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Ruse and the Darwinian Paradigm*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Hannah Gay
Hannah Gay
Affiliation:
Simon Fraser University
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Extract

This collection of essays, written over the past fifteen years by one of the more intrepid defenders of current Darwinian theory, contains material that will be of interest both to historians and philosophers of science and, since Ruse writes well and in an accessible manner, to an even wider audience. A preliminary glance at the contents primes one to expect to be both engaged and provoked; one is not disappointed. The essays include historical speculation on some of the views of Charles Darwin, a defence of human sociobiology and discussion of its feminist critique, punctuated equilibria theory, teleology in biology, extraterrestrial biology and moral theory, the plate tectonic revolution in geology, and the relationship between evolutionary theory and Christian ethics.

Type
Critical Notices/Études critiques
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 30 , Issue 1-2 , Winter 1991 , pp. 143 - 152
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1991

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References

Notes

1 Richards, Robert R., Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). See p. 168, note 42 and Chapter 5, especially p. 216–17.Google Scholar

2 See, for example, Wynne-Edwards, V. C., Animal Dispersion in Relation to Social Behaviour (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1962)Google Scholar. While compelling arguments in favour of individual selection have since been made it is interesting to note that Wynne-Edwards's theory for clutch size evolution in birds, namely that clutch sizes evolved so that the populations be kept in balance to prevent both over-exploitation of resources and extinction, remains consistent with much of the data. It is in many ways more consistent than is David Lack's theory based on individual selection. This is discussed in an interesting paper by Ydenberg, R. C. and Bertram, D. F., “Lack's Clutch Size Hypothesis and Brood Enlargement Studies on Colonial Seabirds,” Colonial Waterbirds, 12, 1 (1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Group selection is also defended in Stanley, S. M., Macroevolution: Pattern and Process (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1979).Google Scholar

3 Smith, John Maynard, Evolutionary Genetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 291.Google Scholar

4 Ibid., p. 175–79.

5 See, for example, Henry Frankel on plate tectonics and Richard Nunan on the theory of the expanding earth in Scrutinizing Science: Empirical Studies of Scientific Change, edited by Donovan, Arthur, Laudan, Larry and Laudan, Rachel, Synthese Library, No. 193 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Gould, Stephen Jay, Ontogeny and Phytogeny (Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard University Press, 1977).Google Scholar

7 Smith, Evolutionary Genetics, p. 288.

8 Gould, Stephen Jay, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), p. 288.Google Scholar

9 Czarnecki, Mark, “Sex and Destiny,” Saturday Night (April 1990): 63–65.Google Scholar

10 Borgerhoff Mulder has recently turned her attention to Kipsigis women. See, for example, her “Marital Status and Reproductive Performance in Kipsigis Women: Reevaluating the Polygyny-Fertility Hypothesis,” in Population Studies, 43 (1989): 285–304.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 See Kitcher, Philip, Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), for an excellent general, and critical, appraisal of human sociobiology.Google Scholar

12 For a recent example, which includes criticism of the William Irons approach, see Symons, Donald, “A Critique of Darwinian Anthropology,” Ethology and Sociobiology, 10 (1989): 131–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 Darwin, C., The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, rpt. of the 1874 ed. (New York: Rand, McNally, 1974), p. 581.Google Scholar

14 I would like to thank my colleague Judith Anderson for suggestions used in this paragraph and for her helpful general comments.