Book Review: Darwin and Design (Michael Ruse)

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Michael Ruse

DARWIN AND DESIGN

Does evolution have a purpose?

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Book review by Anthony Campbell. Copyright © Anthony
Campbell (2003).
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Although there are still people today, particularly in the
USA, who adhere to the Biblical account of special creation
of the different species, most educated people accept that
evolution has occurred. That is, they accept that the
animals and plants we see about us have come into being by
a process of progressive modification of earlier forms. The
really contentious claim put forward by Darwin, however,
was that this has happened without any underlying plan.
Instead of a plan, evolution, according to Darwin and his
successors, has occurred because essentially random
variations have been acted on by natural selection. This
theory seems to many to leave no room for any Divine
purpose.

This is the question that Ruse tackles in his new book.
Although he touches fairly briefly on pre-Darwinian
thought, starting with classical Greece, he naturally
concentrates mainly on the period after the mid-nineteenth
century. Darwin, he says, planted a bomb under Victorian
teleology, and although argument about the role of design
in evolution continued and is still alive today, the terms
of the debate were altered for ever.

Darwin's central idea of natural selection was not widely
accepted in the decades following publication of Tne Origin
, and even Darwin's most vigorous defender, TH Huxley, did
not emphasize it. Not until the 1930s did interest in
natural selection revive. Partly this was due to the
belated discovery of Mendelian genetics, and partly it was
due to the work of the statistician Ronald Fisher. Theodore
Dobzhanski and Ernst Mayr among others built on these
developments and brought about a revival of interest in
natural selection - neo-darwinism.

For some modern Darwinists, notably Richard Dawkins, the
clear implication of Darwinism is that there is no place
for purpose or direction in evolution. Progressive
theologians, however, insist that there is no conflict
between Darwinism and theism, and this is the question that
Ruse takes up in his concluding chapters. He gives natural
theology a fair summing up but concludes that it cannot
ultimately work. "The Darwinian revolution is over, and
Darwin won." We must "recognize that Dawkins is right, that
Darwinism is a major challenge to relgious belief and that
you cannot simply pretend that nothing very much has
happened."

Perhaps rather surprisingly, however, Ruse continues to
argue for what he calls a theology of nature (as opposed to
a natural theology). This seems to rely on an aesthetic
response to nature -- a near-mystical appreciation of the
beauty of the living world. He quotes a remark once made to
him by Ernst Mayr: "People forget that it is possible to be
intensely religious in the entire absence of theological
belief." This attitude would be quite at home in Buddhism
but I think that many Christians would find it too
impersonal.

This is a thoughtful and quite detailed discussion of the
design question in evolution. As in his earlier book, Ruse
is particularly good on the background of the people who
figure in his narrative of events. I had not known
previously that Fisher was a committed Christian as well as
a "fanatical Darwinian", who thought of adaptation as
representative of God's creative intent.

Related review: The Darwinian Revolution (Michael Ruse)

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%T DARWIN AND DESIGN
%S Does evolution have a purpose?
%A Michael Ruse
%I Harvard University Press
%C Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England
%D 2003
%G ISBN 0-674-01023-X
%P x + 371 pp
%K Evolution

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