Reading Ruse: Michael Ruse on Darwinism, Science, and Faith

part i

Introducing Michael Ruse

Chapter 1

Editorial Introduction

Bradford McCall

Michael Ruse, a philosopher and historian of science, is author or editor of nearly four dozen books, as well as author of some two hundred peer-reviewed articles. While I do contend that Ruse needs no real introduction, per se, Ruse is a nonbelligerent nonbeliever. His writings come across as erudite, learned, and yet somewhat accessible. Further, he is one of the most pious men that I know. I point this last aspect out because he is not in the mode of the new atheists, who consistently tear things down, but then build nothing to replace it.

Ruse was born in 1940 in Birmingham, England. His father, William, was a civil servant and school bursar, and his mother, Margaret, a schoolteacher who died when Michael was thirteen years old. William was a conscientious objector to the war, and after World War II, the family became involved in the Society of Friends (Quakers). Michael Ruse attended a Quaker boarding school in York and acknowledges his association with the Junior Friends as a significant influence on his early years. I make mention of this background data only because I think it complexifies the location of Ruse in contemporary philosophy of science, as this reader itself will attempt to demonstrate.

In 1962, after completing a BA in philosophy and mathematics at Bristol University, Ruse emigrated to Canada and was awarded an MA in philosophy from McMaster University (1964). Ruse returned to Bristol for his doctoral work and was awarded a PhD in 1970 for his dissertation, entitled The Nature of Biology. Notably, he taught at the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada, from 1965 to 2000. Since 2000, Ruse has served as both the Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy and Director of the History and Philosophy of Science program at Florida State University. He retired after his fifty-fifth year in the academy in 2020. Notably, while Ruse himself is an nonbeliever, he is highly interested in the science-religion relationship, and in fact contends that one can be perfectly religious even in this age of science. So then, he argues for a sort of middle position with regard to matters of faith and science, particularly with respect to evolutionary biology.

In my opinion, there are four main time periods in Ruse’s scholarly output: (1) the early years, with him grappling with evolutionary theory and its meaning; (2) the middle years, with him concerning himself with the nature and structure of evolution (laws in biology, species questions, and then teleology and whether these make biology different from physics); (3) the human years, dealing first with sociobiology and then on to evolutionary epistemology and ethics; and then (4) the science and religion years, dealing with faith and science issues. This collection of writings will bring into one volume representative samples of the broad range of Ruse’s oeuvre, as represented in his academic books, mainly from post-2000, which would focus upon the fourth area delineated above: science and religion issues. The decision to re-present his writings from this period forward and from this publishing venue is due to manifold concerns of my own. For example, one reason is to collect his voluminous writings from around the turn, and in the new, millennium, in one place. Yet another reason is because his flare in writing increased around the turn of the millennium, and thus this volume would make for an extremely exciting and interesting read. Understanding those preceding points, this book will present Ruse’s writings in this period under seven headings: (1) Atheism, Belief, and Faith; (2) Darwinism, Belief, and Religion; (3) Darwin, Darwinism, and Darwinian Thought; (4) Progress and Directionality in Evolution; (5) Design, Telos, and Purpose in the Natural World; (6) Naturalism, Sociobiology, and Their Entailments; and (7) Darwinian Ethics and Morality—each with five readings, for a total of thirty-five readings in this edited volume.

Throughout his voluminous writings, Ruse develops a constructive Darwinian worldview that is in dialogue with metaphysics, modern philosophy, postmodernity, and science writ large. (This chapter will use portions of Michael Ruse’s writings rather liberally, including Taking Darwin Seriously; Monad to Man; Mystery of Mysteries; Darwinian Revolution; Can Darwinian Be Christian?; Darwin and Design; Evolution-Creation Struggle; Darwinism and Its Discontents; Charles Darwin; Philosophy after Darwin; Philosophy of Human Evolution.) Ruse, I contend, is a highly important figure in numerous areas of concern for philosophy of evolutionary biology, science more broadly, and matters of faith in dialogue with biology. He has distinguished himself in these areas over the last half a century: he has, simply, published at an amazing rate since the mid-1990s. For example, Ruse has distinguished himself in at least the following five areas: by 1998, he had coedited the singular best anthology in philosophy of biology for at least the next fifteen years, if not more (Hull and Ruse 1998); this title, more than any other single title, raised him to be the most significant theorist in philosophy of biology as a whole, to be sure. Additionally, he is perhaps the single best representative of Darwinian thought and historical Darwinism within the twentieth century (and his wake is still being felt today).

Third, he became a leading voice in the science and religion debate, which almost goes without saying, even though he may not be comfortable with that terminology; in fact, in response to what I term the idiocy of the intelligent design debates in and around the turn of the millennium, Ruse sought a more peaceful or irenic resolution that does not disrespect biology, but that accommodates it instead. Fourth, he has become a highly productive theorist in a positive role regarding spirituality and values. Fifth, his concern with evolutionary ethics is unsurpassed, even to this day. Indeed, many of the areas he has written in are core areas for the modern debates about Darwin, Darwinism, and naturalistic explanations and ethics, and even sociobiology. One may say that the earlier part of his career established his bona fides in evolutionary biology, and the last twenty or so years, he has been working on making connections between the first part of his career into an overarching narrative of sorts.

