MAYR: No. They weren't brought up with these ideas, though scientists like T. H. Huxley probably felt, as he said, "how stupid of me not to have thought of it."

EDGE: How do you account for the fact that in this country, despite the effect of Darwinism on many people in the scientific community, more and more people are god fearing and believe in the 8 days of creation?

MAYR: You know you cannot give a polite answer to that question.

EDGE: In this venue we appreciate impolite, impolitical, answers.

MAYR: They recently tested a group of schoolgirls? They asked where is Mexico? Do you know that most of the kids had no idea where Mexico is? I'm using this only to illustrate the fact that ­ and pardon me for saying so ­ the average American is amazingly ignorant about just about everything. If he was better informed, how could he reject evolution? If you don't accept evolution then most of the facts of biology just don't make sense. I can't explain how an entire nation can be so ignorant, but there it is.

EDGE: I understand that there is a facsimile of the first (1859) edition of Darwin's Origin of the Species.

MAYR: Yes and this is an interesting story. Darwin's importance has only been gradually acknowledged. Even 50 years ago, Darwin was just one of those people's names you learned was kind of important. That was it. Nobody read him. Well I published a very successful book for Harvard University Press in 1963 and this gave me the courage to go to the director of Harvard Press, Tom Wilson, and say to him, Tom, I have a great wish, a heart's desire, and that is to see a facsimile edition of the first edition of the Origin of Species. We have facsimile editions of all the great classics, but we haven't got one for Darwin. So he said all right, all right, we'll do it for you, even though we'll probably lose money since who's going to buy it? In 1964 they published this facsimile edition. That was almost 40 years ago. and at that time, the first few years I guess they sold about a couple hundred a year but much to everybody's surprise, sales did not drop off after all the libraries had their facsimile edition, but rather they picked up. After a while, they sold over a thousand a year, and then about 6­7 years ago I was informed by Harvard Press that for that particular year they had for the first time sold 2,500 copies. The last two years I have a report that they sold 3,000 copies a year! Now this shows you how an interest in Darwin has been steadily growing in spite of the great majority of ignorant people. People are beginning to want to know what Darwin really said, which for me is an absolutely marvelous development. You know there's an interesting side note that as a publisher you might be interested in. In the first edition of the Origin of the Species there's not a single misprint. What a document of the workmanship in 1859.

EDGE: Where do you think Darwinism is going to go in the next 50 years?

MAYR: Well, Darwinism will not have to do any going, because it's already here. In the last 50 years, ever since the "Evolutionary Synthesis" of the 1940s, the basic theory of Darwinism has not changed, with perhaps one exception, that is the question of the target of selection. What's the object of a selective act? For Darwin, who didn't know any better, it was the individual — and it turns out he was right.

An individual either survives or doesn't, an individual either reproduces or doesn't, an individual either reproduces very successfully or it doesn't. The idea that a few people have about the gene being the target of selection is completely impractical; a gene is never visible to natural selection, and in the genotype, it is always in the context with other genes, and the interaction with those other genes make a particular gene either more favorable or less favorable. In fact, Dobzhanksy, for instance, worked quite a bit on so-called lethal chromosomes which are highly successful in one combination, and lethal in another. Therefore people like Dawkins in England who still think the gene is the target of selection are evidently wrong. In the 30's and 40's, it was widely accepted that genes were the target of selection, because that was the only way they could be made accessible to mathematics, but now we know that it is really the whole genotype of the individual, not the gene. Except for that slight revision, the basic Darwinian theory hasn't changed in the last 50 years.