Monad to man, the concept of progress in evolutionary biology m ruse (harvard university press, 1996)

Monad to Man



Monad to Man
The Concept of Progress in
Evolutionary Biology

Michael Ruse

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England


Copyright © 1996 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 2009.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ruse, Michael.
Monad to man : the concept of progress in evolutionary biology /
Michael Ruse.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-674-58220-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-674-03248-4 (pbk.)
1. Evolution (Biology)—Philosophy 2. Evolution (Biology)—
History. I. Title.

QH360.5.R87 1996
575—dc20
96-18951


For my children
Nigel
Rebekah
Emily
Oliver
Edward



Contents

1.

2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.

13.
14.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Progress and Culture
The Birth of Evolutionism
The Nineteenth Century: From Cuvier to Owen
Charles Darwin and Progress
Evolution as World View
The Professional Biologist
Evolution Travels West
British Evolutionists and Mendelian Genetics
Discipline Building in Britain
The Genetics of Populations
The Synthesis
Professional Evolutionism
Contemporary Debates
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Credits
Index

IX

1
19
42
84

136
178
205
244
285
321
362
410
456
485
526
541
549
597
601



Acknowledgments

lowe this book to three people. First, to F. H. Legg, my history teacher at
Bootham School York back in 1955. If some of his enthusiasm for the
Victorians comes through in my pages, then I have started to repay my
debt to him. Second, to Robert M. Young, under whose direction I spent
a year in the Wellcome Unit at Cambridge University in the early 1970s.
I agree with few of his conclusions and he agrees with none of mine, but I
still think that his is the most exciting mind ever to have turned to the
Darwinian Revolution. He-and Martin Rudwick and Roy Porter, both
then also at Cambridge-taught me that you simply cannot think about
science divorced from the social context. The third debt lowe is to

Edward O. Wilson, at Harvard University. He was important in two
ways. First, because he urged me to attempt at least once to write a really
big book. In one sense, I have certainly done that! Second, because in the
course of writing a paper with him on ethics I came to see that, although
we were (and are) close friends and committed Darwinian evolutionists,
his vision of the field is simply out of focus with the way that I see things.
I think I now know wherein lies our difference.
Several institutions welcomed me while I was working on the manuscript. In England, these were the Department of History and Philosophy
of Science, Wolfson College, and Pembroke College, all of the University
of Cambridge: I am grateful especially to Michael Redhead, Mary Hesse,
and Nicholas Davies. In France, welcome came from the Ecole d'Hautes
Etudes in Paris and the Laboratoire de Paleontologie Vertebre in Montpellier: I am grateful especially to Jacques Michaux and Jean Gayon. My
home university of Guelph has been very tolerant of my absences. I am
much obligated to David Murray, Carole Stewart, and Brian Calvert. I
am also deeply in the debt of my several typists and assistants: Gail
McGinnis, Linda Jenkins, Moira Howes, and David Castle.
IX


x

Acknowledgments

The staffs of the archives and libraries I consulted were always friendly
and helpful, and the same is true of the scientists I interviewed. Both
private and public funds supported my labors, and I am especially grateful to the Isaak Walton Killam Memorial Fund and the (Canadian) Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
Many people read part or all of my text. If you had seen the earlier
versions, you would know that this really was an act of true friendship.
The list includes: Peter Bowler, Jean Gayon, Jon Hodge, David Hull, Jim

Lennox, Dan McShea, Ernst Mayr, Greg Mitman, Ron Rainger, Marc
Swetlitz, and Polly Winsor. My closest intellectual friends and sternest
critics have been John Beatty and Robert J. Richards. Bob's reaction, on
reading the manuscript, was to throw it across the room. I have striven to
ensure that he will continue to feel that way.
My editors at Harvard, Howard Boyer, Michael Fisher, and Kate
Schmit, have been terrific, and the same is true over and over again of
my wife, Lizzie. We have now done with rental homes and at long last
she can spend the summer tending her own beloved garden. Finally, a
word about my dedication. I do not know if this is the best book I shall
ever write; but I do know that it is the one which has taken the most
time, demanded the most effort and caused the most stress, and it is the
one for which there is the biggest gap between the original bright idea
and the finished product. It is therefore peculiarly appropriate that it be
dedicated to my children.