Ruse does not think that a spirituality should be founded on a requisite number of beliefs, as if they were the foundations and everything should be based around them; rather, he thinks there is a sort of immediate, intuitive apprehension of something beyond us, which is but one reason why he is so very wise and effective in the religion and science (though I have some apprehension with reference to the usage of religion and Ruse in the same sentence!) discussion. But he is not wedded to individual beliefs, per se. I contend, however, that faith is crucial to his position, in a sense, which is demonstrable by his own works (cf. Ruse 2010b). As a thoroughgoing Darwinian, Ruse defends a Darwinian worldview against all comers, from both inside and outside the movement.

In his writings, Ruse highlights three main stages of evolutionary thought through the twenty-first century: (1) the pre-Darwinian era, in which evolution was seen to be a pseudoscience; (2) the Darwinian revolution period from the Origin to the full incorporation of Mendelism into evolutionary thinking; and (3) an era following the neo-Darwinian synthesis in or around 1930 (which persists to this day). Ruse points out that the concept of evolution gained true traction only after the Enlightenment, and is in fact a child of the Enlightenment (Ruse 2013a, 39). Ruse especially highlights the advancement of the concept of evolution that Charles Darwin made in identifying the mechanism of evolution—natural selection—which explains the design-like aspect of living beings (Ruse and Travis 2009, 25). However, Ruse is keen to point out that the idea of progress in biological advancement was not quick to disappear, persisting at least until the modern synthesis in the middle of the twentieth century (some would contend that the notion still persists unto this day).

Ruse notes that the ancient Greeks were not evolutionists. It was not that they had an a priori prejudice against a gradual developmental origin for organisms (including humans), but that they saw no real evidence for such. More importantly, they could not see how blind law—that is to say, natural law without a guiding intelligence—could lead to the intricate complexity of the world, in particular complexity serving the ends of things and organisms. This need to think in terms of consequences or purposes is what Aristotle called final causes, which was taken to speak definitively against solely natural origins. It was not until the seventeenth century—what is known as the Age of the Enlightenment—that we get the beginnings of evolutionary thinking (Ruse 2013a, 1). This could have happened only if there were something—an ideology—sufficiently strong to overcome the worry about ends. Such an ideology did appear, and it was one of progress: the belief that through unaided effort humans could themselves improve both society and culture. It was natural for many in this period to move straight from progress in the social world to progress in the biological world, and so people argued for a full-scale climb upward from primitive forms, all the way up to the finest and fullest form of being, Homo sapiens: from monad to man, one might say. It was not a genuinely atheistic doctrine, but more one in line with deism, that is, the belief that God works through unbroken law. That said, such thoughts did increasingly challenge biblical reading of the past and it went against evangelical claims about providence, the belief that we humans unaided can do nothing except for the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross.

Critics of evolution, notably—for example—the German philosopher Immanuel Kant and his French champion, the comparative anatomist Georges Cuvier, averred that final causes stand in the way of all such speculations. Moreover, particularly after the French Revolution, many thought the idea of progress to be both false and dangerous. For this reason, evolution was hardly a respectable notion; rather, it had all of the markings of a pseudoscience (Ruse 2013a, 40). On the Origin of Species (1859) changed all of this. It is important therefore, from the beginning, to get Charles Darwin right. Darwin had an inventive and discerning eye for a good hypothesis. Added to this is the fact that he was somewhat ruthless in his pursuit of an idea and its supporting facts, using others to gather information for his speculations (Browne 1995, 2002). For Darwin, becoming an evolutionist was a bit gradual. There is no question but that a major influence, along with the geology that was making him think about the operation of laws in nature and implications for such things as time and place, were the fossils that he was collecting on the Beagle trip in the 1830s. His finds were almost forcing him to think about origins and changes and causes. Along with the fossils he found on the voyage, Darwin was certainly set on the path to evolution by the distributions of the organisms—birds and reptiles particularly—that he saw when the Beagle visited the Galápagos Archipelago in 1835 in the mid-Pacific. Even more certainly, his thinking solidified early in 1837 when the taxonomist studying his bird collection confirmed that from island to island there are genuinely different species (Ruse 2013a, 5). It was at this point that Darwin opened a series of notebooks (the key species notebooks are B through E, and the human notebooks are M and N) and wrote down thoughts on evolution.

The key insight leading to the discovery of the mechanism of natural selection—the systematic differential reproduction of organisms brought on by the limited supplies of food and space—came late in September 1838 when Darwin read the Essay on a Principle of Population (1826) by the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus. Malthus had argued that the population pressures in humans lead to inevitable struggles for existence. Darwin generalized this concept to all species and then argued that success in the struggle will (on average) be a function of the different variations of the competitors, and that this will lead to ongoing change—change of a particular kind, namely in the direction of features or characteristics (like the hand and the eye) that aid their possessors. In other words, this process of natural selection (though the term is not used by him for another two or three years) produces contrivances or adaptations—things that seem as if designed for the ends they serve currently in species. That is to say, the process gives a natural (in the sense of blind, unguided law) explanation of Aristotelian final causes (Ruse 2013a, 5). There is no need to suppose outside divine intervention in such instances.

