Review of Ruse book

Ruse's The Evolution-Creation Struggle

The history of evolutionary theory is hard to get straight, in part because noone really wants to do without the agendas that requiare confusing the issue. And the Darwinian variety tends to some gross presumptions. The scientific/academic community is simply incapable of critiquing the limits of Darwinism, so the job has to be done by someone else. It's overdue.
Histories of evolution are always suspect. Noone has a truly objective high ground from which to assess anything. It reminds one of the tale of the blind men and the elephant. Everyone has a part of it, but noone, certainly not Darwinists, can see the whole.
The illusion that Darwin alone got it right with his theory of natural selection is the source of one form of the blindness. Ruse, author of some good histories of evolution (cf. The Darwinian Revolution) here produces an unexpectedly narrow account of the history of evolution, with all the spotlight on the great scientific labors of Darwin, everyone else is somehow an 'evolutionist', even T. H. Huxley. The current 'fundamentalism' on natural selection distorts the whole history of the subject. Looking at the history plainly shows a scattershot effect, in which different perspectives each have an insight the others lack. Hegel would be ridiculed now, but he saw that without an account of the evolution of consciousness you have nothing, and should even bother to claim a theory at all.
Ruse's attempted distinction of the science of evolution and 'evolutionism' is in principle entirely right, but in practice it seems the author is indulging in some pet peeves. To dismiss everything before Darwin as pseudo-science, and set up Huxley as the St. Paul to Darwin is to narrow the field of vision. Darwin's clever but finally inadequate exposition of his own theory subtracts greatly from the misleading claims for his scientific heroism. The Transcendentalists hardly deserve to be been so totally dismissed. The rubric includes the teleomechanists, springing from Kant, who saw the metaphysical dilemma in evolutionary theories, something beyond the capacities of a dunce like Darwin with his 'science'. They sensed the limits of scientific methodology with its reductionist prejudice, and inability, clearly analyzed in Kant, to deal correctly with teleology. The result is clear from the record where all parties swing back and forth between different erroneous attempts at the idea of evolutionary progress. The embryologists before Darwin clearly foresaw something now resurfacing in genetic research, and the current evo-devo makes one hope everyone might press the reset button and start over. Many of the early critics had a problem with Darwin because his theory was all too obviously wrong, and seemed almost silly. We have been so reconditioned by bad histories of Darwinism we have lost common sense. As the dialectic now tries to swing to other extreme with the Intelligent Design faction, one can only throw up one's hands.
Still, Ruse is quite right that the 'religion' of secular evolution distorts public understanding of scientific research. That springs from Darwin's own 'evolutionism', and can't be fobbed off on the others, like Spencer. Two kinds of 'fundamentalists', religious and Darwinian, confront each other. The style of discourse all too obvious among many Darwin fanatics resembles a form of intolerance. The educational system takes on the look of a Jesuitical school of indoctrination. Sociobiology plies its obvious ideology, and in the main disguised Social Darwinism reigns as before. Ruse somewhat outrageously tries to let Darwin off the hook on Social Darwinism. Blaming it all on Spencer doesn't cut the ice anymore. Any theory of natural selection will automatically provoke a kind of Social Darwinist confusion. Time to face facts.
The dismissal of the earlier generation before Darwin is unacceptable anymore. The confusions over the idea of progress, as in figures such as Erasmus Darwin, are notably open to critique, but surely Darwin is as confused as the rest. A figure such as Lamarck, if we can bypass his confused theory of adaptation, and the silliness over giraffes' necks, clearly saw the way in which two levels are at work, and must enter any theory. Darwin collapsed these two levels into a monistic selectionism, to the unending confusion of the whole subject. The point is clear in figures such as Gould who try to reinvent the second level, but can't let go of selectionism.
The current morass of evolutionary theories is a phenomenon clearly, although indirectly, indicated by a figure such as Kant who practically prophesies the intractable Darwin debate. The dilemma of scientific, ethical, aesthetic, and teleological issues has to be recast altogether into something more than just scientific reductionism. Until that day the Darwin debate will tick over without end, and leave one with the impression that a technological society that can put a man on the moon can't produce a true theory of evolution. Thus the term 'evolution-creation' struggle is misleading. The problem is Darwin's theory. The question of creationism is nonsense at the fringe, but threatening to hijack the debate from the domain of scientists and philosphers where it belongs.