Michael Ruse: When evolution works the worst
by Krauze
Richard Bellon reviews Michael Ruse's book, Darwinism and its Discontents for American Scientist:
We see that evolution works worst when elevated to the status of a secular religion or otherwise subordinated to the service of extrascientific commitments. "Beware of anything that answers everything," Ruse cautions. "It usually ends by answering nothing. And that is certainly not true of Darwinism." We see that evolution works best when deployed to address tightly defined questions about the living world.
Indeed. Evolution is a compelling and well-supported way of looking at the world, which shouldn't be conflated with philosophical or political worldview that tries to piggy-back on its success. And the same goes for intelligent design. There are plenty of people interested in associating intelligent design with certain philosophical or political movements - either because they are themselves part of such movements and want to use intelligent design to support them, or because they are opposed to intelligent design and want to see it in unflattering company. But like evolution, intelligent design is an idea that isn't bound to whichever ideological cart various people are trying to chain it to.
February 9th, 2007 at 5:54 pm
"Evolution is a compelling and well-supported way of looking at the world, which shouldn't be conflated with philosophical or political worldview that tries to piggy-back on its success."
I'm not sure Michael Ruse would agree.
He seems to argue that it was a small group of philospohers of biology (including himself, of course) working in the '60's-'70's that established evolutionary theory as "good strong science."
Nevermind the incalculable labor expended by generations of scientists (biologists and others–long prior to 1965) to establish that fact.
Ruse, with a little help from his friends (who don't actually cite him much) did it.
Uh huh.
Ruse has balls, but he is a hack. A popular science and philosophy writer whose scholarly status seems to be belied by the fact that "scholars" don't take him seriously.
A very, very important related issue is involved: In these discussions how much is about "scholarship" and how much is about the lack thereof?
(I admit. I'm a hack! Nothing "scholarly" about me! Most of what I have to say on the subject is drool! Get out your hankies!)
Comment by Rock — February 9, 2007 @ 5:54 pm