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The Evolution Wars: A Guide to the Debates

door Michael Ruse

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The Evolution Wars draws on history, science, and philosophy to examine the development of evolutionary thought through the past two and a half centuries.
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Do you want to understand how the Theory of Evolution evolved? This is the book. Michael Ruse is a great story teller, and he guides us throughout the debates, allowing us a glimpse on how these discussions propel the idea forward, becoming what it has become today. As Edward O. Wilson says on the preface to the 1st edition of this book, "Let me put my endorsement another way. Suppose I were told that all my memory of the evolution controversies, from Darwin's time forward, were to be erased an hour hence, and, before this calamity (there have been times I would have thought it a blessing) I were allowed to choose a book to begin my reeducation. I would select, and therefore here recommend, for clarity and good humor as well as substance, The Evolution Wars." ( )
  adsicuidade | Sep 8, 2018 |
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 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. ( )
1 stem setnahkt | Dec 21, 2017 |
An historical account of evolution as an idea, its reception outside the scientific community, and controversies within the scientific community. The gist is that scientists are people too, so pure objective facts and well grounded theory get entangled with cultural assumptions and ideologies. This thesis is somewhat sloppily presented, e.g. evolution in its formative era is characterized as “secular religion” but “religion” is never defined (it seems approximately equivalent to “worldview”), and the level is layman but background familiarity with salient details is implicitly expected. Still, the perspective is useful for making sense of modern controversies where the sideline observer might wonder what the argument’s about. The book was published in 2000 and it shows; e.g. there’s a somewhat vituperative chapter on Steven Jay Gould, and a chapter on Intelligent Design and its ilk that predates the Dover PA trial.
  qebo | Dec 5, 2014 |
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