Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
science. At this point the story of evolution blends into a historical narrative
in which science takes over as the mechanism of the cosmos' development.
In narrative form, Sagan has produced something that bears a notable
similarity to the transformation of evolution into science that one witnesses
in the Musée de l'Homme, only on a grander scale. The process of biologi-
cal evolution that began on our planet is now “coming of age” in science, in
that “passion for exploring the Cosmos,” by which we are “in some pain and
with no guarantees, working out our destiny.”
17
The aspirations of science
by this account are also the aspirations of nature, and we have an obliga-
tion to pursue its course back to the outer reaches of the universe where
this journey first began. The “matter of the Cosmos has become alive and
aware” in human evolution—that is to say, in mystical union with the natu-
ral universe—and this makes the pursuit of science a moral responsibility,
not only because it honors “the accumulated wisdom of men and women
of our species, gathered at great cost over a million years,” but more impor-
tantly because it is the eternal return called for by our evolutionary heritage.
We honor evolution by pursuing science. In science, human beings who
were “born ultimately of the stars and now for a while inhabiting a world
called Earth, have begun their long voyage home.”
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e
volutionism
, P
atRonage
,
anD
the
s
cientific
P
RiesthooD
I will come back to this
nomos
-
cosmos
identity, but before I do I would like
to give this pattern a name and explain why I think it has significance of
the kind I have outlined. I will call this “evolutionism,” a term already put
into play by the philosopher Michael Ruse to distinguish evolution as world-
view from evolution as science. In his
Monad to Man
(1996), Ruse describes
evolutionism as any nonscientific application of the ideas of evolutionary
science. He reads it, as I also will in part, as a pattern that has descended
from the Enlightenment notion of “Progress.”
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Ruse and I also agree that
its attraction has not diminished with the maturation of evolutionary stud-
ies. He recognizes that evolution still has “the trappings of a religious faith,”
just as it did for the generation of Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer,
because scientists continue to confuse it with evolutionism.
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Ruse sub-
stantiates this claim with extensive and detailed evidence gathered from
personal interviews and from the writings of evolutionary science's most
important contributors of the last two centuries. Almost without exception,
Ruse finds that evolutionism has been the rule rather than the exception. It
is not a peculiarity of science fiction or of overly zealous documentary hosts.
