Some comments on Maynard Smith's contributions by David Bohm

摘要

Maynard Smith in his Status of neo-Darwinism has made what I regard as a very useful contribution to the clarification of the metaphysical assumptions underlying this subject. As indicated in my earlier articles, the main point about anyone's metaphysics is not to criticize it (though this can often be an appropriate thing to do). Rather is it to bring out what the metaphysics is, to make clear what is fact, and what assumption. I think that, in general, Maynard Smith has done just this with regard to neo-Darwinism. However, it seems to me that in a number of significant respects he is still overlooking metaphysical assumptions by tacitly accepting as fact certain notions that are in reality either suppositions or conventional definitions of terms.