Monad to Man



Introduction

Le Jardin des Plantes lies just a few hundred meters upriver from
Notre Dame, on the left bank of the Seine, in Paris. Dominating the
grounds is one of the most beautiful buildings in a city of beautiful
buildings. La Grande Galerie du Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle
was opened in 1889 (as was the Eiffel Tower) to commemorate the
hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the French Revolution.
Alas, in our time, for many years the building stood empty, in a

seemingly endless state of repair and renovation. Finally, in the spring of
1994, the doors were opened and the public was once again invited in.
The wait was justified. Entering the vast hall, one is simply overwhelmed
by a huge display celebrating the diversity of life. Adam and Eve never
dreamed of this! Yet, although it commands the visitor's attention at first,
in a way this flamboyant exhibition of the curator's skill is but a filler.
The real message and purpose of the museum is to be found in the side
galleries, tier upon tier of them around the walls.
It is the goddess of evolution to whom the museum is dedicated-the
story of life from its first beginnings, and of the causal mechanisms which
fuel the way forward. From displays using the most simple of graphics to
those relying on all of the tricks of high technology, you are guided on a
trail from life's earliest forms to our own species, Homo sapiens, and
treated to glimpses of what perhaps lies beyond. Memorably, in what is
surely the greatest triumph in the hundred-year history of the Entente

1


2

Monad to Man

Cordiale, pride of place is given to he who is known as the "father" of
evolution, the Englishman Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882).

Evolution: Triumphant or Troubled?
There is no real surprise that the museum is structured as it is. Evolution
is one of the ideas of our age. What child of the playground is ignorant of
the dinosaurs? Has not seen them in pictures, has not collected them in

plastic, has not eaten them as pasta? Who could be a serious reader of the
newspapers and be unaware of the fabulous hominid finds in Africa-near-complete skeletons showing that our ancestors rose up on two
legs, before their brains exploded in size? And who has not bought, for
themselves or a friend or a relative, one of those best sellers explaining so
vividly some aspect of development in time? Ever Since Darwin by the
American paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, or The Blind Watchmaker
by the British sociobiologist Richard Dawkins?
Nor is this fascination with evolution merely a phenomenon of the
popular realm. Historians of science are producing scholarly editions of
key texts, most especially Darwin's private notebooks and all of his
correspondence, both the letters to and the letters from him (Barrett et al.
1987; Darwin 1985- ). Philosophers like myself have discovered evolution, to such an extent that we have to be reminded that there is more to
biology than evolution and more to science than biology (Callebaut
1994). The same is true in other fields, both the social sciences and the
humanities. Recently it is the students of speech and rhetoric who have
turned to the subject, happily deconstructing the metaphors and other
stylistic tricks in the evolutionists' texts (Myers 1990; Selzer 1993).
Most importantly, there are the scientists themselves. Where before we
had departments of zoology and botany, now we find departments of
evolutionary biology (often linked with ecology) cutting right across
traditional divides. Associated with this "new" discipline, there are
places now for evolutionists to display their labors. Not only do the
generalist publications like Science and Nature carry much on evolution,
but there are specialist outlets also. In 1994, for instance, the journal
Evolution appeared in six issues, in 2,066 pages in all. There were a total
of 171 articles, authored by 358 people, on organisms from fruit flies to
salamanders, from white-tailed deer to milkweeds.
Yet, all is not well. Evolution may be one of the dominant ideas of our
time. It is also one of the more troubled. Stay with the scientists for a

