Assembling language from spare parts

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Gary,

       Liz would certainly be supportive of your interest in both  
Werner and Mayr. (And, of course, Darwin.) Nothing was dearer to her  
heart than the issue of new machines out of old parts (unless it  
might have been links between language and gesture).   I can't  
imagine that she (or Labov) would have any problem at all agreeing  
with you regarding the importance of both quantitative and  
qualitative change.  The point of divergence would be when you rely  
on facts regarding duplication and divergence to defend the idea of  
"genuine novelty."  Rather than counting on the magic of the genome,  
Liz and I would have emphasized the magic of selection.  Still, it  
would be wrong to dismiss the impact of genetic mechanics.  However,  
I would like to avoid commenting on the details of your analysis of  
duplication and divergence without taking time to read your recent  
work.  So, let's leave the rest of that discussion to the future.
    For the present, however, I thought it would be interesting to  
draw the attention of readers of info-childes to a thoughtful  
obituary for Ernst Mayr that Tom Givon posted last May to the funknet  
bulletin board.  The obituary is from Steven Peterson of Penn State  
Capital College, but I am including it with Tom Givon's preface.

--Brian MacWhinney


Dear funk-people,

I thought it would be of interest to functionally-inclined linguists to

take a look at the following "appreciation" of the life and work of a

recently-departed eminent evolutionary biologist, Ernst Mayr. It is a

very thoughtful piece, in spite of the few lapses into PC and the

occasional Marxist slip. Mayr's grand Darwinian themes resonate well in

linguistics: adaptive selection (functionalism), diversity and its

crucial role in change (the Labovian theme of variation-and-diachrony),

emergence (non-mechanistic change), the interplay between field-work and

theory, and between qualitative (field) and quantitative (lab)

methodology; and, above all perhaps, the dynamic-historical (diachronic)

theoretical understanding of extant forms (synchronic typology).  TG



*******************************





Ernst Mayr, arguably the preeminent biologist of the twentieth century,

died on February 3, succumbing after a short illness at the age of 100.

Mayr was the last survivor of a generation of renowned natural

scientists that included the likes of Julian Huxley, George Gaylord

Simpson, Theodocious Dobzhansky, J.B.S. Haldane, G.L. Stebbins and

Hermann Muller, all of whom worked to establish Darwinian evolution as

the cornerstone theory of biology.



Mayr's contributions to the science of biology, during the course of his

remarkable life, are manifold. He will be remembered primarily for his

role in the elaboration of what has become known as the Synthetic Theory

of Evolution—the syntheses of the Darwinian ideas of evolution through

natural selection and the common descent of all living organisms from

extinct forms, with the science of genetics—from the groundbreaking work

of Gregor Mendel in the nineteenth century to the revealing of the DNA

double helix by Rosalind Franklin, James Watson and Francis Crick in the

early 1950s.



In addition, Mayr is chiefly credited with formulating the "biological

species concept," the notion that species are not simply defined by a

static compilation of common physical characteristics, but are dynamic

populations of interbreeding organisms interacting with other species in

an environment while remaining reproductively isolated, that is, they

are prevented either geographically or behaviorally from breeding with

other closely related groups.



The biological species concept both incorporated and enriched Darwin's

revolutionary ideas regarding the introduction of species and their

geographical distribution. Darwin had sought causal explanations(ability

of a species to disperse, e.g.) for the appearance of closely related

species in unexpected locations, striking a blow against the creationist

notion that species are found where they were originally "created." The

subsequent work of Mayr with birds, and that of G.G. Simpson with

mammals, has greatly enhanced our understanding of the geographical

distribution of species.



Mayr was a tireless proponent of "population thinking," a profound idea

that plumbs the depths of the contradictions inherent in concepts such

as "species" and "population." He emphasized that while the

characteristics of populations are shaped and altered by natural

selection, each individual member of that population is unique. Early

on, Mayr rejected "essentialism," an idealist conception that posited

the existence of "typical" individuals within any given population, a

viewpoint that, with the rediscovery of Mendel's laws of inheritance at

the turn of the last century, made a considerable comeback at the

expense of Darwinism. Mayr pointed out that the racialist notions that

were widely held during that period were thoroughly essentialist, in

that they accepted as given the existence of "average" or typical racial

types.



