Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-mkpzs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T19:07:24.728Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Darwinism and Environmentalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2011

Brian Garvey
Brian Garvey
Affiliation:
Lancaster University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

A number of authors have combined a commitment to Darwinian evolution as a major source of insight into human nature with a strong commitment to environmentalist concerns. The most notable of these is perhaps Edward O. Wilson, in a series of books. Yet it may appear that there is a tension between Darwinism as a world-view – or least some major aspects of it – and a concern for non-human entities as worthy of concern in their own right. In the present paper, I want to address some of the reasons for thinking there is such a tension.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 69 , October 2011 , pp. 67 - 82
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 See for example Wilson, Edward O.: The Future of Life (London: Abacus, 2002)Google Scholar; Baxter, Brian: A Darwinian Worldview: Sociobiology, Environmental Ethics and the Work of Edward O. Wilson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007)Google Scholar.

2 See Næss, Arne: Ecology, Community and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy. Translated by Rothenberg, D. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 ‘The Genius of Charles Darwin’, Channel 4, November 2008.

4 For Example Midgley, Mary ‘Gene-Juggling’ Philosophy, vol. 54 (1979) 439–58Google Scholar; Margulis, Lynn and Sagan, Dorion: Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species (New York: Basic Books, 2002)Google Scholar.

5 For Example Dawkins: ‘Universal Darwinism’ in Bendall, D.S., ed. Evolution from Molecules to Man (Cambridge University Press)Google Scholar. Reprinted in Hull and Ruse, ed, The Philosophy of Biology (Oxford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

6 Second Edition (Oxford University Press, 1989).

7 Margulis, Lynn: Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution (New York: Basic Books, 1998)Google Scholar.

8 Darwin, Charles, (1859): The Origin of Species. Reprint of the First Edition, Burrow, W.J., ed. (Harmonsworth: Penguin, 1968), 69Google Scholar.

9 Ibid., 116.

10 Margulis: Acquiring Genomes.

11 Margulis, Lynn: Symbiosis in Cell Evolution (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1981)Google Scholar.

12 Lewontin, Richard: The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism and Environment (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000), 67–8Google Scholar.

13 Ibid.

14 For an elaboration of this consequence of Lewontin's view, see Ratcliffe, Matthew: ‘An Epistemological Problem for Evolutionary Psychology’, International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 19 (1) (2005), 47–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Wilson, Edward O.: The Diversity of Life, Second Edition (Harvard: Belknap, 1999), 347Google ScholarPubMed.

16 Ibid., 346.