Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology

174
Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology, Vol. 10 (2005)
Michael Ruse
attracting attention, and there were wonderful archival resources at Darwin’s own university,
in Cambridge, England.
Although I say it myself, I worked hard at my tasks, and actually spent a year in
Cambridge, working in the archives and trying to acquire the skills of a professional historian
of science. I learnt much from Robert M. Young, Martin Rudwick, and the late
Roy Porter, then still a graduate student but with more energy than the rest of us put
together. But the one thing I did feel the need of was a good overview of the Darwinian
Revolution. Something that someone like me could read and, as it were, get up to speed
on the topics. So, at the end of the 1970s, I wrote just such a book! And, without being
unduly modest, I think I did a pretty good job. It has been a good standard account from
that day to this, and still sells as many copies each year as it did almost from the beginning.
Actually, let me be a little more modest, because I think my book succeeded for one
very good reason. People started to take serious, professional interest in the Darwinian
Revolution around the time of the centenary of the Origin, in 1959. By the end of the
1970s, we had therefore had twenty years of hard work by scholars (most of them young
and enthusiastic), and much of the basic groundwork had been done. We had a pretty
good idea of what was going on – a pretty good idea based on published material and the
very large archives. My book was unashamedly a synthesis of the work of us all, and so
this is why it has stood the test of time. I do not mean that nothing new has been done –
one thinks for instance of Adrian Desmond’s (1989) terrific work ferreting out the working-class
evolutionists in Britain in the 1830s, or of Robert J. Richards’s (2002) very important
work on German biology – but basically we were on top of things, and my book
reflects that. 1
But things do not stand still and let us be thankful for that. In this new century, it is
clear that there remains massive interest in the Darwinian Revolution – both internally
by scholars and externally (in the USA particularly) because of current controversies over
evolution – and things are only going to get more intense as the decade proceeds. 2009 is
the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150 th anniversary
of the publication of the Origin of Species. What I think is fair to say is that emphasis has
now moved from finding out the facts and the immediate issues to broader questions of
interpretation. How do we make sense of what happened in the nineteenth century in
biology, with the coming of evolution?
There are some very different interpretations and understandings being put forward.
The Journal of the History of Biology (Spring 2005) has just published a symposium on the
Darwinian Revolution, and it would be hard to imagine more different visions of the
1 What were the important books and articles of the day? Most important of all was the transcription and
publication of Darwin’s notebooks by Sir Gavin de Beer and co-workers. A new improved transcription is
Barrett et al (1987). For me, Robert M. Young’s articles were simply mind-blowing. These have been collected
as Young (1985). Camille Limoges’s (1970) doctoral thesis was very insightful. We all owed a debt to
David Hull (1973) for collecting together the responses to Darwin. Michael Ghiselin’s (1969) overview of
Darwin was quirky, irritating, and stimulating. Martin Rudwick (1972) gave great background. Absolutely
crucial for understanding the reception of Darwinism was Ellegård 1958. This is just a sample and for more
information go to the bibliography of The Darwinian Revolution.