MAYR: If the individual were the only target of selection, this would indeed be an inevitable conclusion. However, small social groups that compete with each other, such as the groups of hunter-gatherers in our human ancestry, were ­ as groups ­ also targets of selection. Groups, the members of which actively cooperated with each other and showed much reciprocal helpfulness, had a higher chance for survival than groups that did not benefit from such cooperation and altruism. Any genetic tendency for altruism would therefore be selected in a species consisting of social groups. In a social group, altruism may add the to fitness. The founders of religions and philosophies erected their ethical system on this basis.

EDGE: What important questions have I not asked you?

MAYR: One question that is very difficult one to answer is whether the Darwinian framework is robust enough to remain the same for many years, which I think it is, yes. The real question is what the burning issues in evolutionary biology are today. To answer that you've got to get back into functional biology. Take, for instance, a particular gene. Say this gene makes amino acids that determine which side of the egg is to become the anterior end of the larva and which will become the rear. We know that's what it does but how it can do that is something about which we don't have the slightest clue. That's one of the big problems, but it's in the realm of proteins and functional biology rather than of DNA and evolutionary biology.

In evolutionary biology we have species like horseshoe crabs. The horseshoe crab goes back in the fossil record over two hundred million years without any major changes. So obviously they have a very invariant genome type, right? . Wrong, they don't. Study the genotype of a series of horseshoe crabs and you'll find there's a great deal of genetic variation. How come, in spite of all this genetic variation, they haven't changed at all in over two hundred million years while other members of their ecosystem in which they were living two hundred million years ago are either extinct or have developed into something totally different? Why did the horseshoe crabs not change? That's the kind of question that completely stumps us at the present time.

Then there are issues that no one besides a few biologists can fully fathom. Like how and why do prokaryotes, bacteria that have no nucleus, differ in their evolution from eukaryotes, organisms that do have an nucleus. Eukaryotes have sexual reproduction, genetic recombination and well-formed chromosomes, whereas prokaryotes have none of the above. So how do they get genetic variation, which they must have in order to survive according to the principle of natural selection? The answer is that prokaryotes exchange genes with each other unilaterally; one bacterium injects a set of DNA into another bacterium, which is an amazing process. Genes of course also go from one chromosome to another via this old-fashioned process that all bacteria use to reproduce. Beyond that, we don't really know how much such gene transfer occurs in higher organisms.

EDGE: A number of years ago I was talking to a German publisher about a new book on Darwinism. "I can't publish it," he said. "It's just too hot to handle." Why is Darwin so dangerous, to use Dan Dennett's phrase?

MAYR: I have a good deal of contact with some very good young German evolutionary biologists, and I'm constantly amazed how preoccupied they are with political concerns. It's just that they have gone through a series of political changes, from the Weimar Republic, to the Nazi period, Soviet occupation, DDR, and finally a United Germany, and throughout this time, everything has always been colored by politics. People got their jobs because they were Nazis, or because they were anti-Nazis, and so forth. They have to find a way to purge this from their system. In Germany, they scrutinize all leaders in a field and check all the records as to whether they had been Nazis, which Nazi organizations they might have belonged to, whether they published either papers or books that indicate that they had been Nazis or Communist, etc.

They think they have to do all this cleansing of science so that people can't go and say well you didn't tell us that so-and-so was a Nazi or a Communist. Scientists just have to cope with that. On the other hand, translations of my books that were published in Germany have been very successful. In fact, one of them is so successful that the German printing has run out and I can't persuade the publisher to republish it. He asks why he should publish another German edition of the book, when everybody reads the English edition. Which is true.

EDGE: Recently the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung began an initiative in their Feuilletton (Arts and Culture) section to present popular science and big scientific ideas to the public.

MAYR: I would say that generally you have far more food for the intellect in foreign newspapers than you have in American ones, except a little bit in papers like the Washington Post or The New York Times. It's remarkable; you pick up a German newspaper and there's all sorts of good reading material in it. Whereas we have very few such general interest articles in our papers. The focus in our papers tends to be almost exclusively on news rather than on education.

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