Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology

176
Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology, Vol. 10 (2005)
Michael Ruse
Gayon (1992), and from a host of younger scholars like John Beatty (1987), Joe Cain
(1993), and Betty Smokovitis (1996). So let us not be overly worried on this score.
If the complaint is that one should not use a term like “revolution” because it means
so many different things – or applies to so many different events – that it becomes trivial
and misleading, I agree fully that one should not assume that one revolution is going to
be like another. Especially in science, one should not assume that all revolutions are
alike. (Especially, one should not assume that they are all Kuhnian. I will speak to this
particular matter later.) But the word revolution does have a standard meaning, and it is
useful. It means a dramatic change from one state to another. The American Revolution
was certainly revolutionary in this sense. Before, the country was ruled by the British;
after, it was not. This made all of the difference.
Similarly in other cases. The Information Revolution makes a lot of sense. I remember
when one had to book ahead to make a telephone call to England from Canada, on
Christmas day. Yesterday, sitting in a hotel room in Bogotá, Colombia, I did a radio
phone-in show in Boston, along with Richard Dawkins in his college rooms in Oxford,
and the head of the Discovery Institute out in Seattle. Anybody over forty sitting at their
laptop today, grabbing information from the internet, needs no more proof that something
pretty revolutionary has occurred.
Of course, this in itself does not imply that the Darwinian Revolution was revolutionary,
but by any measure it surely was. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, by
and large people did not believe in evolution. At the end of the nineteenth century, by
and large people did believe in evolution. More than this, they accepted that it applies to
our own species, Homo sapiens. This was a terrific move. I will allow completely it was not
necessarily purely a scientific revolution. Perhaps it was not even primarily a scientific
revolution, being more one to do with religion – Does God still exist and what does He
care about us? – or culture or whatever. But it was a revolution and moreover, whether
the most important overall factor or not, science was a very important factor. I would go
further and say that it was the prime causal factor, for without the scientists I do not see
how you could have had a shift to what is (after all) a scientific claim: organisms, including
humans, evolved.
So Hodge is going too far here. But I suspect that underlying his complaints is a
third, deeper objection. Hodge is a professional historian. The one thing that is drummed
into professional historians today is that you must not judge the past by the present,
above all you must not assume that the present is the best and the past is the worst. This
is the dreadful sin of “Whiggishness.” By highlighting the Darwinian Revolution, you are
putting today’s categories on the nineteenth century and moreover you are portraying it
all as a move from dark to light. Anathema!
Fortunately, I was first a philosopher before I became a historian, so I can see the
strengths and weaknesses of this objection. It is indeed true that one should not simply
mine the past for support for the present – the kind of thing that one often sees at the
beginning of science textbooks – Darwin, Mendel, double-helix. But the very fact of
interpretation is not bad history. Indeed, it is essential for history. Without interpretation
one just has one fact after another – chronology. Martin Rudwick (1986), probably the
best living historian of geology, once wrote a book that offered no interpretation or ref-