β Scribed by Richard M. Burian
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
is a phenomenon of nature. Having turned eightyfive, he is publishing at a rate that the youngest and most energetic scholars should envy. He continues to produce new work covering a broad range of topics in systematics, evolution, ornithology, history of biology, philosophy of biology, and more. The present volume includes a substantial portion of his recent writings on the philosophy of biology. It will come as no surprise to the readers of this journal to learn both that there is a prodigious amount of new work in Mayr's book and that, nonetheless, it is vintage Mayr, reworking and staking out anew positions that are, on the whole, familiar.
The book contains twenty-eight essays (supplemented by nine introductions); twenty-three have been published previously, but only five before 1980. Thus, most of the essays are recent, lightly reworked for the present volume. The reworking is generally helpful, though it could have been done better. For example, it would have been useful to remove some more redundancies, including internal repetitions within essays (compare, e.g., pp. 240 and 251), and to collect the references (which fill some fifty pages, scattered throughout the volume) at the end of the book in a single standardized format. Similarly, some essays might have been updated; an example is the useful treatment of "Weismann's Growth as an Evolutionist," which could be improved in light of Frederick B. Churchill's recent work on August Weismann, presented in part at the same symposium as the lecture on which Mayr's essay is based. 1
π SIMILAR VOLUMES
Some of these views can be found in Mayr' s collection of his articles in Evolution and the Diversity of Life (Cambridge,