For Darwin, continued change (or even trying to keep things stable) makes for inadvertent differences, so that later forms are different from earlier ones, and groups separated simply tend to move away from each other. Unconscious selection thus changes the forms of organisms quite without our knowledge or desire (Ruse 2013a, 96). Obviously, by pointing out this, Darwin intentioned to prepare the way yet more strongly for a natural form of selection. Differential reproduction can have cumulative effects even without intelligent forethought. The way prepared as such, Darwin was now ready to start the argument for the main mechanism of natural selection.

First, Darwin had to convince the reader that there is widespread variation in the natural world. Without this widespread variation, no sustained change would be possible; he therefore pontificated widely over the world of animals and plants showing that whenever organisms are looked at in any detail, they exhibit a great deal of variation. Darwin always believed this, but no doubt his extended eight-year study of barnacles confirmed his conviction that no two forms of an individual are ever exactly identical.

Next came two crucial chapters. First, Darwin argued that there is always an ongoing struggle for existence, which he lifted from Malthus, as mentioned above. Population pressures put everything under a strain.

A struggle for existence inevitably follows from the high rate at which all organic beings tend to increase. Every being, which during its natural lifetime produces several eggs or seeds, must suffer destruction during some period of its life, and during some season or occasional year, otherwise, on the principle of geometrical increase, its numbers would quickly become so inordinately great that no country could support the product. Hence, as more individuals are produced than can possibly survive, there must in every case be a struggle for existence, either one individual with another of the same species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life. It is the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms; for in this case there can be no artificial increase of food, and no prudential restraint from marriage. Although some species may be increasing, more or less rapidly, in numbers, all cannot do so, for the world would not hold them. (Darwin

1859, 63–64

)

And so to natural selection (Ruse 2013a, 97). With the struggle and with variations, a differential survival and reproduction follows automatically.

How will the struggle for existence . . . act in regard to variation? Can the principle of selection, which we have seen is so potent in the hands of man, apply in nature? I think we shall see that it can act most effectually. Let it be borne in mind in what an endless number of strange peculiarities our domestic productions, and, in a lesser degree, those under nature, vary; and how strong the hereditary tendency is. . . . Can it, then, be thought improbable, seeing that variations useful to man have undoubtedly occurred, that other variations useful in some way to each being in the great and complex battle of life, should sometimes occur in the course of thousands of generations? If such do occur, can we doubt (remembering that many more individuals are born than can possibly survive) that individuals having any advantage, however slight, over others, would have the best chance of surviving and of procreating their kind? On the other hand, we may feel sure that any variation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed. This preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection. (C. Darwin,

1859, 80–81

)

Along with natural selection, Darwin introduced a subsidiary mechanism that he termed sexual selection. He divided this further into two kinds: (1) sexual selection brought about by male combat, and (2) sexual selection brought about by female choice. The former produces such things as the antlers of deer and the latter such things as the remarkable tail feathers of species of peacocks. It was made clear that the division between natural selection and sexual selection was based on the different intents of human breeders (Ruse 2013a, 97). Some breed for profit, for such things as fleshier cattle and shaggier sheep, and others breed for pleasure, for such things as more vicious fighting cocks and more beautiful birds.

Darwin took advantage of this part of his discussion to give his opinion on a matter which has divided biologists from the time of Aristotle to the present day: form versus function.

It is generally acknowledged that all organic beings have been formed on two great laws—Unity of Type, and the Conditions of Existence. By unity of type is meant that fundamental agreement in structure, which we see in organic beings of the same class, and which is quite independent of their habits of life. On my theory, unity of type is explained by unity of descent. The expression of conditions of existence, so often insisted on by the illustrious Cuvier, is fully embraced by the principle of natural selection. For natural selection acts by either now adapting the varying parts of each being to its organic and inorganic conditions of life; or by having adapted them during long-past periods of time: the adaptations being aided in some cases by use and disuse, being slightly affected by the direct action of the external conditions of life, and being in all cases subjected to the several laws of growth. Hence, in fact, the law of the Conditions of Existence is the higher law; as it includes, through the inheritance of former adaptations, that of Unity of Type. (C. Darwin,

1859, 206

)

There are, to this day, detractors who attempt to claim that Darwin only came along at the end of a long process to inherit all of the glory of the discovery of evolution. There is little need to spend much time on those claims because basically they do not hold much water. In no wise did Darwin steal ideas from Alfred Russel Wallace. Darwin’s ideas—the ideas of the Origin that is—are all right there in the thirty-five-page sketch of his ideas that Darwin wrote in 1842 (C. Darwin and Wallace 1958). There was some tweaking about the nature of adaptation; perhaps he hit upon the principle of divergence in the early 1850s—although there are certainly hints of that in the species notebooks—but the mechanisms (natural and sexual selection) are there, as is the structure of the argument of the Origin (Ruse 2013a, 5). During this time frame, the private Darwin was thinking furiously and by 1842 felt sufficiently confident to put his ideas on paper in a thirty-five-page preliminary essay (usually known as the sketch), and then some two years later in 1844 he expanded his ideas to a much longer, 230-page essay (usually known as the essay.) The activity rather slowed as Darwin—the professional, public Darwin—turned increasingly away from geology and toward the life sciences.

