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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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