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)    

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
%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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