Ernst Mayr not only lived to a distinguished age, but his years were paralleled by his scientific distinction as one of the last century's leading evolutionary biologists. One gets the measure of his own self-assessment when we read on p. 172 ‘I am presumably well qualified . . . having discussed the species problem in sixty-four books and scientific papers, published from 1927 to 2000. I also had to make decisions on species status when describing 26 new species and 473 new subspecies of birds. Furthermore I had to make decisions on the rank of species level taxa in twenty-five generic revisions and faunistic reviews. Hence, there should be no doubt about my qualifications’. Quite so, and nobody would wish to deny that Mayr was one of the pivotal figures in the neo-Darwinian synthesis.

Nevertheless, the book is heavy-going, in part because it largely consists of originally separate essays and although some over-riding themes emerge there is also a degree of duplication. In essence Mayr sets out to achieve two things: first to define, defend and cherish the central fact of Darwinian evolution, and second to insist that the subject is effectively autonomous. So far as the former is concerned Mayr provides wide-ranging reviews, but the underlying tone gives me some misgivings because to a considerable extent he engages in claims for priority and authority with the result that he is dismissive of a number of other contributors to this discipline. This recurrent whiff of the ex cathedra has the rather odd effect of making Mayr sound as a lonely voice, and one seldom gets the impression of biology being a buzzing, chatting, and engaging community of souls. Also, rather strangely there are very few examples of all the various wonders of biology and the marvels of evolutionary adaptation: even within the group of which Mayr was an acknowledged authority, the birds, such examples as the kiwi, hoatzin, swift and crow all have terrific stories to tell, but the woodenness of delivery leaves at least this reader feeling flat.

What of the autonomy of biology? This too is a curious gambit, and seems to this reviewer to point to incoherence. To be sure biology is a great deal more than the sum of its physical and chemical parts, and hence the recurrent lure of vitalism. That won't work, but simply for Mayr to claim autonomy is hardly sufficient if one wants to explain the evolution of such complex and integrated systems. Moreover, it is difficult to square such autonomy with the likelihood that there are deeper principles constraining what is and is not possible in biology, and however dimly somehow one senses that these must link to the other sciences.

It would be a mistake to think this book is without some value, and Mayr serves well to articulate existing pieties (such as humans being an evolutionary fluke with all the implications this has for the SETI programme) as well as providing crisp analyses as to the different types of teleology, but behind this one senses a mind that is straying into areas beyond his philosophical competence. He thus lauds the philosopher Quine in his claim that ‘Darwin's greatest philosophical achievement [consisted] in having refuted Aristotle's final cause’ (p. 91). Such a view is, of course, echoed by Dawkins (of whom Mayr is particularly dismissive) and Dennett, but I for one suspect that the complaint by Darwin's colleague, John Herschel, of evolution by natural selection being ‘the law of the higgledy-piggledy’ (p. 92), still retains a real force. Moreover, this reviewer would not be quite so ready as some to dismiss Aristotle and indeed some straws in the wind suggest that the origins of biological form, the template for its existence, may not be as nebulous as Mayr appears to think. Herschel's remarks suggest that even at the time of Darwin both he, and indeed the neglected Sedgwick, had actually put their finger on exactly why biology cannot, contra Mayr, be autonomous.