For Darwin, especially for a Darwin whose thinking about evolution was ever influenced by those Galápagos organisms’ distribution from island to island and changing as they went and thus making a treelike history to life (unlike Lamarck’s parallel upward progressions), it was almost a truism that his developmental thinking was the explanation of the fanlike distributive pattern that epitomized Linnaeus’s system. It is more than probable that it was taxonomic thinking that pushed Darwin to what he considered the major conceptual addition to his theory—the principle of divergence—that occurred in the years from the essay to the Origin in 1859. Why should there be the range of different forms that we find—is it just accidental or is there a deeper reason? In the notebooks, things seem to happen almost by necessity. The enormous number of animals in the world depends on their varied structure and complexity; hence as the forms became complicated, they opened fresh means of adding to their complexity; but yet there is no necessary tendency in the simple animals to become complicated although all perhaps will have done so from the new relations caused by the advancing complexity of others (C. Darwin 1987, E 95).

Then, Darwin saw how this all comes about by selection, because it is of advantage to organisms to differ from potential competitors and thus occupy different niches reducing conflict. Darwin writes,

The same spot will support more life if occupied by very diverse forms. . . . Each new variety or species, when formed will generally take the place of and so exterminate its less well-fitted parent. This, I believe, to be the origin of the classification or arrangement of all organic beings at all times. These always seem to branch and sub-branch like a tree from a common trunk; the flourishing twigs destroying the less vigorous,—the dead and lost branches rudely representing extinct genera and families. (C. Darwin

1860

b, point

6

; emphasis original)

In the summer of 1858, Alfred Russel Wallace, a young naturalist and professional collector, formerly in Brazil and now in the Far East—someone with whom Darwin had been corresponding—sent to Darwin a short essay with exactly the same ideas that had been fermenting in Darwin for nearly twenty years. Darwin’s friends—Lyell and Hooker—came to his rescue: Wallace had to be acknowledged as a source of research validating natural selection, but there must be no nonsense about Darwin’s priority being removed, as the various letters of Darwin outlining selection were published in the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London, and then Darwin sat down to write an overview of his theory. Thus it was in the late fall of 1859 that the Origin of Species arrived on the intellectual arena.

Evolution after the Origin was nearly a truism. The mechanism of it, however, was another matter. No one denied natural selection, per se. Very few, however, accepted that it could be as powerful as Darwin suggested. That said, people became evolutionists in droves. The number of pure Darwinians, as we might name those who adhered unto selection as primary, was very few, and the most prominent after Darwin himself was Alfred Russel Wallace, who became enamored of spiritualism in the 1860s and thereafter started to deny selection as applied to humans (Wallace 1870a).

The reasons for this halfway acceptance are well known. On one side, there were scientific problems with selection. It was thought that it could never be strong enough to overcome the supposed averaging nature of heredity as it was then understood to be. Even the best new variations would be swamped into equilibrium in a generation or two (Greg 1868). Added to this was the physicists (ignorant as they were of the warming effects of radioactive decay), who denied that there was time enough for such a slow process as natural selection (Burchfield 1975). On the other side, there was the matter of adaptation. Selection does not just bring about change, for it brings about adaptive change. Heavily Christian evolutionists like American botanist Asa Gray thought that selection could not fully explain adaptation and so they wanted (God-) directed variations, with a basis in design (Gray 1876). But this, Darwin said, rather made natural selection redundant. Nevertheless, there was much ink spilled on the notion of design, to which we now turn.

Design with and after Darwin

Surprisingly, there is still no consensus on Darwin’s dealing with teleology. After On the Origin of Species was published, Thomas Huxley praised Darwin’s defeat of teleology. Asa Gray, on the other hand, applauded his restoration of teleology. In our own time, scholars are similarly divided. Darwin did not reject the idea of a creator at any time throughout the six editions of the Origin, as one of his heroes was the natural theologian William Paley. Teleology, says Ruse, was in bad shape when Darwin’s Origin appeared. Darwin investigated Paley’s claims by seeking proximate, or secondary, causes rather than ultimate causes. And in seeking those explanations, he made no qualms about invoking final causes—that is, teleology. The complexity of life, he believed, was there for a purpose.

David Hume struck a presumed fatal blow to Christian teleology by saying it could infer a multitude of designers, not just one; or one—perhaps even a stupid mechanic—who simply copied others who had perhaps produced something only after lengthy trial and error. Moreover, the abundance of evil argues for a kind of God that no one would want anyway. Teleology thus became an idea unneeded in science, riddled with paradox in philosophy, and obstructive of genuine belief in religion . . . destined for the slag heap . . . along with phlogiston (Ruse 2003d, 28). Anglican churchmen such as William Paley and other natural theologians responded to Hume with a resounding restatement of the argument from design (that is, design exists and only a designer can explain it). Just as the complex machinery of a watch working together for the purpose of telling time points to the existence of a watchmaker, so the marvelous contrivances of the eye for the purpose of seeing point to the existence of an eye-maker.

