The book is Every Living Thing, The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life, by Jason Roberts. It is sort of a double biography of Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788), but it continues to follow their legacies well beyond their lifetimes to the present. I cannot recommend it more highly.

I do not know what impression Mr. Roberts intended, but if you thought Linnaeus was a young man on the make, something of a scoundrel who might say anything in the interests of self-promotion, you might not be too far from the truth. The hero of this book is not Linnaeus but rather his sometime rival, Buffon.

But let us deal with Linnaeus first. Linnaeus obtained a phony doctor’s degree from what we would now call a diploma mill. He anointed 14 (or 17 of what he called his “apostles” (!), sent them on long journeys from which many never returned, and completely abandoned one who returned with no specimens. He has been criticized for not allowing his daughters their educations, to a degree, says Roberts, that was extreme even for the time (but he supported his daughter Elisabeth in her interest in botany. She wrote a paper devoted to what is now known as the Elizabeth Linnaeus phenomenon). Linnaeus also believed in the fixity of species, not to mention some very bizarre creatures, but in that he was probably not alone.

Linnaeus developed a taxonomy that is largely in use today; that is a major accomplishment, to say the least. After defining and then apparently rejecting some ridiculous species within the genus Homo, he divided Homo sapiens into four subspecies: in essence, European, African, indigenous American, and Asian. Europeans, to Linnaeus, were governed by laws, whereas Africans were governed by whim, Americans by customs, and Asians by opinions. Roberts notes that “apologists have attempted to absolve Linnaeus of racism,” but he insists that claiming that Europeans alone were governed by laws is a clear statement of superiority. He cannot forgive Linnaeus, who stood by these characterizations for the rest of his life. I do not know whether Roberts is engaging in presentism, but I suspect not.

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Photograph by Al Denelsbeck.

Photography Contest, Honorable Mention.

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In my post of 12 June, I commented on the first part of William Dembski and Winston Ewert’s new book, the second edition of Dembski’s 1998 book The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance Through Small Probabilities. I noted that to make the argument for a Design Inference they had set aside Dembski’s previous criterion of Complex Specified Information, and instead replaced it by Algorithmic Specified Complexity (ASC).

This is a measure of the difference between the length of a bitstring and the length of a bitstring that describes it. It originates from the mathematical work on “randomness deficiciency”, where the bitstring is a binary number, and the smaller bitstring is a computer program that computes it. In that field, numbers that are considered truly random are those generated by programs that are almost as long as the number. A number that can be generated by a short program is not considered random.

Dembski and Ewert intend to apply this to biology. The longer number somehow specifies a phenotype (or maybe a genotype), while the shorter number “describes” it. In my previous review, I had reached Chapter 7, “Evolutionary Biology”. Here, let’s consider how they argue the ASC criterion can be applied to biological adaptations. (Spoiler – we’re going to be disappointed).

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The following obituary by Glenn Branch is reproduced with permission from the National Center for Science Education. In addition, you may read over a dozen very nice remembrances on Leiter Reports, here. Leiter Reports describes itself as “[t]he world’s most popular philosophy blog, since 2003.” Thanks to Nick Matzke for providing the link.

Michael Ruse, influential historian and philosopher of biology, dies at 84

The influential historian and philosopher of biology Michael Ruse died on November 1, 2024, at the age of 84, according to the obituary in The Globe and Mail (November 4, 2024). Ruse was one of the founders of the field of philosophy of biology: the first of his more than 70 books was the seminal The Philosophy of Biology (1970) and he founded the field’s first journal, Biology and Philosophy. He was especially interested in evolutionary biology, which he discussed in books such as The Darwinian Revolution (1979, second edition 1999), Darwinism Defended (1982), Taking Darwin Seriously (1986), Monad to Man: The Concept of Progress in Evolutionary Biology (1996), and Darwin and Design (2003), among others.

Owing to his scholarly interest in evolutionary biology, Ruse was recruited by the plaintiffs in McLean v. Arkansas, a legal case challenging the constitutionality of Arkansas’s 1981 equal time for creation science law. His testimony that creation science failed to qualify as scientific was central to the favorable ruling, although it excited considerable controversy among his fellow philosophers. Ruse continued to discuss and criticize creationism, editing a collection of essays related to McLean, But Is It Science? (1988, second edition coedited with Robert T. Pennock 2008) as well as writing The Evolution War (2000), and The Evolution/Creation Struggle (2005). Raised as a Quaker, Ruse was not a believer, but he sought to promote peaceful coexistence of science and religion, articulating his views in books such as Can a Darwinian Be a Christian? (2001) and Science and Spirituality (2010). Despite his differences with his intellectual foes, Ruse was famed for his friendliness and conviviality. Kenneth R. Miller of Brown University, president of NCSE’s board of directors, commented, “I respected him as a philosopher who genuinely understood science and more importantly loved him as a friend.”

Ruse was born in Birmingham, England, on June 21, 1940. He earned his B.A. in philosophy and mathematics from the University of Bristol in 1962, his M.A. in philosophy from McMaster University in 1964, and his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Bristol in 1970. He spent his career at the University of Guelph from 1965 to 2000 and then at Florida State University, where he was the Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy from 2000 onward. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, one of the Gifford Lecturers in Natural Theology for 2001, and the recipient of at least four honorary doctoral degrees.

Originally posted in Righting America, October 29, 2024, and reprinted with permission. Glenn Branch is deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit organization that defends the integrity of American science education against ideological interference. He is the author of numerous articles on evolution education and climate education, and obstacles to them, in such publications as Scientific American, American Educator, The American Biology Teacher, and the Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics, and the co-editor, with Eugenie C. Scott, of Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design is Wrong for Our Schools (2006). He received the Evolution Education Award for 2020 from the National Association of Biology Teachers.

Climate Change for Kids…and Parents Too!, the latest entry in a spate of climate change denial books aimed at a young audience, invites the reader to “[d]elve into the science of climate change and discover how science, removed from assumption and speculation, reflects the history and truth found in God’s Word” (in the words of the back cover). The reference to God’s Word is distinctive: the propaganda efforts in the same vein from the CO₂ Coalition, Mike Huckabee’s EverBright Kids, and PragerU are ostensibly secular. But the authors of Climate Change for Kids are Ken Ham, the founder of the young-earth creationist ministry Answers in Genesis, and Jessica DeFord, who, armed with a master of science degree in wildlife ecology, works for the same organization. In consequence, their book is a mix of error and fantasy, with the errors resembling those of secular climate change deniers and the fantasies emanating from their own reading of — and creative additions to — the Bible.

A fair amount of the eighty-page book purports to address the evidence for climate change and for anthropogenic climate change from the historical record. It would be tedious to describe all of its errors, but a central misunderstanding deserves attention. Acknowledging that “[t]he observational data shows [sic] that the global surface temperature of the earth has been warming over the past 100 years or so since it has been recorded” and reporting that the amount of warming is estimated to be about 1.5–1.8 °C, Ham and DeFord then caution, “But this warming estimate didn’t come solely from the observational data collected at weather stations and by satellites. It’s based on computer models. What you input into these models will decide what predications [sic] the computer model provides” (p. 18). A footnote offers a 2022 paper by meteorologist Roy W. Spencer and climatologist John R. Christy, both at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, as evidence for the middle sentence.

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