Mayr, on the other hand, favored the viewpoint that focused on the fact

that no two individuals making up a species (or a "race" for that

matter) are alike. For Mayr, as for Darwin, it was the uniqueness of

every member of a population that served as the fuel for natural

selection, providing the impetus for the evolution of entirely new types

of organisms. Once the genetic mechanism for the production of

continuous diversity was understood, the profundity of Darwin's original

ideas were reestablished and enriched in the form of the new synthesis.



Ernst Mayr was born in Germany, in the town of Kempten, Bavaria in 1904.

The offspring of a long line of doctors, Mayr chose instead to

concentrate his considerable intellectual abilities in the field of

zoology, with a special interest in ornithology. At that time, Germany

was still a major center of evolutionary biology, a tradition that owed

to the work during the latter half of the nineteenth century of such

notables as Ernst Haeckel and August Weismann.



Haeckel, who had made major contributions in zoology, as well as in

originating some of the familiar terms in biology (ecology, e.g.), is

chiefly remembered for advancing his famous "Biogenetic Law," which held

that the developing embryo of an organism (ontogeny) was a

recapitulation of the evolutionary history of that organism (phylogeny).

Weismann was a pioneer in the science of genetics, who, among his major

accomplishments, established the role of sex in promoting variation

within a species, and determined that gametes (sex cells) have the

haploid number (half the normal or diploid number) of

chromosomes.



Mayr's attraction to birds brought him in contact with Erwin Stresemann,

who was the curator of birds at the University of Berlin Museum of

Natural History. Stresemann became his PhD advisor, and Mayr attained

this advanced degree at the age of 21. Due to his astonishing longevity,

as well as his European origin, Mayr was in certain essential respects a

living link between nineteenth and twentieth century biology, in that

while he was certainly comfortable with the quantitative aspects of the

biological sciences devoted to genetics and molecular biology, he held

qualitative methodologies, the use of observation and comparison to gain

new insights, in high regard. It is not surprising, then, that following

his studies in Berlin, Mayr, like countless naturalists before him,

embarked on an expedition of discovery to the Solomon Islands and New

Guinea, to collect specimens for Lord Rothschild's museum at Tring,

Hertfordshire, in England, and for the American Museum of Natural

History in New York.



In 1931, Mayr emigrated to New York, and took a job at the museum as a

curator of birds, in particular of the 280,000 bird specimens of the

Rothschild collection that were donated to the museum shortly after

Mayr's arrival. In an interview that marked his 100th birthday, Mayr

declared: "I was very anti-Nazi, so there was no way I could return [to

Germany]" (2004). In 1953, Mayr left the museum to take a position as

the Alexander Agassiz professor of zoology at Harvard. Mayr remained at

Harvard for the rest of his life, and was active until his final

illness.



Mayr was the author or co-author of more than 20 books—among them

Systematics and the Origin of Species (1942), Animal Species and

Evolution (1963), One Long Argument: Population, Species and Evolution,

What Evolution Is (2001), his seminal work, The Growth of Biological

Thought (1982) and Toward a New Philosophy of Biology(1988). His final

work, titled What Makes Biology Unique, was published shortly after his

100th birthday. He also founded the journal Evolution in 1947, and was a

contributor to more than 600 scientific papers. Mayr's spouse of 55

years, Margarete (Gretel) Simon, died in 1990.