Introduction

3

moment. The Russian-born American evolutionist Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900-1975) used to boast that nothing in biology makes sense
except in the light of evolution. Perhaps so. But few who have fought over
undergraduate biology curricula can be unaware of how difficult it can be
to insert evolution explicitly into the program. There is always another
class in biochemistry which is thought absolutely essential for entry into
graduate or medical school. It is hard to quantify these sorts of things, but
a quick survey of Peterson's Guide to Graduate Programs in Biological
and Agricultural Sciences is very suggestive. The 1994 edition advertises
about 325 programs in molecular biology and only 45 in evolution-nearly an order of magnitude of difference. Overall in the Guide,
cell and molecular biology get over three hundred pages whereas ecology,
environmental biology, and evolutionary biology get barely fifty. This is
hardly a stellar performance.
Listen to paleontologist Anthony Hallam talking about perceptions at
his home university (Birmingham) of England's most distinguished evolutionist:
John Maynard Smith, whom I have a great admiration for, was invited
to give the Huxley lecture. I'm on the Huxley committee, which selects
these things, and I pushed for him. But my biological professor colleagues were saying-"Ah yes, Maynard Smith. Isn't he old hat?
Couldn't we get a molecular biologist like Alec Jeffries?" Well, in fact,
we got Alec Jeffries, the year after! It isn't either/or really, but there's no
question about the fact that my biological colleagues-in this university
and I think they speak for many biologists-don't see the sort of thing
that Maynard Smith does as too pertinent to the mainstream of biology
and what really turns them on. (Interview with author, spring 1991)
Others, physiologists and those whom Hallam dismisses as "cell crunchers," may belittle evolutionary theorizing and its practitioners, but it is
not as if full-time evolutionists always inspire much confidence in themselves and their ideas. One of the most unpleasant disputes in recent

science occurred when the Harvard entomologist Edward O. Wilson
published Sociobiology: The New Synthesis-a magisterial overview of
applications of Darwinian theory to animal and human social behavior.
One might have expected the social scientists to have felt threatened and
to have reacted nastily. Much more of a shock was the fact that Wilson's
leading critics were his fellow department members, the population geneticist (and student of Dobzhansky) Richard C. Lewontin and the afore-


4

Monad to Man

mentioned Stephen Jay Gould. If they are troubled, how should we feel?
(See Allen et al. 1976; Segerstrale 1985.)
Outside the narrow confines of science the controversy rises, not only
about theories but about the very idea of evolution itself. The Creationist
debates of the 1920s have had to be fought all over again in the 1980s, as
American fundamentalists, convinced of the literal truth of all of the
Bible, have insisted that the early chapters of Genesis give an origins story
far superior to that of evolution (Montague 1984; Ruse 1988). It is easy
and tempting to dismiss these people as fanatics, and many of them are,
but they have influence-especially with boards of education in the
United States. Moreover, recently they have found more sophisticated
supporters, among lawyers for instance, and even more so among philosophers (Johnson 1991; Plantinga 1991).
Not that the philosophical community taken as a whole has ever been
entirely enamored with evolution and its implications. Most AngloSaxon philosophy of this century-continental philosophy for that matter also-would go unaltered if the biblical six days of creation were
indeed shown true. The influential Ludwig Wittgenstein, for example,
was contemptuous in his dismissal of the significance of evolution
(Wittgenstein 1923, 4.1122). Nor was his great rival, the late Karl Popper, all that happy on the subject. It is true that he did try, very hard, to
use and internalize evolutionism. But, notoriously, Popper characterized

Darwin's thinking as less than genuine science and more a "metaphysical
research programme" (Popper 1972). He qualified this until the day he
died; but, somehow, the stain would not scrub out.
Paris or Potemkin Village? Which is the better metaphor for evolution's
success as a revolutionary idea? This is a challenge, and, for all that we
philosophers may contribute to the problem, as students of the theory of
knowledge, this is a challenge for us. What is the nature of evolutionary
theory and what, if anything, is it about the subject that makes it so addictive and yet leaves so many feeling so queasy? This book is one philosopher's attempt to answer these questions. Not through logical analysis of
the ideas today. My approach is through history for, as a deeply committed evolutionist, I believe that the answers to the present are to be found in
the past. Hence, what I will offer you is a history of evolutionary ideas. But
not just a history of evolutionism per se, for mine is a philosophical history
of science. Not a history of philosophy nor yet a history of philosophy in
science, although there is some of that. Rather, I write a history which is
used to understand the present. For this is what philosophy is all about)


