•  8
    Darwin's Romantic Biology. The Foundation of His Evolutionary Ethics'
    In Jane Maienschein & Michael Ruse (eds.), Biology and the foundation of ethics, Cambridge University Press. pp. 113--53. 1999.
  •  3
    Chapter III contains several puzzles and unexpected features. The first puzzle regards the chapter’s relationship to Chapter IV: Natural Selection. Both chapters treat of natural selection, so what distinguishes them? Is it that Chapter IV indicates the intelligence behind nature’s selections and Chapter III introduces the analog of intelligence? And is it that Chapter III suggests that natural selection performs an eliminative function, while Chapter IV shows the positive impact of selection? I…Read more
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  •  3
    A Defense of Evolutionary Ethics
    In Michael Ruse (ed.), Philosophy After Darwin: Classic and Contemporary Readings, Princeton University Press. pp. 388-410. 2009.
  •  18
    The Nature and Necessity of Cultural History of Science
    Modern Schoolman 76 (2-3): 221-233. 1999.
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    The Emergence of Evolutionary Biology of Behaviour in the Early Nineteenth Century
    British Journal for the History of Science 15 (3): 241-280. 1982.
    The sciences of ethology and sociobiology have as premisses that certain dispositions and behavioural patterns have evolved with species and, therefore, that the acts of individual animals and men must be viewed in light of innate determinates. These ideas are much older than the now burgeoning disciplines of the biology of behaviour. Their elements were fused in the early constructions of evolutionary theory, and they became integral parts of the developing conception. Historians, however, have…Read more
  •  76
    A Defense of Evolutionary Ethics
    Biology and Philosophy 1 (3): 265-293. 1986.
    From Charles Darwin to Edward Wilson, evolutionary biologists have attempted to construct systems of evolutionary ethics. These attempts have been roundly criticized, most often for having committed the naturalistic fallacy. In this essay, I review the history of previous efforts at formulating an evolutionary ethics, focusing on the proposals of Darwin and Wilson. I then advance and defend a proposal of my own. In the last part of the essay, I try to demonstrate that my revised version of evolu…Read more
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    To the Editor
    Isis 95 (2): 270-271. 2004.
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    Darwin's theory of natural selection and its moral purpose -- Appendix 1: the logic of Darwin's long argument -- Appendix 2: the historical ontology and location of scientific theories -- Darwin's principle of divergence: why Fodor was almost right -- Darwin's romantic quest: mind, morals, and emotions -- Appendix: assessment of Darwin's moral theory -- The relation of Spencer's evolutionary theory to Darwin's -- Ernst Haeckel's scientific and artistic struggles -- Haeckel's embryos: fraud not p…Read more
  •  2
    Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions at fifty: reflections on a science classic (edited book)
    with Lorraine Daston
    University of Chicago Press. 2016.
    Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was a watershed event when it was published in 1962, upending the previous understanding of science as a slow, logical accumulation of facts and introducing, with the concept of the “paradigm shift,” social and psychological considerations into the heart of the scientific process. More than fifty years after its publication, Kuhn’s work continues to influence thinkers in a wide range of fields, including scientists, historians, and sociolo…Read more
  •  51
    Alan C. LoveDarwinian calisthenicsAn athlete engages in calisthenics as part of basic training and as a preliminary to more advanced or intense activity. Whether it is stretching, lunges, crunches, or push-ups, routine calisthenics provide a baseline of strength and flexibility that prevent a variety of injuries that might otherwise be incurred. Peter Bowler has spent 40 years doing Darwinian calisthenics, researching and writing on the development of evolutionary ideas with special attention to…Read more
  •  17
    "All art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one." Friedrich Schlegel's words perfectly capture the project of the German Romantics, who believed that the aesthetic approaches of art and literature could reveal patterns and meaning in nature that couldn't be uncovered through rationalistic philosophy and science alone. In this wide-ranging work, Robert J. Richards shows how the Romantic conception of the world influenced (and was influenced by) both th…Read more
  •  35
    The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Ethics (edited book)
    Cambridge University Press. 2017.
    Evolutionary ethics - the application of evolutionary ideas to moral thinking and justification - began in the nineteenth century with the work of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, but was subsequently criticized as an example of the naturalistic fallacy. In recent decades, however, evolutionary ethics has found new support among both the Darwinian and the Spencerian traditions. This accessible volume looks at the history of thought about evolutionary ethics as well as current debates in the s…Read more
  •  7
    The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (review)
    British Journal for the History of Science 39 (4): 615-617. 2006.
  •  19
    In a late reminiscence, Goethe recalled that during his close association with the poet Friedrich Schiller, he was constantly defending “the rights of nature" against his friend's “gospel of freedom.”1 Goethe’s characterization of his own view was artfully ironic, alluding as it did to the French Revolution's proclamation of the "Rights of Man." His remark implied that values lay within nature, values that had authority comparable to those ascribed to human beings by the architects of the Revolu…Read more
  •  101
    In 1971, Daniel Gasman saw published his Scientific Origins of National Socialism: Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League, the dissertation he had produced at the University of Chicago two years before. That book argued that Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), the great champion of Darwinism in Germany, had special responsibility for contributing to Nazi extermination biology. Gasman stacked up the evidence: that Haeckel’s Darwinian monism (which held that no metaphysical distinct…Read more
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    accepted without a compelling materialistic mechnot add that some books might give you terminal anism. Charles Darwin provided this mechanism in..
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    I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong.2 In 1902, the year after Acton died, the president of the American Historical association, Henry Lea, in dubious celebration of his British colleague, responded to the exordium with a contrary claim about the historian’s obligation, na…Read more
  •  159
    Michael Ruse's Design for Living
    Journal of the History of Biology 37 (1). 2004.
    The eminent historian and philosopher of biology, Michael Ruse, has written several books that explore the relationship of evolutionary theory to its larger scientific and cultural setting. Among the questions he has investigated are: Is evolution progressive? What is its epistemological status? Most recently, in "Darwin and Design: Does Evolution have a Purpose?," Ruse has provided a history of the concept of teleology in biological thinking, especially in evolutionary theorizing. In his book, …Read more
  •  156
    Haeckel’s embryos: fraud not proven
    Biology and Philosophy 24 (1): 147-154. 2009.
    Through the last half of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth, no scientist more vigorously defended Darwinian theory than the German Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919). More people learned of the new ideas through his voluminous publications, translated into numerous languages, than through any other source, including Darwin’s own writings. He enraged many of his contemporaries, especially among the religiously orthodox; and the enmity between evolutionary theory and religious funda…Read more
  •  114
    Darwin’s place in the history of thought: A reevaluation
    Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106 (Supplement 1): 10056-10060. 2009.
    Scholars have usually given Darwin’s theory a neo-Darwinian interpretation. A more careful examination of the language of Darwin’s notebooks and the language of the Origin of Species indicates that he reconstructed nature with a definite purpose: the final goal of man as a moral creature. In the aftermath of the Origin, Darwin, however, became more circumspect.
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    In late winter of 1864, Charles Darwin received two folio volumes on radiolarians, a group of one-celled marine organisms that secreted siliceous skeletons of unusual geometry. The author, the young German biologist Ernst Haeckel (fig. 1), had himself drawn the figures for the extraordinary copper-etched illustrations that filled the second volume.1 The gothic beauty of the plates astonished Darwin (fig. 2 ), but he must also have been drawn to passages that applied his theory to construct the d…Read more