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What Makes Biology Unique?
Mayr's 2004 centennial summation — published the year before his death — distilling a century of thinking into the arguments for biology's autonomy, its dependence on historical explanation, and its irreducibility to physics.
What Makes Biology Unique? Considerations on the Autonomy of a Scientific Discipline is Ernst Mayr's final book, published by Cambridge University Press in 2004, the year he turned one hundred. It is a distillation of his century of thinking into a set of arguments about the nature of biological science — its autonomy from physics, its dependence on historical explanation, its irreducibility to any framework that ignores the specificity, contingency, and variation characterizing living systems. Mayr died on February 3, 2005, three months after his hundredth birthday and just months after the book's publication. It reads as the final statement of a thinker who had nothing left to prove and who used the last clear mind of his life to articulate, with unusual economy, the core of what he had learned.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book covers the full range of Mayr's mature thinking: the proximate/ultimate distinction, the autonomy of biology, the role of contingency, the structure of
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