Mayr's five parts of Darwin's beliefs

List Mayr's five parts of Darwin's beliefs.

#. term used and its meaning:

1. Evolution From essentialism to population thinking, steady change occurs.

2. Common descent Ancestors pass on traits to descendants by material means.

3. Multiplication of species adaptive radiation, isolation & variation lead to new lines.

4. Gradualism nature avoids radical changes all at once.

5. Natural selection abundant production of genetic variation in each generation can not survive, so that a process of culling or "selecting out" takes place.

In summary
Darwin is not a believer in progress, he had no clue as to the material means by which hereditary material is passed on in parental copulation and birth of offspring, and he was disinclined to attribute the process to a divine agent or spiritual entity for personal, familial and empirical reasons.

Darwin was partially responsible for a revolution in our view of the world or

Worldview: (German) weltanschauung

the set of related ideas that people or societies harbor, nourish and hold despite evidence to the contrary and in contrast to the manner or process in which the world actually behaves or exists.

Examples:

Darwin -- species are fixed and never go extinct was replaced by "struggle for existence."

Galileo -- the planets move in perfect circles which Kepler had shown were really ellipses.

Columbus -- that the world was a sphere and that by landing in the Antilles, he had actually reached Japan, China or the "east Indies" islands.

A means in the history of ideas, science and intellectual thought of analytically separating out what civilizations believe, how they behave and what we know to be understood empirically about the world.

Darwin was not a social philosopher. He does not share a body of knowledge with 18th century or 19th century adherents to a transformational evolution or survival of the fittest as Herbert Spencer did. Nor does Darwin necessarily subscribe to the superiority of fit races over less fit competitive ethnic varieties within a single human race that many of his contemporaries believed to be a fact of life.

Pp. 102-103.

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