Introduction

5

Professional Science/Mature Science
In turning to history, as does the evolutionist, I reveal to you my philosophical allegiance. I am not one for a priori theorizing in a time-frozen
vacuum. I am following the scientists themselves. I am a naturalist,
meaning that since science is the best kind of knowledge that we have, as
a philosopher I take science as a model (Ruse 1995). But this means that
if I am to move forward in my task, I must have some guidelines or
signposts. Charles Darwin himself expressed matters exactly, grumbling
that if you do geology without thought, "a man might as well go into a
gravel-pit and count the pebbles and describe the colours." He added:
"How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be

for or against some view if it is to be of any service!" (Darwin 1985- ,9,
269). I must have some hypothesis (or hypotheses) about evolution and
its history which I can test, if I am to achieve my ends.
The easiest way to generate such a hypothesis is by searching first for
the ideal. Suppose we were entirely satisfied with evolution. Suppose we
all counted it as good science, great science even, and that no-one questioned this status in any way whatsoever. What would this mean exactly?
What features would we expect evolution to satisfy then? We can take as
a background presupposition that the aim of science is to give us knowledge of, understanding of, the world of experience. Yet, this very presupposition enjoins me to take particular care. Because I am trying to work
in the spirit of the scientist, it is not for me to stipulate what makes for
science, and especially not what makes for good science. It is not for me
to prescribe merit, and it is certainly not for me to make that which we
have today, by definition, the best. Instead, I must work descriptively,
telling what people seem (or have seemed) to regard as good or satisfactory science, what people judge to be the better kind of science.
Putting matters this way, we might decide to pursue our inquiry by
following the lead of sociology. You may feel that, as philosophers, such a
direction is misguided, beneath our dignity perhaps. Let me say that, if
nothing else, I hope this study will force you to change your opinion. Here,
without apology, I ask you to remember that when characterizing our
sense of pride in our thinking about evolution-and even more when
digging at our sense of worry-I spoke of such things as the success of the
journal Evolution and the failure of evolutionists to occupy the academic
ground of molecular biologists. These are things which touch very directly
on our judgments of status or worth. Because the journal is doing well, we


6

Monad to Man

feel good about evolutionary studies; because departments of molecular

biology much outnumber departments of evolution, we have questions.
Simplistically, one might say that good or genuine or top-quality science is that produced by good or genuine or top-quality scientists. But
what are the latter? The sociological notion I shall employ in this study is
that of professional science, something done by professional scientists.
What I have in mind here is the science of the person who has made a full
commitment to his or her subject, who has achieved the skill and status of
a practitioner of the traditional professions-medicine, law, the clergy
(Shils 1968; Ben-David 1972; Cardwell 1957). Recognizing that this is an
evolving notion, we should anticipate that much of our interest will
center precisely on and around nuances in the idea of scientist as professional, and that it is a mistake to expect rigid necessary and sufficient
criteria. Nevertheless, one can fairly safely say that today, in speaking of
a "professional scientist," one would probably be referring to a person
working full-time (or nearly so) at a university or research laboratory.
Such a person will have qualifications and training-a doctorate and
more years beyond that-and a recognized position in society. And although they may be paid well for what they do, it will be understood that
scientists practice their art for the sake of the art, rather than for mere
gain. A professional scientist has much in common with the person prized
by Socrates in the first book of the Republic.
Today's professional scientist has students: many have remarked how
the culture of science mirrors the old apprenticeship patterns. He or she
belongs to professional organizations-some more prestigious and restricted than others-and a mark of one's status is often one's contribution to the functioning of these groups. The professional scientist
publishes in professional outlets-especially in refereed journals, but also
in monographs and in multi-authored edited collections. Here, particularly, we have a significant line of demarcation from the nonprofessional
world. Within and only within the accepted outlets does one find the
esoteric understanding of the true professional.
Closely connected to the notion of a professional scientist is that of a
scientific discipline (Hull 1988; Kohler 1991). Scientists do not look at
everything, indifferently. They break up into certain subject areas-working in different fields (or domains) of inquiry. Without wanting to preempt future discussion, it seems fair to say that here, at least,
things get more specialized as time goes by. The field (and discipline) is
narrowed into sub-fields (and sub-disciplines), which may then take on

