Monad to Man: The Concept of Progress in Evolutionary Biology by Michael Ruse (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 159 human experience, could not the same be said of such notions as "community," "narrative," or even "Christian"? It is not always clear how appealing to the notion of "Christian" is much more helpful than the appeal to "rational agency" when the questions concern holy orders, the Eucharist, war, marriage, divorce, contraception, homosexuality, revelation, Scripture, and authority-in short, all of those areas of vital importance to embodied, historical Christian life. Amore extensive account of the issues of authority and the "Christian life" would be very helpful. The chapter on "obedience" offers one of the most compelling beginnings. Such questions are hardly new to scholars in these conversations. They simply affirm that Hauerwas and Pinches are to be counted among the more engaging Christian thinkers of the age. University ofSt. Thomas St. Paul, Minnesota CHRISTOPHER}. THOMPSON Monad to Man: The Concept ofProgress in Evolutionary Biology. By MICHAEL RUSE. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996. Pp. 628. $49.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-674-58220-9. No concept has caused more difficulties for the philosophy of biology than that of progress. For "progress" (from the Latin for "going toward" some direction) implies a goal, and goal conjures up the dread specter of teleology, that supposedly revanchist relic from the days of Aristotle and his medieval commentators. In fact much of the historiography of science in the West couches its narrative in terms of modern science's gradual weaning from teleology toward a more mechanical framework, as in the abandonment of Aristotle's "push" explanation of motion as motion toward a goal (that is, something falls because, as Aristotle once said, it is seeking its natural place) in favor of Newton's "pull" model of bodies moving toward other objects by virtue of their mutual gravitational attraction operating by a mechanical law that knows nothing of goals or "natural" places for objects. Inside this narratology Darwin takes pride of place, for according to the standard interpretation Darwin freed the world of biology from William Paley's (and Aristotle's) explanation for organs and organisms as obvious objects of design in favor of his theory of natural selection: a process that seems designed (as the word "selection" implies) but is in fact blind and unthinking (in contrast with the "artificial" selection of professional breeders who breed with an end in mind). 160 BOOK REVIEWS An everyone knows, Darwin's hypothesis revolutionized not just the world of biology but also that of culture at large. However, there is an irony to his wider influence: for to the extent that one denies any role for teleology in evolution, the less applicable the theory is to other philosophical issues (especially ethical ones, but also extending to other areas), whereas if evolution displays a record of increasing progress in its history of increased complexification , then one is able that much more easily to apply that record to human behavior by extrapolating that directedness into the future. This is because, however blind evolution might be, man is certainly an animal who designs things all the time (in fact, so ubiquitous is the human species' design-making habit that it misled Paley to apply it everywhere). Therefore, if evolution is as blind as many theorists hold, then it cannot by definition be of much use in helping to guide the goal-determined behavior of humans, especially in their ethics, an inherently teleologically determined form of reflecting and behaving. But if evolution does have a goal "in mind," so to say, then the way is at least open to using that extrapolated goal as an end in view for determining our own undeniably goal-driven activities. This fusion of the notion of progress with applied Darwinism is strikingly obvious in the case of the career of social Darwinism, the failed attempt to base ethics on Darwinian principles. For without the notion that evolution is going somewhere, there was no way to generate a norm for judgment out of the zigzagging that would otherwise characterize evolutionary tracks. As is well known, this initial foray of evolutionary theorists to generate an evolutionary ethic, now called social Darwinism, ended in a total failure. This collapse of social Darwinism as an influential option...