If one were to characterize the trajectory of Mayr's development as a

scientist, it would be that he was primarily a naturalist turned

theoretician. He was not a popularizer in the manner of his Harvard

,colleague, the late Stephen Jay Gould, but his theoretical acumen (in

this writer's opinion) ran deeper. In fact, Mayr was critical of the

late paleontologist's punctuated equilibrium hypothesis as an

explanation of the evolutionary process for its overemphasis on the role

of saltation (leaps). Mayr didn't completely reject Gould's theory, but

explained that it did not contradict Darwinian gradualism, because such

sudden bursts of evolutionary development are populational phenomena,

that is, they occur at the species level. Thus, a sudden evolutionary

spurt is always subsumed within the overall processes of evolution,

which are for the most part gradual. Mayr took pains to point out that

these accelerated evolutionary events appear saltational only when

compared with the vastness of the geological time scale.



Various theories of saltation as descriptors of the "sudden" appearance

of new types of organisms have come and gone over the centuries, having

their roots in the catastrophism (multiple creations) of the renowned

comparative anatomist Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), who tried to explain

the existence of extinct animals (dinosaurs, e.g.), and fit them into

some kind of schema compatible with Biblical creation.



Even later saltationist theories for the evolution of species or whole

groups of organisms could be interpreted as implying a kind of special

creation, opening the door to a religious interpretation of the

complexities of the natural world. Mayr was certainly cognizant of this

danger as his well-known discourse on the nature of chance

and>>selection, what he termed the "adaptationist dilemma," attests. In

his book, Toward a New Philosophy of Biology (1988), Mayr is critical of

Gould and Richard Lewontin for their attack on the notion that the

development of adaptations as a result of natural selection is anything

but the result of stochastic (chance) processes, therefore rendering the

term adaptation obsolete, and casting a pall over natural selection, the

foundation concept of Darwinism. Gould went so far as to call the notion

of a process of adaptation a "Panglossian paradigm" (after Voltaire's

character in Candide), a futile search for perfection in the

evolutionary process.



Mayr's reply is a clinic on the dialectical approach to a complex and

seemingly contradictory process. He wrote: "When asked whether or not

the adaptationist program is a legitimate scientific approach, one must

realize that the method of evolutionary biology is in some ways quite

different from that of the physical sciences. Although evolutionary

phenomena are subject to universal laws, as are most phenomena in the

physical sciences, the explanation of a particular evolutionary

phenomenon can be given only as a `historical narrative.' Consequently,

when one attempts to explain the features of something that is the

product of evolution, one must attempt to reconstruct the evolutionary

history of this feature."



He continued by explaining that when one rejects all manner of

teleological explanations for the adaptation of species to their

changing environments one is left with two unified, but seemingly

contradictory propositions—chance and selection forces. "The

identification of these two factors as the principal causes of

evolutionary change by no means completed the task for the evolutionist.

As is the case with most scientific problems, this initial solution

represented only the first orientation. For completion it requires a

second stage, a fine-grained analysis of these two factors: What are the

respective roles of chance

 >>>and or natural selection, and how can this be analyzed?" (1988)



Mayr's life-long interest in the fundamental questions that continue to

animate the biological sciences, combined with his exceptional longevity

as a working and thinking scientist, engendered in him a profound

appreciation of its history. In particular, he stressed the importance

of a study of the history of scientific concepts (natural selection,

e.g.). He wrote: "Preoccupation with this sort of conceptual history of

science is sometimes belittled as a hobby of retired scientists. Such an

attitude ignores the manifold contributions which this branch of

scholarship makes" (1982). He stated further: "One can take almost any

advance, either in evolutionary biology or in systematics, and show that

it did not depend as much on discoveries as on the introduction of new

concepts.... Those are not far wrong who insist that the progress of

science consists principally in the progress of scientific concepts"

(1982).



Mayr frequently commented on what he perceived to be the sharp dichotomy

between experimental and theoretical science, and the growing

inclination toward reductionism in biology. He would bristle against the

accusation, often made by physicists and philosophers, that biology was

not "hard" science. An interesting byproduct of this common

misconception, one that Mayr noted in a recent interview, was that there

continues to be no Nobel Prize awarded in biology.



Mayr championed the notion that the governing concepts of the science of

biology were not simply reducible to mathematical formulae and the

timeless laws of physics. By this he did not mean that biological

processes existed outside the realm of the laws of chemistry and

physics, or that many aspects of the living world did not lend

themselves to quantification, but that living processes could not be

entirely explained or even understood from those standpoints.