Introduction

7

autonomous existence. The discipline is the social group working on or in
the field. It is marked especially by its own specialized journals and
organizations. Today, the success-the very existence-of a discipline is
a function of its success in attracting bright students and adequate grant
money or other support. Hence, the building of a discipline often involves
the finding of potential consumers, for one's intellectual products and for
one's students.
A field will have various ideas or sets of ideas which unite its practitioners. It is important to note that professional competence in one discipline does not necessarily imply professional competence in other
disciplines. One is reminded in this context of silly things claimed in the
last two decades by senior astronomers about the origins of life. However, it is true that what the sociologists of science call the "Matthew
effect" is often evident-people at the top of the field get taken more
seriously (and get more credit) than people at the bottom (Merton 1973).
One's efforts to achieve discipline status-perhaps moving oneself out
from other disciplines or up from nonprofessional science-may get a
major boost from the enthusiasm of respected professionals in other
fields. If one can get such people to contribute to the new field, all of one's
worries may be over.
Let us speak of the aim of professional scientists as being the production of mature science. I mean by this term work which is valued and
respected, especially by fellow professionals. Clearly professionals may
get involved in a new area of science, which almost by definition is not
particularly mature; indeed, its immaturity may be the attraction. But the
intention is to move forward toward maturity. This is not to say that
there is no place in professional science for the independent thinker. My
point is just that a thinker who persistently goes against or ignores the

norms or values of a particular professional community is going to lose
respect-be excluded from the journals and the awards and the organizational kudos-and may eventually be pushed to or beyond the limits of
accepted professionalism.
A notion like "mature" science starts to take us from the purely sociological to more traditional philosophical questions, to questions about
the status of science in itself as good or bad at what it is supposed to be or
to do-that is, to questions about its worth as knowledge: epistemology.
But before turning directly to this, ask first about the flip side to professionalism. It is natural to think of science beyond the borders marked out
by professional scientists as being "amateur"; but, since I will look at the


8

Monad to Man

past as well as the present, I am loathe to use this term with its connotations of unpaid activity. In England, particularly, with (as we shall see) a
history of reluctance to give state support to science, we run the danger of
anachronism: illicitly reading the present into the past. I shall rather
speak of "nonprofessional" science as popular science, in the sense of
something accessible to the general public. I think of Scientific American
as being an exemplar of (the very best) popular science. It is true that, in
a way, its contents are very professional-but the articles are intended for
any reader with an interest in the subject, not only for the authors'
disciplinary peers.
Note, therefore, that I am not using the term popular science as such in
a pejorative sense. Nor do I want to suggest that there is a hard and fast
line between professional science and popular science. What interests me
is that a group of people might want to upgrade their science across the
boundaries. Theoretically, it seems that there are a number of ways in
which one might attempt this, including redrawing the boundary! More
tangibly, one might set about organizing the social side of a professional

science-journals, organizations, and the like-although, showing that
norms or values are bound to be involved here, once this effort is under
way certain criteria will be invoked to justify decisions on whose work is
to be included and whose is not. The whole point of a profession is that
its members have moved beyond the popular realm.
An important sub-branch of what I call "popular science" is pseudoscience or quasi-science (Hanen et al. 1980). Here we are getting pejorative, for these words refer to things which are generally thought
discreditable, bogus even, by professional scientists. In the past, phrenology fitted the bill. Today, Scientology qualifies. Some topics are on the
border, perhaps moving one way or the other. Homeopathy strikes me as
being in this state. All pseudo-science is popular science. Not all popular
science is pseudo-science. The articles in Scientific American, although
popular, are not pseudo or quasi. You might want to elevate pseudo-science to the same hierarchical level as popular science. I prefer to see the
former contained in the latter, not only because of the border cases and
because pseudo-science is popular but because the denial of pseudo-science is certainly going to be (non-pseudo) popular science. Someone who
takes time out to attack astrology is most surely not addressing professional scientists (exclusively). Of course, the denial of popular science is
not necessarily pseudo or quasi. It could just be wrong.
In talking of things being "right" and "wrong" we have gone about as