One failing of Paley’s argument, says Ruse, was that he had no credible alternative explanation (apart from chance, which may, he argued, give us a wart or a pimple but not an eye) so his proposition became true simply by definition (Ruse 2003d, 44)—the implication is that Darwin did provide a credible alternative so we can now safely conclude that Paley was wrong. Like Paley, Darwin was looking at the organic world as if it were an object of design (Ruse 2003d, 121). Darwin’s originally orthodox Anglican belief gave way to deism and finally to agnosticism, but he did not go so far as to atheism. He endorsed the argument to complexity (life exhibits evidence of design), but his work planted a bomb within the argument to design (that design requires a designer) (Ruse 2003d, 128).

While Darwin’s thesis of descent with modification as the explanation of biological diversity was widely accepted after publication of The Origin in 1859, his mechanism of natural selection did not fare as well. Oddly, evolution as a philosophy made great gains, but evolution as science did not. In biology, evolutionary thinking was taken over by the German school led by Ernst Haeckel, which occupied itself with working out phylogenies, whereas in England, it was social Darwinism that took over. It was Huxley who turned Darwinism against teleology, as he pointed out that teleology was like a rifle bullet fired straight at a mark; [but] according to Darwin, organisms are like grapeshot of which one hits something and the rest fall wide (Ruse 2003d, 139). Asa Gray, however, pointed out that even the grapeshot points to design—natural selection may choose among variants but it does not explain the origin of those variants. Darwin was not impressed. He countered Gray by saying:

The view that each variation has been providentially arranged seems to me to make natural selection entirely superfluous. . . . It seems to me that variations . . . are due to unknown causes and are without purpose . . . they become purposeful only when they are selected. (Ruse

2003

d

, 147

)

Darwin lacked an explanation of biological variation, so it is not surprising that natural selection made little scientific headway immediately after 1859. The rediscovery of Mendel’s work in genetics at the turn of the twentieth century caused a further eclipse of natural selection in favor of saltationism—marked by those who believed evolutionary change occurred in big jumps rather than Darwin’s gradualism. The rediscovery of Mendel’s ideas moved evolution from its past toward its future. How much Mendel himself truly realized what he had done, and how much later thinkers read back into his work what they wanted to find, is still a matter of debate. The point is that now the way was being opened for an adequate theory of heredity, something so lacking and so needed by the theory of the Origin. What was necessary was that the genetics be extended from individual organisms to factors of heredity working in populations. Unlike Lamarckism, to take an example, natural selection is something that does not act on the individual but is meaningful only in groups. Thanks to some very mathematically gifted biologists, this work was done, and so by around 1930, the framework of a full theory or paradigm of evolutionary change was starting to emerge.

With the discovery of random mutations and further developments in genetics, a school of thought emerged based on nonadaptive random variation. This further relegated selection as secondary because Darwin had been concerned to explain adaptation—the fit of organisms to their special way of life. By the 1930s, however, genetics and natural selection were brought together in what has since been called the synthetic or neo-Darwinian theory of evolution. Mutations provided the raw material of evolution, and natural selection adapted it to the needs of organisms. In the USA, the key figure was the Russian-born geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky. He took a proposal by the American geneticist Sewall Wright—the so-called shifting balance theory, or at least he took the version that used the pictorial metaphor of an adaptive landscape—and used it to pursue studies in the wild and in the laboratory. Following his teacher Morgan in taking the little fruit fly as the model organism, Dobzhansky, his associates and his students followed in detail the physical and chromosomal changes over generations, trying to work out how forces of selection and of drift bring on changes. The little fruit fly Drosophila showed itself a perfect organism for genetical studies—it breeds easily and quickly, it requires minimal maintenance, it has no odd sexual system, it has giant chromosomes easy to study, and it can be found readily in the wild in accessible places. Dobzhansky’s work and that of those in his orbit (particularly the taxonomist Ernst Mayr, the paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, and the botanist G. Ledyard Stebbins) did much to establish Darwinian selection as a major force in the natural world, although there was often a non-Darwinian flavor to the work, especially when their thinking was influenced by deep roots that Wright’s thinking had in Herbert Spencer as much as Charles Darwin. Sometimes the thinking of paleontologists was at best neutrally Darwinian and even at times verged on the unfriendly. The well-known theory of punctuated equilibrium of Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould suggested that the course of evolution is not smooth but comes in fits and starts, and went through various incarnations, but in Gould’s hands was not particularly selection friendly. The very name of the theory had echoes of a theory, dynamic equilibrium, from another tradition. In a similar vein, John J. Sepkoski Jr. (student of both S. J. Gould and E. O. Wilson) did sterling work in mapping the major events in life’s history, producing neo-Spencerian pictures of the repeated upward spurts of complexity, followed by subsequent balance. It was work that could be given Darwinian underpinnings, but not work starting with Darwinism, per se.

In concluding, because he did not want to be accused of dodging the crucial issue, Darwin made brief reference to our own species. In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history (C. Darwin 1859, 488).