Mayr explained that in previous centuries natural scientists, under

pressure to be able to draw conclusions from their working hypotheses

that were reducible to mathematical formulae and the laws of physics,

either succumbed to that pressure and presented purely mechanical

explanations for living processes, or sought vitalist (those who claim

that the property of being alive is sparked by an outside force) and

even religious explanations for the processes being studied.



In referring to the higher levels of complexity of living systems, Mayr

stressed their duality, that is, each organism is at once an expression

of its genotype, the historically developed genetic code for the

synthesis of proteins, and its phenotype, the unique physical appearance

of each individual of a species; the product of the complex interplay of

physiological, embryological and ecological processes. He placed

particular emphasis on two properties unique to living systems,

teleonomy (goal-directed processes) and "emergentism," the tendency for

the evolution of "emergent properties," a notion that reaches beyond the

idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.



Regarding the latter, he wrote in The Growth of Biological Thought:

"Systems almost always have the peculiarity that the characteristics of

the whole cannot (not even in theory) be deduced from the most complete

knowledge of the components, taken separately or in other partial

combinations. This appearance of new characteristics in wholes has been

designated as emergence" (1982).



As a prime example, he cited the work to uncover the importance of DNA

for the science of genetics. "The discovery of the double helix of DNA

and of its code was a breakthrough of the first order.... There is

nothing in the inanimate world that has a genetic program which stores

information with a history of three thousand million years! At the same

time, this purely materialistic explanation elucidates many of the

phenomena which the vitalists had claimed could not be explained

chemically or physically. To be sure, it is still a physicalist

explanation, but one infinitely more sophisticated than the gross

mechanistic explanations of earlier centuries" (1982).



An emergent property, then, is something unanticipated—the evolution of

new behaviors, or new adaptations (lungs, language, abstract thought,

e.g.), that has unforeseen implications that propel a species or a group

of organisms in an entirely new direction. It should be noted that Mayr

considered the concept of emergentism to be philosophically "entirely

materialistic."



Not surprisingly, Mayr was a lifelong atheist and a staunch opponent of

the ongoing attack on evolution by the motley assemblage of religious

zealots, creationists and "intelligent design" advocates. In 1991, he

commented in an interview in the Harvard Gazette: "I'm an old-time

fighter for Darwinism. I say, `Please tell me what's wrong with

Darwinism. I can't see anything wrong with Darwinism." For Mayr,

Darwin's contribution to mankind's knowledge of the natural world was

revolutionary. During an interview on his 93rd birthday, Mayr commented

that one of "Darwin's great contributions was that he replaced

theological, or supernatural, science with secular science. Laplace 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

asecular 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" (2005).



In the introduction to his The Growth of Biological Thought, Mayr wrote:

"A well-known Soviet theoretician of Marxism once referred to my

writings as `pure dialectical materialism.' I am not a Marxist and I do

not know the latest definition of dialectical materialism, but I do

admit that I share some of Engel's anti-reductionist views, as stated in

his Anti-Duhring, and that I am greatly attracted to Hegel's scheme of

thesis-anti-thesis-synthesis." For the most part, Mayr can be classified

as a consistent materialist. However, his outlook stops short of

embracing historical materialism, falling victim to the widely

promulgated viewpoint that history consists of a series of narratives,

rather than the workings of historical laws.



Mayr was one of the outstanding figures of twentieth century science—

brilliant and passionate, with an encyclopedic knowledge of science,

history and philosophy. His contributions to an understanding of the big

questions in biology, not to mention those animating science in general,

have been enormous. One can only anticipate that others, in the face of

the continuing assault on the scientific world outlook, will take up the

defense and further illumination of the fundamental theoretical

conquests of biology with equal vigor and erudition.



             Steven A. Peterson

             Director, School of Public Affairs

             Penn State Capital College

             777 West Harrisburg Pike

             Middletown, PA  17057
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