Mystery of Mysteries: Is Evolution a Social Construction? (Paperback)

Michael Ruse is a philospher and an expert in the history of Biological Evolutionary thought. His goal is to evaluate two alternatives about about the nature of science. He wishes to evaluate if science measures a reality that is independent of the scientist, as Karl Popper would propose, or alternatively that what we see is governed by the paradigm or world view we have selected (and which is often inpenetrable to new concepts), as Thomas Kuhn might propose. His method is to analyse the writings of a selection of Evolutionists from Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles) to current day Evolutionists. Ruse's favorite word is "epistemic" (from the Greek word meaning "knowledge"). He uses it in the sense of "objective testable, reproducible science".

For me much of the value of this book was the analysis rather than the final conclusions. What becomes clear is that Evolutionists simply cannot resisist the temptation to expand their writing outside of pure scientific study into the "non-epistemic" world of reading between the lines and speculating what might have happened in the earth's past history. This is particulary true of Evolutionists public or lay literature. What you can be fairly sure of is this, if you have read anything about evolution lately, and you are not a specialised scientist, what you read is almost certainly of the non-epistemic unscientific kind. Why would evolutionists do this? They are creating coherence, making sense of the world around them, scientific or not.

This leaves me with some conclusions thanks to Ruse.
1)Much of what appears as literature in "evolutionary science" is surely no better scientifically than literature about "intelligent design". The desire for Coherence drives both paradigms.
2)If the Thoery of evolution has become progressively more scientific over the last 150 years as Ruse proposes, is the theory we have now merely a scientific veneer covering a non-epistemic core?
3)Ruse says that in 1981 in the Little Rock Arkansas "balance treatment" case he argued that Creationism was unscientific. Would he now take the stand and warn parents that most of what their children heard about evolution was like-wise non-epistemic?

Frankly, I was expecting an answer. I did not get one.

It is when coming from the philosophy angle that the book fails to hold up. After all, from its title, we expect to be treated to a query on whether evolutionary biology has made it over the hurdle from metaphysical philosophy to bonafide science (and many readers will not even have been aware that this was even a question). The first chapter is an introductory overview of the dilemma. There are two views of science: one objective and descriptive of the world out there (a la Karl Popper) and one more subject dependent, influenced by cultural factors enough not to yield true description of reality (a la Thomas Kuhn). Ruse discusses the difference in these two thinkers writings. Coming from a reader whose read both authors, his description of Kuhnian 'subjectivism' is well off the mark and his synopsis of Popperian objectivism also could use a fair amount of tweaking. Instead of Kuhn, maybe Dewey would've been a better choice.

It is after the first chapter that the chapters become short summaries of key thinkers: the first half devoted to history and biography and the second, a review of each thinkers scientific achievements and whether they represent sceince or metaphysical philosophy. The chapters on the two Darwins, Dawkins, E.O. Wilson and Lewonton are incredible and penetrating. The others are adequate. All of these are followed by a brief conclusion chapter to tie up loose ends, too brief for the books purposes

In the end, maybe Ruse got so caught up in how much fun he was having with the individual histories that he forgot to focus on the question. The nature of science was to be our topic and sometimes we get a glimpse of analysis on the question but not enough to warrant the books subtitle. For those concerned with the history of the field of evolutionary science - from its days as natural philosophy to the present - this book will no doubt satisfy. As an examination of where evolutionary sciecne does and does not hold up as an objective (or subjective) discipline, Ruse leaves us dissapointed.