Ernst Mayr's great work in biology in the 1940's was to understand that a species was not just a group of similar individuals, but a group that interbreeds. The information content of their DNA differs enough from other species to prevent interbreeding.

In his later years Mayr invested much of his intellectual energy trying to modify the philosophy of science to make a proper place for biology. He thought that logical positivists and empiricists sought mechanical and deterministic laws appropriate to material objects but not to life.

He insisted on the importance of information, in the form of the history of living things, as critical to distinguish biology from physics and chemistry. This is basic to information philosophy.

Mayr says in his 1988 Toward A New Philosophy Of Biology,

One of my special concerns has been the neglect of biology in works claiming to be philosophies of science. From the 1920s to the 1960s the logical positivists and physicalists who dominated the philosophy of science had little interest in and even less understanding of biology, because it simply did not fit their methodology. Their endeavors to solve all scientific problems by pure logic and refined measurements were unproductive, if not totally irrelevant, when applied to biological phenomena.

The assumption that it should be possible to "reduce" the theories and concepts of all other sciences, including biology, to those of the physical sciences has clearly dominated not only philosophy but science itself, from the days of Galileo and Descartes. But the further the study of biological systems advanced during the past 200 years, the more evident it became how different living systems are from inanimate systems, no matter how complex the inanimate system or how simple the organism. Attempts to "reduce" biological systems to the level of simple physico-chemical processes have failed because during the reduction the systems lost their specifically biological properties. Living systems...have numerous properties that are simply not found in the inanimate world.
(Toward A New Philosophy Of Biology, p.1)

In most traditional philosophy, the total amount of information in the conceptually closed universe is static, a physical constant of nature. The laws of nature allow no exceptions, they are perfectly causal. Chance and change - in a deep philosophical sense - are illusions.

Information philosophy, by contrast, is a story about invention, about novelty, about biological emergence and new beginnings unseen and unseeable beforehand, a past that is fixed but an ambiguous future that can be shaped by teleological changes in the present that are made possible by Darwinian evolution.

Ernst Mayr has been more outspoken on this view than any other biologist. He wrote in his 2001 What Evolution Is, that the "Great Chain of Being" or scala naturae rising from inanimate matter through plants and animals up to the primates and man was an unchanging perfect structure that reflected the mind of the creator.

Evolution is the evidence for the conclusion that the world is not constant but is forever changing. In the modern view, Mayr says,

the world is of long duration and is forever changing; it is evolving. Even though this may seem strange to us moderns, the concept of evolution was at first alien to Western thought. The power of the Christian fundamentalist dogma was so strong that it required a long series of developments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries before the idea of evolution became fully acceptable. As far as science is concerned, the acceptance of evolution meant that the world could no longer be considered merely as the seat of activity of physical laws but had to incorporate history and, more importantly, the observed changes in the living world in the course of time. Gradually the term "evolution" came to represent these changes.
(What Evolution Is, p.3)

The simple mechanical and deterministic philosophy - for every effect a cause - of Newton and Laplace could never really establish "man as machine." This gave rise to theories of a "vital" force or principle behind life.

Information philosophy, by contrast, is built on probabilistic laws of nature. But the challenge for information philosophy is to explain the emergence of order and life from chaos. It must account for the phenomenal success of adequately deterministic laws when the material substrate of the universe is irreducibly chaotic and random.

Mayr makes it very clear that there are no exceptions to the laws of physics required for evolution. The essential difference is how living things acquire and manage information.

It must therefore be emphasized that the modern biologist rejects in any form whatsoever the notion that a "vital force" exists in living organisms which does not obey the laws of physics and chemistry. All processes in organisms, from the interaction of molecules to the complex functions of the brain and other whole organs, strictly obey these physical laws. Where organisms differ from inanimate matter is in the organization of their systems and especially in the possession of coded information.
(Toward A New Philosophy Of Biology, p.2)

Mayr says that living organisms can not be understood as a causal chain of single causes and effects. Biological phenomena have multiple causes. Actually, so do most physical events.

