Michael Ruse (1940–2024)

Evolution for philosophers, and not half bad at that. Michael Ruse, as you might expect a philosopher to do, starts with history – Cuvier, Lamarck, Darwin (Erasmus, not Charles - yet). Then the central idea – organic evolution through natural selection. Then the early battles – Huxley and Haeckel and Asa Gray (Ruse contends that evolution was accepted very quickly, but natural selection was not; I’m not so sure about the rapid acceptance of evolution, but Ruse makes a pretty strong show more case for the early dismissal of natural selection – after the first edition of The Origin of Species, Herbert Spencer persuaded Darwin to replace “natural selection” with “survival of the fittest” - something that has haunted evolutionary biology ever since).


Then the New Synthesis: Sewall Wright and Ernst Mayr and Theodosius Dobzansky. And finally, recent developments with Lewontin and Gould and Wilson and Dawkins. Ruse isn’t the slightest bit shy about personal comments – Gould has an “enormous ego” and Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa is dismissed as “the peak of self-deception”. Creationists are treated politely but without real seriousness.


In the process of discussing the implications of evolution for religion, Ruse makes an interesting argument – natural selection produces life that looks like it was designed. In a biological variant of the Anthropic Principle, God is “constrained” by the rules of natural selection, just as the rules of physics constrain the values of physical constants. I.e., just as a lot of other physical constants are limited once God decides what the Fine Structure Constant is going to be, so is life limited to certain pathways once God chooses natural selection as a mechanism. I put “constrained” in quotes up there because Ruse isn’t really suggesting limits on the power of God; it’s more like the famous sophomoric question “Can God make a rock so big He can’t lift it?” which is a comment on semantics rather than divine omnipotence. Once having set up natural selection as a divine mechanism, Ruse then uses it to explain one of the oldest theological/philosophical problems – the origin of evil. Making physics the way it is produced some apparently evil results – people are struck by lightning or burned by fires or fall off high places; that’s just the way it works. So with biology; cute baby animals get eaten, species go extinct and tyrants prosper - that’s just what you get with that set of rules. Ruse seems pretty smug about this – I’m no sure a lot of theologians are going to jump on the bandwagon, but it’s still an interesting idea.


If the book has a drawback, it’s that Ruse never really explains how natural selection and evolution work; only a little about mutation and not much at all about recombination. OTOH, there’s a fine reference list and index, plus the last third of the book is original documents – selections from Cuvier and Darwin and Sewall Wright and so on. Recommended. show less

What is to know someone? Can you really tell what makes that particular person that person only by knowing the details of his or her life events? Simply Darwin is not a typical biography — this is an intelectual dissection of Darwinism, for this is how you really get to know the man behind it all.

Pinpointing its manifold philosophical antecedents, Michael Ruse explains in an easy to follow way how Evolution and Natural Selection finally dawned on Darwin — how this polite, discreet, show more non-confrontational man set himself to change the course of biology, science, and even history. For Darwinism is not only a scientific theory. "[F]rom so simple a beginning" (DARWIN, 1859), the Darwinian revolution has spread much farther than its original field of biology. And that is one of the most important and illuminating features of this book. In it you will find an exploration of the consequences of Darwin's controversial theory, its upsides and downsides, the difficulties it encountered, the many ways it has been appropriated (or misappropriated) by other fields, and how it is still changing our world today. In Ruse's words, "for or against, no one denies that Darwin’s ideas stimulate and provoke. For that reason if for no other, no educated person today should be ignorant of the life and labors of Charles Darwin. In science and in culture, he is one of the seminal figures of all time."

So, is this book worthy of your time? If you're a Darwin buff, this being a Michael Ruse's book is enough to make you want to read it. However, if you're not, but nevertheless you want to understand how the idea of evolution by natural selection evolved (inevitable pun), how it changed the ideas of subsequent thinkers, how it is still very much being a part of our everyday understanding of the world today, and all that in a very short, to the point, and clear manner, this book surely won't disappoint you. If by the end of it you fall in love with the topic, the author even offers a suggested reading list to deepen your understanding. What a neat package!


A brief note on the rating
4 in 5? Graphically is very misleading. Goodreads suggestion for each star is much more illuminating. One star, did not like it; two, it was ok; three, liked it; four, really liked it; five, it was amazing(!).

I really, really liked this book. However, this is not, and does not pretend to be, a masterpiece of literature (think of Flaubert's Madame Bovary, or Saramago's Memorial do Convento, as an example). If I reserve the amazement to the masterpieces, 4/5 is the highest I can give to works of a different caliber — works that I really, really like, such as this. show less

Everywhere you look there exists complexity. Nature, our lives, the universe, the environment, economics, politics, sociology—all of it is incredibly complex. But, can we talk about complexity? Is complexity too complex to discuss? It the risk of sounding like a metaphysical junkie, the answer to that is both simple and complex. Charles Lineweaver, along with Paul Davies and Michael Ruse, bring together some perspectives on the question (and maybe the answers) of complexity in Complexity show more and the Arrow of Time. Along the way, we get a series of answers from a cosmological, biological, and even a philosophical point of view.

First off, I’m not even going to act like I knew about everything that was going on in this book. I’m lucky if I understood even one-third of the ideas being bandied about, but that small percentage was still enough to keep me interested. David Wolpert and David Krakauer go little overboard on the equations and theories in their sections, but they try to look at evolution and complexity from a purely mathematical perspective. Eric Chaisson tries to unify complexity across the sciences by defining complexity as a measurement of energy usage; celestial bodies become more complex over time as they burn through energy, biological entities require more energy as complexity increases, and humans through history have required more energy as their technologies have grown increasingly complex. Michael Ruse looks at complexity as described by Darwinian theory and debates whether the analogy of complexity to success to dominance is really true.

All these essays (and quite a few more) helped to create a picture of complexity on many levels. Interestingly enough, there is an underlying urge to simplify complexity. When greeted with the utter chaos of quantum theory and biological systems, there is an impetus to organize, but it always eludes us. This collection is at least a nudge in the right direction when we start talking about complexity at a macroscopic level. A heady but still intriguing read. show less

I'm a big fan of the "Cambridge Companion" series, and find them helpful to bring me up to speed quickly on recent academic thought surrounding major works. This volume is distance from the Cambridge Companion to Darwin, which focuses more on his overall thought, whereas this book focuses just on the Origin.

That being said, this volume does address theological and philosophical implications of Darwin's thought as manifest in the Origin. My two favorite essays were Brooke's "The Origin and show more the Question of Religion" and Lewens' "The Origin and Philosophy". As several essays in the volume note -- especially the last one by Kohler and Kohler, "The Origin of Species as a Book" -- Darwin's Origin went through several editions, with various edits and editions and corrections with each. Brooke's essay notes "The first changes that he made to his book, however, were to add to, rather than subtract from, references to a Creator. He evidently wished to offer reassurance that his theory did not contravene a sophisticated understanding of what 'creation' might mean" (264). The essays are even-handed in issues of religion and philosophy, and lack the neoatheist bloviating of Richard Dawkins and his ilk.

Interestingly, I purchased this book on amazon.com not once, but twice. The first time, as I was finishing p. 184, I realized that pages 185-186 were completely missing! I was able to return it, and Amazon in fact sent me a replacement before I made my return. The second version was error free (from a pagination perspective). show less