Introduction

9

far as we can without being overtly epistemological, so let us drop the
pretense and turn directly to these issues. At once we find ourselves in
murky waters. Intense discussion in recent years has shown that if we
hope for one crisp "criterion of demarcation" between science and nonscience or good science and bad science, we shall almost certainly be
disappointed. No such divider exists. Notoriously, Popper (1959)
claimed that falsifiability would do the trick. Good science, genuine
science, is that which could in principle be shown false by empirical
evidence. Bad science, non-science (Popper does not always keep these

quite as separate as one might like), could not even in principle be shown
false. I myself like to characterize science in terms of natural law (Ruse
1988). Genuine science is that which tries to explain in terms of unbroken
regularities and not miracles and so forth. But, while both of these criteria
probably get us out of the difficulty of calling Noah's Flood or the
Resurrection "scientific," neither really pushes us forward very far. There
are all sorts of things which are not obviously falsifiable (like Newton's
laws of motion) that we would count scientific, and the converse holds
also. Likewise, even if one thinks that the world is law-bound, there is the
question of whether and in what sense genuine or good science must
appeal to general, universal laws. What is the nature of an "appeal" in
this context?
There is no need to despair too readily. There may be no single, unique
criterion of demarcation for good, genuine science-what I have decided
to call "mature" science-but perhaps there is a cluster of concepts or
standards, the satisfaction of more and more of which is what counts. It
is far from essential that a poem have rhymes, but it does rate for quite a
bit. Thus directed, I am going to introduce the notion of an epistemic
value. Against the background presumption that our aim is to understand
the world of experience, a world of unbroken regularity, these values are
tools or standards that we cherish, since "they are presumed to promote
the truth-like character of science, its character as the most secure knowledge available to us of the world we seek to understand." Hence, an
"epistemic value is one we have reason to believe will, if pursued, help
toward the attainment of such knowledge" (McMullin 1983, 18; see also
Kuhn 1977, 321-322).
What are the key epistemic values we find exemplified in mature science? One, much discussed in recent years, is that of the aesthetic or
conceptual elegance which characterizes certain parts of science. Some
parts are simpler, they have a "ring of truth" that others do not. In the

10

Monad to Man

Copernican revolution, for instance, the inferior/superior planet distinction arose naturally from the new theory, whereas the Ptolemaic system
had to introduce all sorts of additional ad hoc hypotheses to explain the
distinction (Kuhn 1957). In addition to this value, other suggestions
include: predictive accuracy, the virtue of a science in being able to hit an
unknown target with some skill; internal coherence, that the components
of a theory hang together properly, with no part contradicting other
parts; external consistency, the obvious worth in having science which
does not (a la Velikovsky) demand that all of one's well-established prior
theories be jettisoned; unifying power, the ability to tie together disparate
parts under one or a few overarching hypotheses; and fertility: "The
theory proves able to make novel predictions that were not part of the set
of original explananda. More important, the theory proves to have the
imaginative resources, functioning here rather as a metaphor might in
literature, to enable anomalies to be overcome and new and powerful
extensions to be made" (McMullin 1983, 16).
This is not a definitive, official list, and other commentators would slice
the pie in different ways. For instance, the nineteenth-century philosopher of science William Whew ell (1840) spoke of the virtues of achieving
a Consilience of Inductions, within which notion he included both
unification and fertility and which he then identified with that of simplicity! The point is that there is a cluster of factors like these that do seem
important in science. Of course, these values do not exist in splendid
isolation. A scientist must go out and examine the world, experiment and
so forth, and there is an increasingly large data base of empirical information. But as more and more information is gathered, scientists are more
and more able to build systems which exhibit and are controlled by the
epistemic values. Their work approaches mature science.
What is the alternative, the opposite? Most obviously one would say
"immature science"; but one has to take care not to lump too many

different things together under the same (possibly misleading) heading. If
one's world picture is not being informed and constrained exclusively by
epistemic values, then other values (non-epistemic, or what I shall often
call cultural) may well be at work. Because in science as in the real world
one's reach always exceeds one's grasp (less metaphorically, one's theorizing is bound to outstrip the evidence), "presumably all sorts of values
can slip in: political, moral, social, religious. The list is as long as the list
of possible human goals" (McMullin 1983, 19). Note that this rather
suggests (what is surely true) that one's judgment of the status of non-ma-


