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Michael Ruse, the Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University, is a philosopher of science who has found in evolution a kind of Weltanschauung, a world picture that gives meaning to life. He believes that we know what we know because of biology and remains a skeptic on the existence of an ultimate reality as attractive as he finds the possibility. A native of England, he attended a Quaker school before entering the University of Bristol, where he studied philosophy and mathematics. Immigrating to North America, he took a master’s degree in philosophy at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, and then returned to Bristol where he earned a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1970. Already on the faculty of Ontario’s University of Guelph, he became a full professor of philosophy of science and of zoology there in 1974, a position he held until accepting his present chair at Florida State in 2000. Dr. Ruse has been a visiting professor at Indiana University, a visiting scholar at Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, and, at Cambridge University, an associate at Clare Hall, a visiting scholar at Pembroke College, an associate and a fellow of Wolfson College, and a member of the university’s department of the history and philosophy of science. He also has served as invited director of the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Montpellier, France. A former Erskine Fellow at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, he also has held Guggenheim and Killam fellowships and currently holds a Templeton Foundation research grant for exploring the constructive interaction of science and religion. He has honorary degrees from the University of Bergen in Norway and McMaster University, and is a fellow of both the Royal Society of Canada and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). In 2001, he delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Glasgow. The founding editor of Biology and Philosophy, he serves on the editorial boards of eight other journals as well as serving as general editor of Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Biology. He is a former president of the History and Philosophy of Science Section of the AAAS and presently an associate of the Center for Science and Religion at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago. A prolific author, Dr. Ruse has written twenty-four books, edited nine, contributed to sixty others, and published more than a hundred scholarly articles. His comprehensive study of the history of the relationship between scientific ideas about evolution and cultural notions of progress, Monad to Man: The Concept of Progress in Evolutionary Biology (1996), was widely hailed as demonstrating how a pervasive Enlightenment optimism regarding the possibility of ongoing social and moral improvement influenced the speculative theorizing of early biologists. In Mystery of Mysteries: Is Evolution a Social Construction? (1999), Dr. Ruse considered the careers and theories of past and contemporary scientists as he probed the extent to which science is both an objective reality with special standards of truth finding and a sequence of paradigms that subjectively mirror our ever-shifting views of the world. The most recent book in his trilogy on evolution, Darwin and Design: Does Evolution Have a Purpose?, published by Harvard University Press in 2003, explores the relation between evolutionary theory and the classical argument from design for the existence of God. He is currently completing a manuscript entitled Darwinism and its Discontents for Cambridge University Press.
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