"The Columbus Dispatch"
December 2, 2001 Sunday, Home Final Edition
SECTION: FEATURES - ACCENT & ARTS; Science; Pg. 07E

EVOLUTION EXPERT DEFENDS THEORY BUT BRUSHES OFF CRITICS
(LENGTH: 756 words)
Rich Elias

The title of Ernst Mayr's What Evolution Is is a statement rather than a
question. Evolution is what Mayr says it is.

He's not somebody easily challenged: a 97-year-old professor emeritus at Harvard
whose first book on the subject dates from 1942, fewer than 20 years after the
Scopes trial set Clarence Darrow against William Jennings Bryan in a legal
contest about Darwinism.

Evolution was controversial then and remains so to this day. Creationists don't
just assail evolution for its challenge to the biblical story of God's creation.
They engage in a battle that will last till doomsday despite the armada of
evidence against them. (Mayr includes references to many anti-creationist tomes
in chapter one). [That's the Armada, I guess.] The problem is that Mayr
thinks he's won the war. He knows what evolution is -- hence the title. But even
evolutionists aren't sure of the boundaries they're supposed to defend.

Mayr defends the center. What Evolution Is summarizes what is now the core
principle in biology, the synthesis and redefinition of ideas drawn from
Darwin's The Origin of Species in 1859. Darwin's genius lay in pulling existing
concepts together into a new theory about the development of life on Earth.
Evidence from fossils had led geologists to question biblical accounts of
creation. (For a superb account, see The Discovery of Time by Stephen Toulmin
and June Goodfield, which is, unfortunately, out of print). What was missing was
a theoretical explanation of how life on Earth, in all its wondrous variety,
branched and proliferated into all the creatures that 
share this planet.

Darwin provided that theory. It remained for nearly a century of biologists to
harden it into fact. Twists and turns in the evolution of evolution since
Darwin's day have done little to deflect or substantially redefine the few
simple principles of his theory: evolution works on populations, not on
individuals; mutations that increase an organism's chance to survive tend to
endure (because such organisms live long enough to pass on their genes through
reproduction; change must therefore be gradual, measured in thousands or
millions of years for most plants and animals).

Most high school-biology textbooks (except in districts where creationists hold
a red pencil) tell this much. For details, see Mayr.

What Evolution Is presents the current tenets of the post-Darwin evolutionary
synthesis almost as an order of battle. Written like a textbook, Mayr's brief
account is aimed chiefly at puzzled readers who need a plan of the castle before
they can hold the territory surrounding it. Readers will feel enriched by the
chance to hear about the central ideas of evolution from a researcher who helped
frame them.

Few authors can acknowledge help from librarians at a research center named in
his honor. Mayr can. But this doesn't mean that he has written a book a general
audience will read with pleasure. Its organization is forbidding. Although Jared
Diamond's introduction praises Mayr's lucid writing and relative lack of jargon,
plenty of sentences will make readers stumble. (Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel
is a masterpiece of lucidity; Mayr, his mentor, is frequently opaque.)

Even so, a master is worth listening to. Precision is a special grace in science
writing, and an authority such as Mayr rarely stoops to the level of the popular
press.

So we can be grateful for this summary of evolution. At the same time, he stays
true to his core discipline by refusing to notice related concerns that flit
like gnats around it. To Mayr, creationism is one such gnat; he brushes it aside
with references to other books; he doesn't challenge it.

Yet recent extensions of evolutionary ideas have taken the foreground.
Evolutionary psychology, popularized in Robert Wright's The Moral Animal,
purport to extend Darwin's ideas to explanations of human behavior. In medicine,
Amherst College professor Paul Ewald takes off from natural selection to a
theory that blames microbes for all human diseases, including the "disease" of
homosexuality. One has to wonder what Darwin -- or Mayr -- would say.

The real threat to the theory of evolution does not come from creationists, no
matter how many books they write or Web sites they set up. The threat comes
mainly from idea-mongers who apply a few accepted principles to new, uncharted
realms. What Evolution Is may be valuable in pulling us back to the center of
Darwin's theory, but its failure to say what's right or wrong on the noisy
periphery somewhat diminishes its usefulness.

POWRÓT