It is fitting to now return to the Origin for its most famous closing words. And so to the final, famous paragraph:

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. (C. Darwin

1859, 489

–

90

)

Chapter 2

Mummy’s Boy

Making a Start

I was born in England in 1940, the same week as the fall of France. My father was a conscientious objector. After the war, he and my mother joined the Religious Society of Friends, Quakers, and it was within that religion I grew up, even going as a teenager to a Quaker boarding school in York. At about the age of twenty, my belief in the existence of God faded away. I had no Saul on the road to Damascus experience in reverse. Less dramatically, Lewis Carroll knew the score.

In the midst of the word he was trying to say,

In the midst of his laughter and glee,

He had softly and suddenly vanished away—

For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.

(L. Carroll

1950

, final stanza)

I used to think that, by seventy, I would again believe in him. At that age you cannot be too careful. But here I am, in my ninth decade and no belief. For a while, I was a fairly militant atheist. When I was thirteen, my mother died suddenly of yellow jaundice. She was thirty-four. She had been orphaned as a child, unable to develop her intellectual abilities to the full, so she put her energies into making sure her bright little boy had a loving childhood, one that guided him strongly to develop his intellectual abilities to the full. I will say that, unsurprisingly, nonbelief opened the way to hitherto-unacknowledged hate of God, for killing my mother. Hate or not, I see now that, for about fifteen years, from ages thirteen to twenty-seven, I lived in a haze of sadness—until I got married and my newfound joy cleared the clouds. I don’t think I was particularly perverse or weak in this. I was just about to enter adolescence, I had just gone away to boarding school, so I was in a strange new environment, separated for the first time from the all-dominant, very-much-loved force in my life, my mother, and now she was gone. My headmaster gave me the news at 3:00 p.m. on a Wednesday. That evening, no one said anything to me. I am not sure they were told. The next morning, at 8:45 a.m., I was in class. That was the therapy and support I got. It was an all-boys school. The first woman I spoke to was two months later at Christmas.

I contrast this with my son Edward, who at twenty-four went to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville to read law. Arriving on the Friday—classes started on the Monday—on the Saturday he went downtown (alone) to explore. He got caught up in a neo-Nazi demonstration and was literally within arm’s length of a young woman who was killed when someone drove a car into the crowd. On the Monday morning, when he went on campus at 9:00, the university already had counselors on call. Edward saw one the whole first semester and often thereafter, graduating with honors. These days, when everybody is criticizing higher education, it is comforting to know that sometimes some people get everything absolutely right.

I did not at all dislike my father. His attitude toward me was a combination of pride and jealousy at my achievements, although toward the end of his life his feelings mellowed as he started to feel (a totally justified) satisfaction with what he was able to do with his life. (He was a school bursar.) I am not writing to speak ill of him. But, he did absolutely nothing to aid me through life’s journey’s after my mother died. Fifteen months later, he had found and married a new partner—an au pair from Germany—and, to be honest, from then on I was an irritation who, fortunately for the happiness of all, was around only for limited periods, namely through school holidays. I always got a job, like working for the painters at my father’s school, and was expected to contribute to my keep. If it was hard on me, it was sheer misery for my sister (two years younger than I) who was packed off as a boarder at my father’s school, literally just across the road. Talk about something to instill a sense of self-worth.

I will say, talking of senses of self-worth, part of my mother’s influence on me was to instill a sense that I was exceptionally talented, one who was going to make a mark in life. My mother’s belief was not entirely unjustified. In the state school system at that time, the all-important hurdle was the eleven-plus, a kind of IQ test one took when one was ten, and if successful (20-percent pass rate) one could go on to grammar school with the prospect of secondary and tertiary education on the state’s tab. I aced the exam and went on to the top grammar school in town, top class, top five out of a class of thirty. That all changed a couple of years later, when I went away to boarding school. (Why on earth did my parents send me there? The English class system, I am afraid. Private school, known misleadingly as public school, was—by my lower-middle-class parents, striving to climb the greasy pole—considered a priori as better than anything in the public sector.) From the first, at my boarding school, I was labeled as B material—far behind those boys who had been to private school and already had five years of Latin and Greek under their belts, no good at games, father unimportant, socially difficult adolescent—and with no mother to plead my cause, that was the end of that. Given my depressed state, I was not about to change things. And yet, the influence was still there. Deep down I knew I was special, if not showing it then. Not deep enough, I am afraid. By the time, six years later, I went to university, I came to accept what the world was telling me. My feeling about unacknowledged talent was quite gone.

I am sure that, had my mother lived, I would have been directed toward a life in medicine. If it sounds a bit arrogant to assume that I would have been good enough to get into medical school, I should explain that, in the fifties, this was not the high hurdle that it became by the seventies. (My suspicion is that television was much responsible for this. Medical shows like Ben Casey had a powerful effect. Students in veterinary schools went from all male to all female. After All Creatures Great and Small, every little girl wanted to be a vet.) In the fifties, indeed, medicine was generally marked down as something for those not good with concepts. At my school, it was generally the career choice for those boys whose fathers were GPs, and the understanding was that they would inherit the practice. To be honest, for quite a while I wondered if I had taken the wrong path, or at least not taken the right path. Apart from anything else, I had friends in medical school and I envied the camaraderie of that way of living. Very different from the rather lonely ways of a philosopher.

