Michael Ruse

Hopes of applying the findings and speculations of evolutionary theorizing to the problems of ethics have yielded a program with a bad reputation. At the level of norms – substantival ethics – it has been a platform for some of the more grotesque socio-politico-economic suggestions of our times. At the level of justification – metaethics – it has opened the way to some of the more blatant fallacies in the undergraduate textbook. Recently, however, a number of people, philosophers and biologists, have sensed that a more adequate evolutionary ethics might be possible. United in the conviction that it simply has to matter that we humans are modified monkeys rather than the creation of a Good God, in His image, on the Sixth Day, they argue that recent developments in evolutionary biology, especially those dealing with the genetic basis of social behavior, open the way to a satisfactory biological understanding of morality

The relationship between biology, the science of organisms, and ethics, the philosophy of morality, has never been a particularly happy or fruitful one. Indeed, for much of this century, attempts to relate our animal nature to our sense of right and wrong have been taken as paradigms of how not to do moral philosophy. It has been argued that such systems of “evolutionary ethics” commit the most basic fallacies, and can serve only as dreadful warnings to those who would cross interdisciplinary divides.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:144 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 28" 1 JANUARY 199o name neo-Kantianism is generally used only for the time following 188o.s And is K6hnke really beingjust toward later neo-Kantianism in reckoning the 187os as a high point after which only a period of decline could follow? HELMU'r HOLZHEY Universityof Zurich Robert J. Richards. Darwin and the Emergenceof Evolutionary TheoriesofMind and Behav- /or. Science and Its Conceptual Foundations Series. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987. Pp. xvii + 7oo. $34.95. This fascinating book operates at two levels, possibly three. At the most straightforward level, it is a history of science, telling the tale of the fate of evolutionary ideas as they have been applied to mind and behavior during the past two centuries, with special emphasis on the nineteenth century. At another level, Richards is acting qua philosopher, for he thinks the story he has to tell has important implications for philosophy. In particular, he thinks the people he discusses show the way to compelling theories of evolutionary epistemology and evolutionary ethics. To this end he attaches two philosophical appendices to his book, articulating and defending his philosophical claims. Then, at perhaps a third level, Richards uses his historical narrative as a case study (and possibly an exemplar) for his philosophy, especially his epistemology, trying to justify and illustrate his position. Let me take these levels in turn, briefly. First, we have the history. Anybody who knows anything at all about the history of science will know that the subject is clogged with overproduction and overinterpretation around a few key figures. Chief among these is Charles Darwin, and if ever anyone writes anything again on his discovery of natural selection, I for one will scream. What I have long suspected-- and what Richards shows in full detail--is that, because of their tunnel vision, the historians of science thereby ignore huge fertile areas, which go untouched. And the paradox is that the narrow perspective means that important aspects of those overdiscussed figures go unanalyzed! Certainly, Richards plows virgin territories, and thereby throws new light on many important figures in biology, psychology, and philosophy--not the least of which is Darwin himself. Richards starts in the eighteenth century with the first growths of evolutionary thought, showing that from the beginning thinkers recognized that humankind had to be part of the problem, and that this meant (in particular) human thought and behavior. I was glad to see a full discussion of Charles Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus Darwin. We are now starting to realize how he merits interest in his own right, not just as a curious anticipation of his more famous grandson. Moving forward, Richards shows how Erasmus Darwin struggled constantly with the problem of the human mind, as did Frenchmen like Lamarck. These and other thinkers were all known to s See H. Holzhey, "Neukandanismus," in HistorischesWOrterbuchderPhilosopfiie,vol.6 (1984), column 747ft. BOOK REVIEWS 145 Charles Darwin, and a significant part of Richards's discussion is devoted to showing just how much of Charles Darwin's thought on mind and behavior was built out of the work of others--with his own distinctive twists. Richards emphasizes, and I am sure he is right here, that natural theology was crucial to the development of Charles Darwin's thinking. It was not, as many critics have claimed, a case of Darwin throwing off religion and then taking up evolution. Rather, he has led to his evolution through his religion. Richards is almost unique among twentieth-century thinkers in finding virtue in the work of Herbert Spencer. I am still not convinced that Spencer was other than a tedious Victorian chauvinist. But no doubt I will not be the only scholar who is happy to have a Spencer apologist against whom one can test one's critical opinions. To be commended without reservation, however, is Richards's detailed analysis of the psychobiological thinking of William James. Richards delicately balances his knowledge of James's own psychological states (including facts still suppressed) with conceptual analysis of James's scientific claims. I do not know if this counts as "externalist" or "internalist " history of science, but it certainly shows that knowledge...

he history of evolutionary theory is a little bit of a puzzle. Charles Darwin, the author of the Origin of Species in 1859, was the man who made evolutionary ideas reasonable—ideas that were generally accepted—and it was Darwin who provided the major mechanism of natural selection. He was not the first evolutionist, however. For at least one hundred and fifty years, starting with people like the French encyclopediast Denis Diderot, people had been speculating that organisms had a natural origin, from primitive forms. But why did these speculations have to wait this long? It is true that Christianity, incorporating as it did the creation stories of Genesis—what the nineteenth-century English essayist Thomas Carlyle called "Jewish old clothes"—was not going to be friendly towards evolution. But what about the Greeks? Did not they get into such ideas?As a matter of fact we all know that they did, a bit. Empedocles had some fanciful ideas about pieces coming together to make functioning organisms, but these were ideas for which he was roundly scolded by Aristotle. Why? Ernst Mayr, the distinguished, twentieth-century evolutionist, used to argue that Plato was the culprit. Supposedly, the theory of forms precluded any sort of developmentalism. Jellyfish are jellyfish and cows are cows and humans are humans, and that is an end to it. But many have long suspected that Mayr is probably not

There is a strong need of a reasoned defense of what was known as the “independence” position of the science–religion relationship but that more recently has been denigrated as the “accommodationist” position, namely that while there are parts of religion—fundamentalist Christianity in particular—that clash with modern science, the essential parts of religion do not and could not clash with science. A case for this position is made on the grounds of the essentially metaphorical nature of science. Modern science functions because of its root metaphor of the machine: the world is seen in mechanical terms. As Thomas Kuhn insisted, metaphors function in part by ruling some questions outside their domain. In the case of modern science, four questions go unasked and hence unanswered: Why is there something rather than nothing? What is the foundation of morality? What is mind and its relationship to matter? What is the meaning of it all? You can remain a nonreligious skeptic on these questions, but it is open for the Christian to offer his or her answers, so long as they are not scientific answers. Here then is a way that science and religion can coexist