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This, of all Darwin's contributions, was the most significant, Mayr reports. "The Living world," he says, "can [now] be explained without recourse to supernaturalism." An underlying implication of this situation was a kind of democratization of natural science -- a distribution of scientific knowledge that could be tested, verified, and explained by unscientific people. At the end of the article, Mayr asserts that "almost every component in modern man's belief system is somehow affected by Darwinian principals."
While Mayr's article offered a well-rounded review of Darwin's most important contributions to natural science, it was not without its pitfalls. The most notable pitfall was that it didn't seem to reach out to 'the other side.' It felt similar to a press release for Darwinism -- a "puff-piece." This is illustrated by Mayr's language: "No educated person any longer questions the validity of the so-called theory of evolution." Indeed if Mayr wrote...
One should question the purpose of the article, then. Has the article been written to tell like-minded individuals what they already know? Has it been written to reaffirm a particular worldview, much like a hymn is sung, or a manifesto is published?
Science is most affected and thus progressed by change, discourse, competing ideas, and openness to new theories. Indeed, Mayr is a notable scientist and great contributor to the field of evolutionary biology, but he appears to be singing to the choir with this article. This fact weakens the power of the piece. More appropriate would have been more open language that recognized that even evolutionary biology is a living science, and not a "final cause," as Mayr ironically treats it.
References
Mayr, Ernst. "Darwin's Influence on Modern Thought." Scientific American July (2000): 79-83.
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