Over a career that spanned six decades, Michael Ruse battled not only creationists but also his fellow Darwinians.Lizzie Ruse/Lizzie Ruse
It’s rare for a philosopher to give expert testimony in a court case, but that’s where Michael Ruse, a young professor from the University of Guelph, in Ontario, found himself in late 1981. The state of Arkansas had introduced legislation requiring schools that taught evolution to give equal time to something called “creation science.” The American Civil Liberties Union opposed the bill, arguing that creation science was actually religion – Christianity, specifically – and that teaching it in U.S. public schools would violate the First Amendment, which guaranteed separation of church and state.
Biologists and other scientists took the stand, explaining to the court what evolution was and how it worked. But Dr. Ruse played an even more fundamental role, explaining what distinguishes science from other kinds of inquiry, and what sorts of ideas deserve to be called scientific.
Dr. Ruse’s testimony “was absolutely essential,” said Dr. Eugenie Scott, former executive director of the U.S. National Center for Science Education. If the bill had become law, students would be learning “a religious view that’s masquerading as science.”
Justice William Overton was convinced; in his decision, handed down on Jan. 5, 1982, he referenced Dr. Ruse’s testimony verbatim, concluding that creation science “has no scientific merit or educational value.”
This was Dr. Ruse’s most high-profile fight, but hardly his only one. Over a career that spanned six decades, he battled not only creationists but also his fellow Darwinians – notably the “new atheists” who, like him, were in awe of Darwin’s theory of evolution but disagreed sharply as to its implications.
Michael Escott Ruse was born into a Quaker household in Birmingham, England, on June 21, 1940. His father worked as a civil servant and later as a bursar in a Quaker-run school and his mother was a primary school teacher. When she died suddenly at the age of 33 – Michael was 13 – it took a heavy psychological toll. But he always remembered her steely work ethic, and credited her with instilling in him the drive to succeed.
He enrolled at the University of Bristol, studying mathematics and then philosophy. After earning his bachelor’s degree there, he moved to Canada to pursue a master’s at McMaster University in Hamilton, graduating in 1964. After a few unsuccessful years of graduate work at the University of Rochester, he returned to Ontario. Luckily, new universities were sprouting up, all of them keen to fill faculty positions. At the age of 25, with just an MA, he was hired at the still-new University of Guelph to help get its philosophy department off the ground. He would remain there for 35 years (though he took a brief leave to complete his PhD at Bristol). Soon he was recognized as a founder in the new field of philosophy of biology.
By 1974, Dr. Ruse was a full professor at Guelph. Teaching came naturally to him. “I knew in the first five minutes of class that this was what I was going to do with my life,” he wrote in an autobiographical essay published earlier this year.
He found happiness in his personal life as well, though the journey was rocky at first. He had two children with his first wife, April Steele, though he described the marriage as “disastrous.” A few years later, however, he found his soulmate in Lizzie Matthews. Like his first wife, she was a former student. The couple married in 1985 and had three children together. Dr. Ruse often said that he was “endlessly in love” with her, recalls their youngest son, Edward, a lawyer based in Washington, D.C.
Dr. Ruse was a father figure to many students and younger colleagues, who were frequently invited to the family home. He would read everything they wrote, offering constructive criticism over dinner and wine (as the family’s beloved Afghan hounds and cairn terriers scurried about), or during walks to and from campus.
Had it not been for the University of Guelph’s mandatory retirement policy, Dr. Ruse likely would have remained in Ontario. Instead, in 2000 he accepted a position as a professor and director of the History and Philosophy of Science Program at Florida State University, in Tallahassee.
He eventually became a U.S. citizen, though he retained both his Canadian and British citizenships.
Philosopher of science Michael Ruse with wife Lizzie Ruse in 2018.Lizzie Ruse
Dr. Ruse wrote like the wind, producing at least 70 books, his family estimates. “He found that he could easily write thousands of words in one sitting,” said Kenneth Dorter, a philosopher recently retired from the University of Guelph, who knew Dr. Ruse since the 1960s. At one point, he figures Dr. Ruse was producing three books a year. “He had all this stuff going on in his head, and it just came pouring out.”
Charles Darwin, his intellectual hero, anchored many of those books. (By a rough estimate, about one-third of Dr. Ruse’s books refer to Darwin or Darwinism in their titles.) In Darwin’s lifetime, his most ardent supporter was the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, who earned the nickname “Darwin’s bulldog”; in contrast, one scholar described Dr. Ruse as “more of a friendly cocker spaniel.”
A dozen years after the Arkansas case, the creationist movement returned with “intelligent design,” offering scientific-sounding arguments rooted in biology and biochemistry. This time Dr. Ruse wasn’t involved in the legal battles – intelligent design was eventually defeated in the courts, just as creation science was – but he did attack the movement in a number of books and articles. While intelligent design was more sophisticated than its creation science predecessor, Dr. Ruse still saw it as an attempt to dress up a religious viewpoint as science. As he told the Discovery Channel’s Jay Ingram: “Ten times zero is still zero.”
Dr. Ruse fought openly with the “new atheists,” a group of militant non-believers unofficially headed by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. In his 2006 book The God Delusion, Dr. Dawkins accused Dr. Ruse of being too soft on creationists, comparing him to Neville Chamberlain, the U.K. prime minister who tried to appease Hitler in the early days of the Second World War. For his part, Dr. Ruse described the new atheists as a “bloody disaster” and said that The God Delusion made him “ashamed to be an atheist.” Unlike his more ardent opponents, Dr. Ruse did not see science and faith as necessarily being in conflict. (Edward Ruse notes that the family would always place a stuffed Darwin figure on top of their Christmas tree.)
“Part of it is his Quaker upbringing,” said Dr. Paul Thompson, a philosopher at the University of Toronto who is working on a biography of Dr. Ruse. “He had a deep sympathy for the quest that lots of people have, to find meaning and purpose in their lives, and he didn’t want to rub people’s noses in the fact that, well, maybe there isn’t a good answer to those questions, and science has made it hard to continue with some of the answers that we thought we had.”
He did not fear controversial subjects. Dr. Ruse penned a book on the biological causes of homosexuality, and a book on sociobiology, an idea developed by the late Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson that seeks to explain human behaviour in terms of biology. Yet another book looked at the merits of the Gaia hypothesis, a contentious theory which views the Earth and its various life forms as a synergistic, self-regulating complex system. Each of these drew both praise and criticism.
Dr. Ruse received numerous awards, including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, an Izaak Walton Killam Fellowship, and the Bertrand Russell Society Award.
He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1986, and, in the same year, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was also awarded at least four honorary doctorates.
Dr. Ruse died from lung disease on Nov. 1, with his wife by his side. In addition to Ms. Ruse, he leaves his five children, Nigel, Rebecca, Emily, Oliver and Edward, and seven grandchildren.
A man of a thousand ideas, Dr. Ruse could occasionally be forthright and brusque, but also cared very deeply for those around him.
“We all loved him,” Dr. Scott said. “There was something about this rosy-cheeked cheerfulness that he had about him. You can’t stay mad at a guy like that. He was just so much fun to be with, even when he was wrong.”
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