The development of completely new disciplines — evolutionary biology and genetics — was necessary before the centuries-old battle between mechanists and their opponents could be resolved. To the distress of both camps, the conclusion reached was that both were, to some extent, correct. The finding that all processes in living organisms strictly obey the laws of physics and chemistry — that there is no residue of "vital forces" outside the realm of the physical sciences — meant that the mechanists were right. But the finding that the coded information system of living organisms has no equivalent in inanimate nature meant that the antimechanists were also right. This genotype-phenotype duality of the living organism is the reason why it is not sufficient in biology to search for a single cause in the study of a phenomenon, as is often sufficient in the physical sciences.
(Toward A New Philosophy Of Biology, p.2)

With the emergence of life in the universe, purposeful behavior appeared. The vitalists and creationists assumed that a primordial teleology in the cosmos had created life. Evolution removed the need for a cosmic, pre-existing teleology. Jacques Monod called purposeful behavior in life "teleonomic" to distinguish it from creationist ideas of a "cosmic teleology."

The clear recognition of two types of causation in organisms has helped to solve an important problem in biology, the problem of teleology. What is teleology, and to what extent is it a valid concept? These have been burning questions since the time of Aristotle. Kant based his explanation of biological phenomena, particularly of the perfection of adaptations, on teleology — the notion that organisms were designed for some purpose. Teleology was the principal argument used by some of Darwin's major opponents. And the numerous autogenetic theories of evolution, such as orthogenesis, nomogenesis, aristogenesis, and the omega principle (Teilhard de Chardin), were all based on a teleological world view. Indeed, as Jacques Monod (1971) rightly stressed, almost all of the most important ideologies of the past and the present are built on a belief in teleology.

It is my belief that the pervasive confusion in this subject has been due to a failure to discriminate among very different processes and phenomena, all labeled "teleological." [T]he word teleological has been indiscriminately applied to four entirely different phenomena or processes. By partitioning so-called teleological phenomena into these four categories, and by introducing an appropriate terminology for each, it is possible to study each of them separately and show that three of them can be explained scientifically. On the other hand, no evidence whatsoever has been found for the existence of the fourth one, cosmic teleology.

The most important conclusion of the recent research on teleology is that it is illegitimate to extrapolate from the existence of teleonomic processes (that is, those directed or controlled by the organism's own DNA) and teleomatic processes (those resulting from physical laws) to an existence of cosmic teleology. There is neither a program nor a law that can explain and predict biological evolution in any teleological manner. Nor is there, since 1859, any need for a teleological explanation: The Darwinian mechanism of natural selection with its chance aspects and constraints is fully sufficient.

Mayr's teleomatic processes are our ergodic processes in physical nature. Both involve the creation of information. The striking thing about teleonomy is that the management of information is done by processes that are remarkably similar to computer programs.

When B. F. Skinner's "black-box" model of the mind gave way to cognitive science in the 1960's, the idea that a mind consists of many distinct functions suggested that a computer with its many subroutine programs could be an effective mind model. Many computer scientists became cognitive scientists.

But computers are strictly deterministic logical state machines. So many cognitive scientists continued to lean toward "man as machine" and "mind as (mechanical) computer." Few saw any value to be gained from random "chance."

Mayr wrote,

The study of genetics has shown that seemingly goal-directed processes in a living organism (teleonomic processes) have a strictly material basis, being controlled by a coded genetic program. Curiously, the coded program is a concept philosophers with a background in logic, physics, or mathematics seem to have great difficulty in understanding and accepting. Since the term program was taken over from the field of informatics, it is sometimes rejected as an anthropomorphism. Yet, the use of the term in biology is fully justified. Even though the mechanism by which the DNA stores and codifies information is of course different from that of a computer, the basic principle is remarkably similar, as demonstrated by the researches of molecular biology.

Returning for a moment to the rift between the physicalists and biologists, we must note that advances during the last 150 years not just in biology but in the physical sciences as well have greatly helped to narrow the gap that existed between the two camps. Many of the concepts of classical mechanics and the traditional philosophy of science that were questioned by biologists, such as strict determinism (vs. high frequency of probability), the predictiveness of all processes, or the universality of laws, have now also been either given up entirely by modern physics or at least restricted in applicability.

Classical physics was strictly deterministic. Laplace's boast that he would be able to predict the future course of events on earth ad infinitum if he had a complete catalogue of the existing situation was symptomatic of this attitude. Not surprisingly, natural selection with its emphasis on the chance nature of variation was not palatable to the physicists. This is why John Herschel referred to it as the "law of the higgledy-piggledy." Modern physics has theoretically abandoned such determinism, and yet physicists still are far more deterministic in their thinking than biologists.
(Toward A New Philosophy Of Biology, p.4)

And we could add that philosophers of mind and human agency are distinctly more deterministic and compatibilist than the physicists.

Would Ernst Mayr have liked the recent two-stage free will models of neurobiologist Martin Heisenberg and his many predecessors?