Charles Darwin: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

Saturday, July 25 to Saturday, August 1

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During this exciting week on Star Island, Dr. Michael Ruse will present the following lectures. Each will last approximately one hour (illustrated with PowerPoint) and will be followed by an hour discussion from the floor.

Lecture One: Setting the Scene

We begin with the Greeks and the Jews, and their rival pictures of origins, trying to understand them in their own terms and not as anticipations and refutations of what is to come. We will then move on through the Scientific Revolution and the Reformation to the Enlightenment and the coming of the social doctrines of progress. This will help us understand why it was that people first began to think in terms of biological evolution, but at the same time why many very sophisticated figures like the philosopher Immanuel Kant in Germany and the comparative anatomist Georges Cuvier in France rejected the idea. We will then journey through the first half of the nineteenth century, stopping just as we get to Charles Darwin. Much emphasis will be given to religious developments showing (among other things) that Christian critics of evolution were far from crude biblical literalists.
Photo: Fossils were of huge interest in the first half of the nineteenth century and the early Victorians were as obsessed with dinosaurs as we are today. These are models made for the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, now in a park in South London. Note how clumsy the brutes seem to be. Today, we have a much greater appreciation of the dinosaurs and their sophisticated adaptations. After all, they were around for 150 million years!

Lecture Two: Darwin and the Origin

Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882), the English naturalist, is rightly known as the father of evolutionary theory. His On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, is the classic statement of evolutionary ideas and moreover the place where he introduced his mechanism of natural selection. This lecture looks at Charles Darwin as a person and then at the Origin of Species. We shall examine the structure of Darwin’s argument, trying to understand why many people were very excited about Darwin’s views on evolution but why also most people rejected Darwin’s claims about his mechanism of natural selection.
Photo: The title page of the Origin of Species. 1250 copies were printed and it sold out almost immediately. In all, Darwin wrote six editions. Today, if you wanted to buy this book it would cost you around $200,000.

Lecture Three: Evolution after Darwin

This lecture will survey the history of evolutionary thinking after Darwin, covering the arrival of Mendelian (later molecular) genetics and how this led to the revival of Darwinism in the 1930s and the final triumph of natural selection. We will then look at evolutionary theory today, paying special attention to natural selection and the evidence for it. Also to be considered are the areas of sociobiology, paleontology, biogeography, and embryology. Rival theories like Stephen Jay Gould’s punctuated equilibrium will also be discussed.
Photo: The male frigate bird from the Galapagos. He is obviously doing his sexual thing, trying to attract the females. Darwin wrote extensively on these issues in the Descent of Man and today sexual selection is a topic of intense interest to evolutionary biologists. This photograph was taken by Edward Ruse on the Galapagos in 2007.

Lecture Four: Humans and the Problem of Knowledge

First we will look at the history of evolutionary thinking about humankind. Special attention will be paid to Darwin’s Descent of Man, and then to the work of paleoanthropologists in the twentieth century. We shall discuss such exciting discoveries as Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) in Africa and the hobbit (Homo floresiensis) in Indonesia. Following on this, we shall turn to the problem of knowledge and the possible pertinence of Darwinian thinking. We shall begin with the American Pragmatists in the nineteenth century and then move on to the recent work of evolutionary psychologists like Steven Pinker, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides. Is Darwinism self refuting as is claimed by the American philosopher of religion Alvin Plantinga?
Photo: Lucy, a specimen of Australopithecus afarensis discovered in East Africa about 1970. About 3’ 6” tall, she truly is a “missing link,” because she walked upright and yet had a chimpanzee-size brain. (She did not have a chimpanzee brain; rather one of the same size.) She still had legs far better adapted for climbing that we modern humans.

Lecture Five: Humans and the Problem of Behavior

We begin by looking at so-called Social Darwinism, showing that it was a much more complex phenomenon than many people think. We shall cover such major figures as Herbert Spencer, Alfred Russel Wallace, Andrew Carnegie, and Prince Peter Kropotkin. We shall, following the claim made in the movie Expelled, ask whether or not Darwinism leads in a straight line to Hitler. (NO! But it’s an interesting question!) Then coming to the present we shall ask, following Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, if human sociobiology throws light on morality and about its import for humankind? Has recent work on the brain carried the discussion forward? Does game theory have a role in this discussion? Can one liken morality to a language as is claimed by Steven Pinker?
Photo: The grave in Highgate cemetery (in London) of Herbert Spencer, in respects a far greater influence on Social Darwinism than Charles Darwin himself. George Eliot, with whom Spencer is reputed to have had a romantic dalliance, is buried just around the corner. Across the path is the grave of Karl Marx, giving rise to many jokes about the combination of Marx and Spencer, playing on the name of the British department store chain, Marks and Spencer. Scholars have discovered that most American nineteenth century Marxists were indeed more in the tradition of Spencer. Apart from anything else, they could follow Spencer whereas Marx’s German-based philosophical thinking was just too difficult.

Lecture Six: Darwinism and Religion

There are two big questions to be discussed here. First, can evolutionary theory explain religion? A number of thinkers today including the philosopher Daniel Dennett, the biologist David Sloan Wilson, and the anthropologist Pascal Boyer think that such an explanation is possible, but others disagree strongly. Second, if Darwinism is true then is religion – Christianity in particular – false? This is the claim of philosopher Philip Kitcher and biologist Richard Dawkins. But are their critiques well taken? And what about Creationism and Intelligent Design Theory? Why are so many Christians, in North America particularly, so opposed to evolution in general and Darwinism in particular? Is the debate all one-sided or do they have some good points? Can we ever hope for a science-religion resolution?
Photo: Darwin’s Finches, little birds found on the Galapagos and the much-cited example of evolution in action. Note the massive beaks on this pair, an adaptation for eating nuts and cactus. Other species of Darwin’s finches have very fine beaks, an adaptation for eating insects. This apparent design like-nature of organisms, their parts functioning for specific ends, was something that Darwin learnt from the natural theologians, and is right at the heart of the criticisms of the Intelligent Design Theorists today. (This illustration was drawn for the publication based on the discoveries of HMS Beagle, the ship on which Darwin traveled around the world, from 1831 to 1836.)

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