Detailed Biography of Dr. Michael Ruse

Michael Ruse was born in England, in 1940. His parents were Quakers, and it was in that faith that he was raised, although around the age of twenty his formal beliefs faded, never to return. He went as an undergraduate to the University of Bristol and there, almost by chance, he took a philosophy course. The topic was René Descartes’ Meditations, and from the first day he was hooked. There really are people in this world who wonder about whether you are awake or asleep and how you tell the difference!

After his undergraduate degree was finished, Ruse emigrated to Canada, a country where he spent thirty-eight years, teaching for three and a half decades at the University of Guelph, in southern Ontario. In 1965, the province (there are no private universities in Canada) had created the university out of the already-existing Ontario Agricultural College, adding on arts and sciences, and Ruse was one of the founders of the Philosophy Department. Although he is a non-believer, Ruse still takes very seriously the parable of the talents. More than anything else in his life, he feels that he has justified his existence on this earth thanks to his time and efforts (together with that of his colleagues) put into the creation of a lively and well-respected teaching and research unit. In 2000, escaping the prospect of compulsory retirement at the age of 65 – a point when he would still have three teenagers at home -- Michael Ruse and family pulled up stakes and went a thousand miles south, to Florida State University in Tallahassee. He has been very happy building a Program in History and Philosophy of Science, a unit that now boasts seven full-time members and a growing number of students. Ruse hopes to go on teaching until 2015, at which point he will have put in fifty years as a college professor. One of the real joys has been team-teaching with colleagues in other disciplines, including Joe Travis in biology and Matt Day in religion.

In the mid 1980s, Ruse started the journal Biology and Philosophy. He has also edited, and still edits, a large number of collections. Most recently there have been The Cambridge Companion to the Philosophy of Biology, The Cambridge Companion to the Origin of Species, The Oxford Handbook to the Philosophy of Biology, and Evolution: The First Four Billion Years. These activities and books reflect Michael Ruse’s research interests. In 1965, he started to read a little book on evolutionary theory, written by the doyen of British evolutionists, John Maynard Smith. As with Descartes some years before, it was love at first gene. Ruse read and wrote non-stop, a few years later publishing his first book: The Philosophy of Biology. The late 1960s was the time when the philosophy of science community was enthralled by Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Important and long-lasting was Kuhn’s insistence that, in order to do good philosophy of science, one must do good history of science. Ruse took this to heart, spent his first sabbatical at the University of Cambridge in England, retooling as a historian and immersing himself in the massive Darwin archives. Thus at the end of the 1970s, Ruse published The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw. He is proud that this book is still in print.

Michael Ruse has always thought that intellectuals should engage in issues of public concern. In the late 1970s, there was a growing debate about biblical literalism, so-called Scientific Creationism. This led Ruse to a courtroom in Arkansas in 1981, where he appeared for the American Civil Liberties Union as an expert witness in a successful attempt to beat back a bill that mandated the teaching of Genesis in the State’s biology classrooms. He put together some reflections and other pertinent ideas in a collection, But is it Science? The Philosophical Question in the Creation-Evolution Controversy. It was through this engagement that Ruse became friends with the liberal Christians and Unitarians and others who come to Star Island, a place much loved now by him and his family for over twenty-five years.

In the history and philosophy of science of the 1980s, the big question was about so-called “social constructivism.” Is science, as people like Karl Popper claimed, a disinterested reflection of objective reality? “Knowledge without a knower,” said Popper, showing his belief that the culture and the individual have no place in mature science. Or is science, as people like Michel Foucault argued, something that is an epiphenomenon of the society of the day, reflecting the interests and values of the powerful? Ruse set out to throw light on the issue of values in science. He started a massive case study on the concept of progress in evolutionary biology. Appearing a decade later, Monad to Man: The Concept of Progress in Evolutionary Biology argued that science does try to eliminate the cultural but that often the motives are themselves cultural! In other words, the true picture is more complex and interesting than either side allowed.

Drawing on the work in Monad to Man, Ruse then over the next decade published a trilogy of works: Mystery of Mysteries: Is Evolution a Social Construction?, looking more philosophically at the constructivism issue; Darwin and Design: Does Nature have a Purpose?, looking at final causes and design-arguments in evolutionary biology; and The Evolution-Creation Struggle, arguing that evolutionists and Creationists battle bitterly because they are similar in many ways and competing for the same resources and territory. Needless to say, this last book has earned Ruse the scorn of right-thinking atheists, and people like the biologist Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett are unstinting in their criticisms.

Being therefore an object of derision by both the Creationists, who still smart from the Arkansas court appearance, and the so-called “new atheists,” who think him a traitor to the cause because he dares to liken some evolutionists to intemperate religious figures of the worst kind, Michael Ruse is firmly convinced that he must be saying something useful and possibly correct. Although, somewhat unexpectedly as he gets older he gets even less inclined towards religious belief, because the atheists are not so inclined and the religious tend to be so inept, Ruse has taken to arguing that science and religion can be harmonized. This is the topic of Can a Darwinian be a Christian? The Relationship between Science and Religion, and the forthcoming Making Room for Faith: Christianity in an Age of Science. In 2001, in Glasgow, Scotland, Michael Ruse was a Gifford Lecturer. These very prestigious lectures are on the topic of natural theology, that is on the topic of God, the world, and the ways in which reason can and cannot throw light on their relationship.

In the future, Michael Ruse would like to write a book on biology and war. Although no longer the pacifist that he was when still a Quaker, he thinks that we need more rather than less study of the causes of war and the prospects of peace. There is still much work to be done before the long sabbatical that faces us all!

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