Mystery of Mystery

Michael Ruse9780674467064, 0-674-46706-X

With the recent Sokal hoax-the publication of a prominent physicist’s pseudo-article in a leading journal of cultural studies-the status of science moved sharply from debate to dispute. Is science objective, a disinterested reflection of reality, as Karl Popper and his followers believed? Or is it subjective, a social construction, as Thomas Kuhn and his students maintained? Into the fray comes Mystery of Mysteries, an enlightening inquiry into the nature of science, using evolutionary theory as a case study. Michael Ruse begins with such colorful luminaries as Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles) and Julian Huxley (brother of novelist Aldous and grandson of T. H. Huxley, Darwin’s bulldog’) and ends with the work of the English game theorist Geoffrey Parker-a microevolutionist who made his mark studying the mating strategies of dung flies-and the American paleontologist Jack Sepkoski, whose computer-generated models reconstruct mass extinctions and other macro events in life’s history. Along the way Ruse considers two great popularizers of evolution, Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould, as well as two leaders in the field of evolutionary studies, Richard Lewontin and Edward O. Wilson, paying close attention to these figures’ cultural commitments: Gould’s transplanted Germanic idealism, Dawkins’s male-dominated Oxbridge circle, Lewontin’s Jewish background, and Wilson’s southern childhood. Ruse explicates the role of metaphor and metavalues in evolutionary thought and draws significant conclusions about the cultural impregnation of science. Identifying strengths and weaknesses on both sides of the “science wars,” he demonstrates that a resolution of the objective and subjective debate is nonetheless possible.

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Table of contents :
TITLE PAGE……Page 3
PREFACE……Page 7
CONTENTS……Page 9
PROLOGUE / Science Wars……Page 13
1 / KARL POPPER AND THOMAS KUHN……Page 25
2 / ERASMUS DARWIN……Page 49
3 / CHARLES DARWIN……Page 66
4 / JULIAN HUXLEY……Page 93
5 / THEODOSIUS DOBZHANSKY……Page 112
PHOTO INSERT……Page 134
6 / RICHARD DAWKINS……Page 146
7 / STEPHEN JAY GOULD……Page 159
8 / RICHARD LEWONTIN……Page 177
9 / EDWARD O. WILSON……Page 196
10 / GEOFFREY PARKER……Page 218
11 / J ACK SEPKOSKI……Page 238
12 / METAPHORS AND METAVALUES……Page 260
EPILOGUE / Terms of Engagement……Page 280
PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS……Page 282
REFERENCES……Page 283
GLOSSARY……Page 300
INDEX……Page 311