From Publishers Weekly
In a signal contribution to the debate about the nature of science, Ruse, a professor of philosophy and zoology at the University of Guelph, in Ontario, tackles a central question: Is science a report on objective reality with special standards of truth finding, as Austrian-born philosopher Karl Popper maintains, or is it a culturally bound enterprise, a sequence of paradigms that subjectively mirror our ever-shifting view of the world, as American physicist Thomas Kuhn insists? Ruse's intriguing answer, likely to satisfy no one fully, is that both Popper and Kuhn are correct. He uses evolutionary biology as a case study, starting with physician-poet Erasmus Darwin, a deist who regarded evolution as set in motion by a remote, nonintervening God, then moves on to grandson Charles Darwin, whose theories, according to Ruse, strongly reflected Victorian attitudes about progress, gender, race and capitalism, as well as Malthus's notion of the "struggle for existence." In a handsome, scholarly probe, Ruse argues that Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene) advances a "secular theology" rooted in 18th-century laissez-faire capitalism's belief that things work best when everybody is following his or her self-interest. Harvard sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson, in Ruse's view, replaced the religious fundamentalism of a Southern Baptist childhood with an ardent faith in what Wilson calls "the evolutionary epic," neo-Darwinism as a fertile "myth." And paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould's hotly contested theory of "punctuated equilibrium" owes a debt to Marxism (Gould's father was a Marxist) and to German idealism, in Ruse's analysis. Ruse's ultimate verdict: science remains embedded in cultural values, even as it improves its quest for objective knowledge.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
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From Library Journal
As its subtitle indicates, this book was prompted in part by the debate between the physicist Alan Sokal (Fashionable Nonsense, LJ 11/1/98) and post-modernist sociologists over whether science is mainly discovered or invented (constructed). Rather than another frontal attack on the post-modernists (although the Sokal debate is discussed at length in the prolog), this book is, instead, a thoughtful and fascinating survey of the many ways in which social concepts have affected evolutionary theory. Beginning with Erasmus Darwin, Darwin's grandfather, Ruse (Monad to Man: The Concept of Progress in Evolutionary Biology, LJ 11/15/96) provides a brilliant analysis of how ideas like progress and metaphors based on political and cultural theories and values have both helped and hindered the maturation of evolutionary theory into a true science. Most of the middle to late 20th-century scientists Russ deals with (including Stephen Jay Gould and E.O. Wilson) seem to have overcome their cultural biases and have produced relatively culture-free, or at least culture-independent, science. Nevertheless, the ways in which cultural metaphors continue to enrich their writings provides a fascinating study in the difficulty of producing truly epistemic (Ruse's term) evolutionary theory, free of any significant contamination by the value systems in which its developers are immersed. This is a thoroughly absorbing and important overview by an interesting and controversial philosopher. For academic and larger public libraries.ALloyd Davidson, Seeley G. Mudd Lib. for Science & Engineering, Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
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