It was also partly that the English school system narrows one into fixed channels at an early age—sixteen in my case. I followed the herd in doing science rather than humanities—after the successes of WWII, with prospects of intergalactic travel, not to mention the power of nuclear understanding, physics was high profile. Because of my choice, I was locked into mathematics and physics and nothing else. By the middle of the first week at university, I realized that I may have been a good high school mathematician, but I was no university mathematician. I managed, at the end of my first year, to divert my path to a joint degree in mathematics and philosophy. The start to my whole life as a philosopher puts one in mind of those desperate people at the US-Mexican border, willing to do anything to escape their present position. Unsurprisingly, my mental attitude looked upon writing as a chore to be completed as quickly as possible and then forgotten. That said: God works in mysterious ways. Had my mother lived and I had been steered into a life of medicine, I might now be looking back on a lifetime of urology or something similar. What might have been. (More details of my life as a professional philosopher are given in Ruse 2017c, 2017d, 2017e. For those not looking desperately for material to pad out their dissertations, a cadet version is Ruse 2016.)

Canada

Despite the burdens that weighed down on me after my mother died, there were people to whom I have owed an everlasting debt. People who said: Mike, you are better than you let yourself be. One was Stephan Körner, my philosophy professor in England, where I did my undergraduate degree. It was he who, on getting a letter from an unknown university in an unknown city in Canada—McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario—offering support for graduate work, put forward my name. Hence, at the age of twenty-two, in 1962, I emigrated to Canada for my MA. That completed, I moved on to a PhD program at the University of Rochester, in upstate New York. I was not a success. My personal stresses were still a major factor, to which one can add the loneliness of life in a new and rather alien place. After two years, following a summer spent working at Manpower—summer jobs as a teenager prepared me for a firm that offered daily working gigs with immediate pay in cash—I left to return to Canada, tail between my legs, with one B and seven incompletes. That I got a Guggenheim twenty years later suggests that my problems were less about ability and more about psychology. I should say that at Rochester was the second of those people who thought I was better than I let myself be. The epistemologist Keith Lehrer was ever ready to write me a letter of support. I still get pleasure from remembering that the only other philosopher to get a Guggenheim in my year was none other than Keith Lehrer.

In Canada, as elsewhere in the sixties, there was a massive increase in higher education, with the founding of many new universities. The new University of Guelph, in Southern Ontario, was atypical in being founded on the long-existing Ontario College of Agriculture, the Home Economics (Domestic Science) College, and the College of Veterinary Science. There were many students whose grandparents had met at Guelph. The dean of Agriculture, recognizing that things were about to change dramatically, and the cozy little world of hitherto was gone forever, decided to seize the opportunity. He decreed the week before term started that philosophy would be a compulsory subject for all his students. The Philosophy Department was desperate for anyone willing to pitch in and teach first-year courses.

At this point, the third of my benefactors, John Thomas (father of the comedian Dave Thomas), on the faculty at McMaster, stepped up to the plate. He virtually hustled me onto the bus from Hamilton to Guelph. I was the right person, in the right place, at the right time. The job was mine. Having to get up in the morning, wash, and go to work—not to mention marrying the first of the student wives—started to turn me around. It needed to. Although let me not be entirely negative about my years of trial. One very good consequence is that my life as a teacher—something I loved as much as research—was fused with the strong conviction that the mental health of my students—especially my grad students—was as important as their academic prowess. Without wanting to sound like Mother Teresa, the Ruse table had always space for another mouth. For a bed, if needed. As we shall see Darwinism telling us, the truly happy person is the person giving to others. This is infectious. Not one of my five children had any religion as they grew up. All five of them are in jobs serving others.

Back to my new job. I should stress that, while the students in the Agricultural College—or Cow College as it was called elsewhere in Ontario—tended not to be overburdened with culture, generally they were very far from stupid. Lively and inquiring, they were great fun to teach. I knew in the first five minutes of the first class that that was what I was going to do with my life. So it proved. I retired at eighty after fifty-five happy years of teaching. Within a week, my aggies were tearing each other’s throats out as they argued about Thrasymachus and might is right. It rather boggles the mind to think of them, back home for Christmas, discussing philosopher kings while milking the cows. The dean of Agriculture was a wise man. He knew that education is more than teaching about fertilizers and the like. It is about developing the whole person. I suspect he had read John Dewey.

Life Becomes Positive

If my job at Guelph were to become permanent, there was still a PhD to be written. Any good mentor will tell one’s student to pick a topic on which there is not a lot written, and what there is tends to be rather bad. Don’t touch Hume on causation. My background in mathematics and physics still inclined me toward the philosophy of science. More than one person suggested that biology, as opposed to the traditional physical sciences, looked promising. Looking back, I can see that an unacknowledged (and unappreciated) factor was that, in the 1960s, biology was really coming into its own, with the double helix in molecular biology and more formal discussions about groups and how natural selection molds their biological nature. A paradigm was the work in the early 1960s by William Hamilton on the structure of hymenopteran (ants, bees, and wasps) sociality, showing how what came to be known as kin selection promoted the sterility of workers, who hereby increased their genetic fitness (ability to pass on one’s heritable factors, that is, genes).

