Ruse on "the ongoing struggle between evolution and creationism"

The 1 May /Boston Globe /offers an interesting review of Michael Ruse's
latest book.

"Evolutionary War" by Peter Dizikes, Boston Globe, May 1, 2005
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/05/01/evolutionary_war/

 
I offer these tidbits to encourage you to read the review:

"What accounts for this revival? Some observers point to the increasing
political influence of the religious right. Others point to decades of
well-funded creationist efforts to chip away at evolution's stature,
reducing it to just one in a range of competing theories. But Michael
Ruse has a different explanation: He lays much of the blame at the feet
of evolution's most famous advocates.

Ruse, a philosopher of science at Florida State University, occupies a
distinct position in the heated debates about evolution and creationism.
He is both a staunch supporter of evolution and an ardent critic of
scientists who he thinks have hurt the cause by habitually stepping
outside the bounds of science into social theory. In his latest book,
''The Evolution-Creation Struggle,'' published by Harvard University
Press later this month, Ruse elaborates on a theme he has been
developing in a career dating back to the 1960s: Evolution is
controversial in large part, he theorizes, because its supporters have
often presented it as the basis for self-sufficient philosophies of
progress and materialism, which invariably wind up in competition with
religion."...

"All told, Ruse claims, loading values onto the platform of evolutionary
science constitutes ''evolutionism,'' an outlook that goes far beyond
the scientific acceptance of evolution as a means of explaining the
origins and development of species. Provocatively, Ruse argues that
evolutionism has often constituted a ''religion'' itself by offering ''a
world picture, a story of origins, and a special place for humans,''
while its proponents have been ''trying deliberately to do better than
Christianity.''

Jack Haas
Received on Tue May 3 06:55:51 2005