Product Description

Drawing on work of the past decade, this volume brings together articles from the philosophy, history, and sociology of science, and many other branches of the biological sciences. The volume delves into the latest theoretical controversies as well as burning questions of contemporary social importance. The issues considered include the nature of evolutionary theory, biology and ethics, the challenge from religion, and the social implications of biology today (in particular the Human Genome Project).

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1423360 in Books
• Published on: 1998-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 370 pages

Review
"this collection of essays can be very helpful ... filled with engaging facts, inferences, competing explanations, arguments, theories and speculations." -- Ashland Theological Journal

About the Author

David L. Hull is Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University. His publications include Darwin and His Critics (1983), The Metaphysics of Evolution (1989), and Science as a Process: An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science (1991).
Michael Ruse is Professor of Philosophy and Zoology at the University of Guelph. He is founder and editor of the journal Biology and Philosophy and on the editorial board of a number of scientific journals. His publications include The Philosophy of Biology (1989), The Darwinian Paradigm (1989), Evolution Naturalism (1994), and Monad to Man: The Concept of Progress in Evolutionary Biology (1996).

Customer Reviews

excellent introduction
I think the first reviewer must have been reading a different book. This excellent collection edited by Michael Ruse is the best and best priced anthology I found after examining dozens of possible texts to use in my upper division philosophy of science course. The chapters are fairly short and quite accessible to undergraduates. The editor is fair in presenting a number of perspectives on controversial issues. And readers get a broad survey of the field. The book is hardly slanted to creationism: Ruse is not a believer, though again, quite fair toward belief. A very good survey for college students and the wider educated public.

Another Ruse
From the choice of a vague title to the choice of materials the content of this book is really a subtle attack on science. I describe the attack as subtle because this book, read superficially, makes an attempt to appear as an impartial and an open-minded study of the merits of science as oppose to a theory of supernatural creation. This book is a collection of essays or chapters from books by various authors. Read it if you like but scrutinize it carefully. It omits the strongest material in favour of science, and pasted sections of the more amenable scientists such as Stephen Gould and Ernst Mayr, and slants them towards the ultimate proposition: Science has not disproved intelligent design 100% and so a supernatural creator remains a viable possibility. It does include a chapter that advocates the depoliticising of the stem cell debate. To that credit must be given. It is not clear how that can be achieved, given that many opponents of stem cell research oppose it on philosophical or medical and ethical grounds when they really oppose them on religious grounds. "Philosophy of Biology" is also subtle in giving Richard Dawkins a couple of chapters, and so create the impression that both sides are covered; but the chapters for Dawkin were chosen so that they could be criticized, mainly in the Introduction and the other parts of the book. The use of both "philosophy" and "biology" as part of its title was probably intended to create the subtle message that this book is to be taken seriously because it is about philosophy and science, when in fact, it is about casting doubt on science. Yet, in the Introduction chapter the editor accuses Dawkins of being subtle. The reader has to judge for himself whether it was Dawkins or the editor that was being "subtle" in the sense of not openly declaring the real motives and intention of their work.This book seems to be designed to shoring up the intelligent designers knocked wobbly by science and needed a crutch to keep them on their feet, hoping to be saved by the bell. It is also to shore up the editor's own book, "Darwin and Design - Does Evolution Have a Purpose?". I would have given the book more than one star because many of the chapters written by the original writers were were well written, but since they were taken out of context, I thought that the book should not be given credit on that account. The reader best reads those books in their entirety.