Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection, published in On the Origin of Species in 1859, is one of the great intellectual achievements of western civilization. The ideas on which it was based—the natural development of today’s organisms from forms far more primitive, perhaps ultimately from inorganic materials—had been around from the 18th…
Michael Ruse
Michael Ruse, a refugee from compulsory retirement laws, now living and working in Florida, was for 35 years a professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph. He has written many books on the history and philosophy of Darwinian evolutionary theory. With Socrates, he believes that good food and drink are highly conducive to deep philosophical thought.
Articles by
Michael Ruse
Some change really is progress and beer is the perfect example. The Campaign for Real Ale, which started in Britain in the early 1970s, was a protest against the homogenization of beer that was a function of the big brewers buying up the pubs and filling them with wishy-washy products. And then came the era of…
The Nature-Nurture Square Dance
In which our reviewer claims that sociobiology is here to stay April 2005
In 1975, the world’s leading authority on ants decided to break out and go for the big time. Harvard professor Edward O. Wilson had already had 20 years of stunning success as an evolutionary biologist. He had worked on ants from all over the world; he had been the coauthor with ecologist Robert MacArthur of a hypothesis about island biogeography that is still the lynchpin of our studies about the flows of organisms in and out of restricted…
In Why Think? Evolution and the Rational Mind, Ronald de Sousa—a long-time member of the University of Toronto Philosophy Department, now cast out into the knackers’ yard of retirement—discusses two cases of people instructed by God to kill their children. First there was the wretched Texas housewife Andrea Yates, killer of her five…