulation, which is the idea that the living organisms in any assemblage are populations in which every individual is uniquely different, which is the exact opposite of such a typological concept as racism. Darwin applied this populational idea quite consistently in the discovery of new adaptations though not when explaining the origin of new species.

Another idea that Darwin refuted was that of teleology, which goes back to Aristotle. During Darwin's lifetime, the concept of teleology, or the use of ultimate purpose as a means of explaining natural phenomena, was prevalent. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant based his philosophy on Newton's laws. When he tried the same approach in a philosophy of living nature, he was totally unsuccessful. Newtonian laws didn't help him explain biological phenomena. So he invoked Aristotle's final cause in his Critique of Judgement. However, explaining evolution and biological phenomena with the idea of teleology was a total failure.

To make a long story short, Darwin showed very clearly that you don't need Aristotle's teleology because natural selection applied to bio-populations of unique phenomena can explain all the puzzling phenomena for which previously the mysterious process of teleology had been invoked.

The late philosopher, Willard Van Orman Quine, who was for many years probably America's most distinguished philosopher — you know him, he died last year — told me about a year before his death that as far as he was concerned, Darwin's greatest achievement was that he showed that Aristotle's idea of teleology, the so-called fourth cause, does not exist.

EDGE: Is this an example of Occam's Razor?

MAYR: It's that in part as well, but what's crucial is the fact that something that can be carefully analyzed, like natural selection, can give you answers without your having to invoke something you cannot analyze like a teleological force.

Now a third one of Darwin's great contributions was that he replaced theological, or supernatural, science with secular science. Laplace, of course, had already done this some 50 years earlier when he explained the whole world to Napoleon. After his explanation, Napoleon replied, "where is God in your theory?" And Laplace answered, "I don't need that hypothesis." Darwin's explanation that all things have a natural cause made the belief in a creatively superior mind quite unnecessary. He created a secular world, more so than anyone before him. Certainly many forces were verging in that same direction, but Darwin's work was the crashing arrival of this idea and from that point on, the secular viewpoint of the world became virtually universal.

So Darwin really had an amazing impact, not just on evolutionary theory, but on many aspects of everyday human thought. My firm belief is that each period in world history has a particular set of ideas that are the Zeitgeist of that period. And what causes this Zeitgeist? The answer usually is that there are a couple of important books that have been responsible for everybody's thinking. The number one book in this realm is, of course, the Bible. Then for many years, the answer might have been Karl Marx's Das Kapital. There was a short period when Freud was mentioned (though I don't think he's mentioned anymore by anyone besides the Freudians). The next one — and there is no doubt in my mind that Darwin's Origin of Species was the next one — not only secularized science, gave us the story of evolution, but also produced hosts of really basic theoretical concepts, like bio-populationism and, as I showed, the repudiation of teleology. No one before Darwin had introduced these ideas or had advanced them so forcefully.

EDGE: Not even the scientific community outside of evolutionary biologists?