Michael Ruse of the Florida State University Department of Philosophy delivers an STS colloquium talk titled “Debating Darwin: Mechanist or Romantic?” on Thursday, March 14, 5:00-6:30pm in Buchanan Tower 1197.
Michael Ruse and Robert J. Richards interpret Charles Darwin in fundamentally different ways. Ruse sees Darwin as a product of his British, industrial, capitalist, liberal environment, where machines dominate the scene and where Scottish political economics is the ruling ideology. Richards sees Darwin as a product of the German Romantic philosophy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and much more holistic. This talk offers a quick overview of some of the crucial issues, for instance the place or non-place of group selection in Darwin’s thinking.