Introduction

11

ture science could be a function of the intent of the practitioners. Given
two people who accept the early chapters of Genesis, one might judge the
one a bad scientist because he insists on a literal reading and on opposing
other views informed by epistemic values, and one might judge the other
no scientist at all but a good theologian because, taking Genesis metaphorically, he uses the reading for moral and spiritual purposes. (Not
"When were animals and plants formed?" but "What are our duties to
animals and plants?")
Some philosophers argue that the growth of science to maturity involves the gradual replacement of cultural values by epistemic values. This
is an attractive idea. Think, for instance, of the growth of anthropology
from the racist, sexist writings of men such as Richard Burton to the work
of today's men and women, who are eager to make sure that nothing in
anthropology is externally inconsistent with our knowledge of human
genetics. It is not so much a question of whether you accept or reject
Burton's views on blacks and women as a matter of acknowledging that
today we simply know that any such views are negated by modern biology. However, I am unwilling to endorse this position too strongly here
for fear of prejudging matters which are at stake. In particular, I am

reluctant simply to accept that a necessary condition for scientific maturity is that all the cultural values be expelled. Perhaps so. We shall have to
see.2
What does seem fair to say is that there is a distinction to be made between non-mature science that, for various reasons, may not be strong on
the epistemic values and non-mature science that, again for various reasons, breaks from or denies the epistemic values. There is a difference between the person who writes on modern physics in a book for
schoolchildren and who therefore drops all of the mathematics, even
though it is mathematics which gives modern physics its predictive power,
and the neo-Nazi who persists in claiming that Jews or Gypsies or homosexuals are species apart. There is flat external inconsistency here with
modern biology.
Already, I am hinting at connections between the sociological and the
epistemological, but first just a brief word about the actual products of
science. Traditionally, the ultimate aim of science has been thought that of
going beneath the phenomenal surface of experience, to find the powers or
forces or causes that make things work. Thinking on these is incorporated
within the key unit of the scientist, the "theory," as in "Newton's theory
of gravitational attraction." Much effort has been devoted to explicating


12

Monad to Man

the notion of theory, in particular the extent to which it is (and necessarily
must be) an axiomatic system, with initial assumptions or hypotheses and
deductively derived consequences or theorems (Hempel 1966). Here, I
shall take no stand on the issue, but I will say unequivocally that in the
pursuit of mature science, trying to exemplify such values as predictive
fertility, scientists do rely very heavily on the methods and findings of the
deductive enterprise par excellence, mathematics. Theory building often
makes heavy demands on formal techniques.
Another matter on which I shall take no stand is whether, as is argued

by many of today's philosophers, theories are better thought of not as
single monolithic axiom systems but as families of related systems, "models," applicable to limited areas of experience (Giere 1988). I will agree,
however, that this is the way that working science often shows itself. I
will agree also that there is more to science than just ideal systems of
thought-techniques and methods are very important. This is brought
out strongly by Thomas Kuhn's (1962) popular notion of a "paradigm,"
which is rather more than a theory, being a whole way of looking at and
explaining and manipulating an area of study.
What of the connections? A good part of this book-a crucial part of
this book-concerns the relations between the sociological and the epistemological, and where they do or do not come into focus together. Hence, I
do not want to prejudge the issue with simplistic equivalences. But obviously there are major parallels, starting with the already-drawn link between professional science and mature science. You may think that this is
simply a matter of definition, for it is true that I have said that mature science is what professional scientists aim to produce. But I intend the claim
as a synthetic identity. Professional science has certain features; mature
science has certain features; as a matter of empirical fact mature science is
what professional science aims to produce. This holds both for the central
features professional science aims to exemplify (the epistemic values) and
for lesser features and side effects. A major reason for the esoteric nature
of so much professional science is that mature science is heavily dependent
on mathematics, something notoriously opaque to the outsider.
We likewise see a reasonably nice fit between other divisions made in
the two spheres of sociology and epistemology. Non-mature science corresponds to popular science, inasmuch as both are to be considered in the
realm of science. The power of epistemic values is relaxed and possibly
(probably, since there has to be some burning reason to make people
want to do it) cultural values come to the fore-perhaps as part of the