Abstract
Darwin and Design: Does Evolution Have a Purpose? by Michael Ruse Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, USA 384 pages, $30/£20 ISBN 067401023X ![][1] Human beings are brilliant teleological thinkers. Knowing the laws of newtonian mechanics and the initial positions and velocities of all the billiard balls on the table, we still have a devil of a time predicting where any ball will go. But when someone picks up a cue, we are stunningly successful at predicting which shot will be attempted. Design, purpose and teleology seem natural to us and it is little wonder that they are hard to abandon in biology. Yet the reasons for doing so may be overwhelming. In Darwin and Design , author Michael Ruse addresses this wonderful problem in a very successful way. For more than three decades, Ruse has been one of the leading philosophers and historians of biology. Darwin and Design is the latest offering—a mix of history and philosophy with implications galore for controversial issues in contemporary culture. Like all of Ruse's writings, the prose is graceful and humorous, and the clarity of exposition makes it accessible to a very wide audience. The book contains much interesting and important historical background pertaining to biology and to notions of design and … [1]: /embed/graphic-1.gif
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