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[Book Review: Darwin and Design: Does Evolution Have a Purpose?]

After Monad to Man (1996) and Mystery of Mysteries (1999), Darwin and Design is the third volume in Michael Ruse’s trilogy on the interaction between science, in particular Darwinian evolutionary biology, and the cultural environment in which it develops. Ruse’s bigger project throughout the three volumes is “(...) to bring our understanding from several disciplines – philosophy, history, religion – to answer questions about the nature of science, and conversely to use science to answer questions in the subjects I use as my probes.” (p. ix). This is, of course, a very wide-ranging project and any book of a manageable size will be able to treat only a small part of it. The part of his project that Ruse addresses in Darwin and Design is the following issue: “Darwin seems to have expelled design from biology, and yet we still go on using and seemingly needing this way of thinking. We still talk in terms appropriate to conscious intention (...). In biology, we still use forward-looking language of a kind that would not be deemed appropriate in physics or chemistry. Why is this?” (p. 8). His answer comes on p. 276: “Organisms, produced by natural selection, have adaptations, and these give the appearance of being designed. (...) If organisms did not seem to be designed, they would not work and hence would not survive and reproduce. But organisms do work, they do seem to be designed, and hence the design metaphor, with all the values and forward-looking, causal perspective it entails, seems appropriate.” In other words, design talk in biological science is important because it captures important phenomena in the organismal realm, but it is to be taken metaphorically rather than literally. According to Ruse, the design metaphor as it features in contemporary biological science constitutes a powerful and indispensable heuristic tool for biological investigation, one that is able to raise questions that would not have been asked without thinking of organisms as if they were designed to function well in their environments. To be able to evaluate the status of the notion of design as a heuristic metaphor for biological science, we need to know its history and its position with respect to other currently advocated notions of organismal design. According to these two topics, Darwin and Design can be divided into two parts with Chapter 11 as a pivotal chapter standing with one leg in each part. (This is my perception of the book’s struc-