Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology

184
Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology, Vol. 10 (2005)
Michael Ruse
My gut instinct as a partisan is to say that one side is right and the other wrong, but
that is what partisans say. My more reflective opinion as a historian is that we have rival
and ongoing world pictures, very much akin to Kuhnian paradigms. Not strictly paradigms,
for apart from the fact that both sides see at least something in the opinions of
the rivals, there is not a sequential process, with one paradigm beating out the other.
Rather there are ongoing world pictures, and in this sense the Darwinian Revolution was
no revolution.
Epilogue
When I set out to write the Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw, I had no
worries about my topic. There was a Darwinian Revolution and I was going to write a
book about it. I did just this, and neither I nor my early readers – most friendly, some
critical, a few vitriolic – doubted that there was a phenomenon there about which I had
written. Now, nearly thirty years later, as you can see, I think matters are rather more
complex. But let me say that I do not see this as a matter of regret, and certainly not a
cause to feel sad that I have spent so much of my life as a scholar talking and writing
about a phenomenon that may or may not exist. If scholars felt that way, then most
theologians would be out of business by lunchtime. Rather, I now see how much more
complex – and interesting – things are than what I and others once thought. And that is
an excellent thing.
Having said this, if you want a good entry into the debate, might I recommend The
Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw. It is a great place to start!
References
Agassiz, E C (ed.) (1885) Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence. Houghton Mifflin, Boston.
Agassiz, L. (1859) Essay on Classification. Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts and
Trubner, London.
Barrett, P H, Gautrey, P J, Herbert, S, Kohn, D, Smith, S. (eds.) (1987) Charles Darwin's Notebooks,
1836-1844. Cornell University Press, Ithaca.
Bates, H W. [1862](1977) Contributions to an insect fauna of the Amazon Valley. In: Barrett, P H
(ed.) Collected Papers of Charles Darwin. Chicago University Press, Chicago. pp. 87-92.
Beatty, J. (1987) Dobzhansky and Drift: Facts, Values and Chance in Evolutionary Biology. In:
Kruger, L. (ed.) The Probabilistic Revolution. MIT Press, Cambridge.
Bowler, P. J. (1988) The non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth. Johns
Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.
Bowler, P. J. (1996) Life's Splendid Drama. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.