Encouraged by the already-mentioned Stephan Körner, I went back for doctoral work to my undergraduate university (Bristol). The English PhD, unlike the American, has no coursework. It is all dissertation (what is called a thesis in England and Canada). There was no escape from it. I was faced with a major writing project. It was at this point, moving on from the frozen state of my thinking and emotions of the previous fifteen years, I discovered (totally unexpectedly) that I have this incredibly strong talent for writing and loved doing it. It was not like being moderately good at games and knowing that, if you worked at it, you could be really good. It was like having the sporting ability I do have and then, overnight, when I kicked the ball, it would go in the direction I intended. I do not stress this newly discovered ability because I am totally immodest—although that helps!—but because it was hitherto totally unknown to me and so very strong. A complete surprise. That it took so long to discover this was, surely, a consequence of the aforementioned haze of sadness within which I still lived. I could function in everyday life (if getting one B and seven incompletes can be called functioning), but creativity and passion were simply unknown. Released from the sadness, I could flourish. Not just the dissertation but, from that day to this, publications of the order of Erle Stanley Gardner, the author of the Perry Mason series.

Came the publication (in 1972) of my first book, The Philosophy of Biology. Philosophically, as at the time were most Anglophone philosophers of science, I was a logical empiricist, meaning that Newtonian mechanics was regarded as the model to be emulated—laws, axiomatic, testable, and so forth. Ernest Nagel (1961) and Carl Hempel (1965) were the standard-bearers. With enthusiasm, from this perspective, I embraced philosophical work in the biological sciences. More accurately, philosophical work in the evolutionary side of the biological sciences. I, like others on the same path, took seriously Dobzhansky’s aphorism that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. Truly though, my focus was more the result of a nonbiologist not knowing there were other parts of biology! I was hugely pleased and relieved when its first review by Anthony Flew was favorable. I should say that, generally, negative reviews of my papers never discouraged me. It was through them that I learned the trade of writing at a professional philosophical level. My colleagues always used to say: It’s okay for you, Mike. They accept anything you send them. To which I would truthfully reply: I have more rejection letters than the rest of the department put together. You have a thick skin. We all have thin skins. It is just that some of us learn to live with them. I never had any choice. Earning the approval of my mother is still my dominant motivating factor. If she were to return from the dead, she would be shocked to see how her memory has motivated my life. Over seventy books written or edited. More articles than I have time to count or to bother to put on my CV. Shocked, but (despite the regret of my not becoming what my father always referred to as a real doctor) rather proud.

The Influence of Thomas Kuhn

I was launched into the philosophy of biology. But, we are talking now of the late sixties. Like many of my generation, a book written by one who was not a philosopher changed the course of my thinking. I refer to the Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) by the historian of science Thomas Kuhn. Using the concept of a paradigm, a kind of scientific theory that included the sociological factors—like training—Kuhn argued for an extremely idealistic view of science, where moving from one incommensurable paradigm to another demanded something akin to a leap of faith. Like all philosophers, I rejected this. What I did absorb and endorse—like many other philosophers—was Kuhn’s directive, that in order to do good philosophy of science one had to be able to do good history of science (Callebaut 1993).

In my case, this sparked an interesting paradox. Down the road from Guelph, on the other side of the border, was the long-established, highly regarded University of Michigan, with a Philosophy Department having a deservedly strong reputation. On the door of his office, the chair had pinned a list of the top ten philosophy journals, in order. Imagine being a tenure-track assistant professor in that department. Talk about heavy-handed suggestions! Guelph, being a new university in Canada, had other priorities. A major function was to supply higher education to immigrants or the children of immigrants, a huge population since WWII. Often, over 50 percent of the class would fall into this category, starting with the professor! And immigrants did not come to Canada just to watch hockey. They wanted to seize the opportunities. To better themselves, and—even more—their children. At convocation, there would be father in the suit he wore only at weddings and funerals, mother in corsets so tight she could not sit down, and kid with a T-shirt under the gown. Suddenly, leaving war-torn Europe for twenty years of backbreaking labor in the New World was all worthwhile.

As I discovered, this was certainly no block to being a prolific publisher. The contrary. If anything, living in an atmosphere of commitment to better oneself, it was a spur to action. We had the opportunities. We were going to grab them. I went from untenured lecturer in 1968 to tenured full professor in 1974. Less than twenty-five years after I had arrived penniless in Quebec, I was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. I felt I had done something to mark the trust the country had shown when it invited me in. Our Lord had given us five talents (Matt 25:14–30). We were able to turn to him and say: Here are your five talents. And here are five more. No one needed to pin anything on doors telling us what we should do. On my first sabbatical in 1972, I scarpered off for the year to England where I spent the whole twelve months in the manuscripts room of the library of the University of Cambridge, huddled over the unpublished notebooks