EDGE: Where do the generation of William Hamilton, George Williams and John Maynard Smith fit in?

MAYR: Hamilton never denied the primacy of the individual. In the case of G. C. Williams, I have come to the unhappy conclusion that not many of the proposals of his best known book, Adaptation and Natural Selection (1996) are valid.

EDGE: All right, so Darwinism isn't going to change in 50 years, but the people writing about it certainly are changing.

MAYR: Every year one if not two books come out about Darwinian theory. Many of them are favorable, which is fine, and yet as many others attempt to improve or revise Darwin's original ideas, coming up with some so-called new theory that is invariably total nonsense.

EDGE: I can imagine what you think about evolutionary psychology.

MAYR: Not necessarily! To tell the truth, I don't know much about it, but I have heard there's a field called evolutionary epistemology. They use a very simple Darwinian formula that can really be stated in a single sentence. If you have a lot of variation, more than you can cope with, only the most successful will remain. That is how things happen. In epistemology and countless other fields. Variation and elimination.

EDGE: Who's notable in that field?

MAYR: Quite a few people though I can't recall their names right now. Suffice it to say that there are many more evolutionary epistemologists in Germany and Austria than in this country.

EDGE: It seems to me that Darwin is much better known in England than in the United States. Books about Darwin sell well and people debate the subjects. Here in America what passes for intellectual life doesn't necessarily include reading and having an appreciation of Darwin.

MAYR: Yet the funny thing is if in England, you ask a man in the street who the greatest living Darwinian is, he will say Richard Dawkins. And indeed, Dawkins has done a marvelous job of popularizing Darwinism. But Dawkins' basic theory of the gene being the object of evolution is totally non-Darwinian. I would not call him the greatest Darwinian. Not even Maynard Smith. Maynard Smith was raised in math and physics, and he was an airplane engineer in the last war. For the most part, he still thinks like a mathematician and engineer. His most successful contribution to evolutionary biology has been applying so-called game theory to evolution. Personally I have — and now I perhaps expose myself to a great deal of criticism, but regardless — I have always been a little unhappy about that application of game theory. What animal ever, in a confrontation, would say, now let me figure it out, would it be better to be timid or would it be better to be bold? That's not the way organisms think. You get — and somebody would have to work this out since I'm not a mathematician — exactly the same result if you have a population with every animal acting with a different mixture of timidity and boldness. Individuals at one end of the curve are very timid and have little boldness, individuals in the middle of the curve have an appropriate mixture of timidity and boldness, and individuals at the other end of the curve are very bold. Somewhere in between, in a given environment with a given set of enemies and competitors, is the best mixture of the two tendencies. You get the same results with game theory, but in my opinion, the better solution has a much more biological, Darwinian approach.

EDGE: How can the evolution of human ethics be reconciled with Darwinism? Doesn't natural selection always favor selfishness?