Top Highlights

• The first step to wisdom, as the Chinese say, is getting things by their right names.
• Suddenly—that is not too strong a word—
• Ernst Mayr’s 1942 Systematics and the Origin of Species. Read it, he said, if you want to become a real biologist.
• He was inspired by the idea, central to the Enlightenment agenda, that what had been accomplished in mathematics and physics can be extended to the collective actions of men. His 1785 Essay on the Application of Analysis to the Probability of Majority Decisions is a distant forerunner of present-day decision theory.
• Still, the concept that social action might be quantitatively analyzed and even predicted was original to Condorcet. It influenced the later development of the social sciences, especially the work of the early sociologists Auguste Comte and Adolphe Quételet in the 1800s.