Mystery Of Mysteries. Is Evolution A Social Construction ? - Hardcover

Ruse, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 067446706X ISBN 13: 9780674467064

Verlag: Harvard University Press, 1999

Inhaltsangabe

Book by Ruse Michael

Über diesen Titel

Críticas

Ruse sets out to answer [questions in the science wars], to salvage what is reasonable from the claims of both constructivists and realists, and to find a "via media" between the two. His methodology consists of examining the role of cultural versus epistemic values in the work of ten prominent evolutionists to discover what role cultural values play for each, and whether there is a set or body of norms, values or constraints that guide scientists in their theorizing and observing...Ruse's trek through 250 years of evolutionary biology yields another interesting finding: as a science matures and becomes more professionalized, epistemic values internal to the discipline become more explicit, more important and more thoroughly satisfied, whereas cultural values, although never completely absent, become relatively less significant.--Timothy Shanahan "Tree "

Reseña del editor

With the 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? This text adds to the argument, using evolutionary theory as a case study. Michael Ruse begins with such luminaries as Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles) and Julian Huxley (brother of Aldous, grandson of T.S. Huxley), 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. Ruse also 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.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Harvard University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1999
• ISBN 10: 067446706X
• ISBN 13: 9780674467064
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Sprache: Englisch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304