This Is Biology: The Science of the Living World

This book I bought some time ago to learn more about biology. I've just finished it and found it very good explaining what the science is, what is the difference between physical and life sciences. It also provides great overview of the subject, its history and philosophy, including taxonomy, evolution, ecology and ethics. I now adapt some ideas from biology to the science of memory dump analysis. There are some structural book organization deficiencies that would have made the book better. There are notes and the end of the book but I would prefer to have them to be footnotes. Also there is a very useful glossary at the end of the book too but for the beginner in any science it is useful to have definitions in footnotes ready to read when they are first encountered. Thanks, Dmitry Vostokov Founder of Literate Scientist Blog

The title is misleading. If you expect Biology 101 you're going to be disappointed. Mayr assumes a great deal about the educational level of his readers, so perhaps the book should should carry a subtitled warning to the unwary. My sound bite description of the book is The Philosophy of Biology. It's not about living things per se but about the study of them, with particular emphasis on the way in which the biology is closer to history than it is to areas of science that involve the exploration of universal properties. While the future behavior of subatomic particles and the formation of stars and galaxies may be, to a certain extent, predictable, biology is about what has been, not what will be. Mayr accepts this, but brilliantly defends biology as a science (is history a science?). Whether you find him convincing depends on how much you respect the force of his conviction, if not the arguments themselves. Mayr's not an easy read and it's not always immediately apparent what points he is making. Mayr was perhaps the world's greatest living biologist, or at least its most visible, to those who look for such things. Now that he has died, I feel driven to go back for a reread, after which perhaps I'll post another review.

Ernst Mayr is one of my favorite natural science writers. He has the experience of a lifetime (to say the least, since he has over 70 active years in the field) in biology. Mayr has an exquisite writing style and lots of anecdotes to share, besides he surely is an intellectual though never makes you feel neophyte, on the contrary, he guides you with ease and a critic view on nature itself. "This is Biology" is enriched with personal opinions and, of course, reflects the authors' view modeled by only seven decades of experience among the best.

Mayr's book is a superb reflection on the place biology deserves among the sciences and among all other intellectual disciplines. He clearly explains the accomplishments and uniqueness of biological science. As one would expect, his reflections on evolutionary biology are his strongest.

This is an excellent and extremely accessible (but not in a dumbed down sense) introduction to biology. My only serious complaint is in Mayr's treatment of ethics, which is a good example of what bad can happen when a specialist doesn't stick to his specialty. His discussion of the possible biological origins of certain ethical behavior starts off fine, with an explication of how though individualistic selection can produce egoism, kinship selection and group selection can extend an organism's altruistic "interest" to other members of its kin or, larger, to its group. So far so good. But as Mayr notes what Darwin pointed out, altruistic behavior via kinship selection never extends to every member of a species. So by the end of the discussion of the biology of altruistic behavior, what we have are explanations for why someone might act altruistically towards their "in-group". Yet later, in discussing the proposition that moral inclinations are not innate, Mayr appears to endorse the proposition that reprehensible behavior towards minorities (including slavery) is, as Mayr put it, "amoral". But a group subordinating the interests of an outgroup for the benefit of the ingroup is precisely what one would expect from Mayr's biological account of altrusitic behavior directed solely towards one's ingroup! At the very least, Mayr gives a good account for why one would be biologically inclined to act altruistically towards one's ingroup, but provides zero biological reason for any transgroup universal altruism. From then on, Mayr only gets worse, delving into the murky fields of philosophy and moral theology. Aside from Mayr's wildly overstated implication that Darwin proved that God has nothing to do with the origin of morality (when did biology start coming up with transcendental proofs like that?), Mayr further sullies an otherwise excellent book by critiquing Judeo-Christian ethics' relevance in today's world. That has nothing to do with biology, and if someone wanted to read much better discussions on such a subject, there are much better treatments in the philosophy section of the bookstore. Furthermore, Mayr's broad brush overview of Judeo-Christian morality reeks of straw man superficiality. Perhaps Mayr didn't think it worth his time to study serious treatments on Judeo-Christian morality, but if he didn't, he shouldn't have broached the subject in a biology book. Finally, that Mayr can discuss the scientific bases of morality without mentioning the classic problem of the "naturalistic fallacy" (i.e. in this context, what IS the case biologically, does not entail what OUGHT to be the case morally), AKA the "fact-value gap", indicates how superficial (or unread) a discussion of ethics Mayr engages in. If creationists sound silly talking about biology, biologists should get a clue about how they must sound when they try to talk seriously about theology and moral philosophy.