Michael recalled his visit to Stellenbosch in South Africa for fall 2014 with fondness. As he wrote (Beatty 2024):
The town is right in the middle of the wine-growing area and truly competes for the most beautiful place on Earth. I had intended to work on a book on global warming, but discovered on the first day that most of the holdings in the university library were in Afrikaans! So I switched to writing a book on Darwinism, my area of professional expertise. (n.p.)
Furthermore:
It turned out to be one of the most successful and enjoyable projects in my whole academic life, producing Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us About Evolution, a book of which I am very proud.1
His recollections about his visit also reflect his personality. Michael loved travelling, visiting new places, meeting new people and eating new food. Yet, certain themes and emphases remained constant, Darwin prime among them. He loved life and he loved his wife Lizzie and his family, which included not just many children but also a diverse menagerie of small animals. He loved his students too, and young people who needed support, as well as many (although distinctly not all) of his colleagues. Michael was a complex man, capable of ridiculing and insulting as well as supporting and encouraging others. We are among those who felt the warmth of his collaboration and support, celebrating his fine scholarship while sometimes wishing he would behave a little more appropriately.
Jane first got to know Michael when he visited Indiana University in the winter of 1976. The History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) Department had invited him to introduce the philosophy of biology. We read Michael’s The Philosophy of Biology and David Hull’s Philosophy of Biological Science (Hull 1974; Ruse 1973). Part of the discussion argued why Michael’s version was better, but we also felt the tremendous respect Michael had for David. I had completed my coursework and was auditing the course, but Michael took it upon himself to encourage me to embrace philosophy along with my historical study of developmental biology. My friend and fellow student John Beatty became, as John has written, Michael’s special ‘project’. John writes ‘As a graduate student, and beyond, I was a project for him, a personal as much as a professional project’. Michael went on to produce more excellent work in the philosophy of biology, some in collaboration with David Hull (eds. Ruse & Hull 1998).
The next time I spent a lot of time working in close proximity with Michael was when we both had research leave at Harvard in 1983–1984. We shared an office nestled among brachiopod specimens in the Museum of Comparative Zoology. My host was Ernst Mayr, and Michael’s was E.O. Wilson, which made for a lot of lively discussion! That led to many friendly follow-ons, including our editing of Biology and Ethics (eds. Maienschein & Ruse 1999). Michael created opportunity for others, generously inviting so many of us to benefit from his connections and collaborations.
Betty settled in Gainesville, Florida, at the University of Florida, with Michael nearby in Tallahassee as the Werkmeister Chair at Florida State University (FSU). Michael brought excitement and energy to Florida’s HPS community, and he gathered students and colleagues around him. Something was always happening at FSU, and every spring he organised a larger or smaller Werkmeister meeting, usually on some aspect of evolution. The events were full of lively discussion, and Michael enjoyed the intellectual sparring with his closest friends, including Ernst Mayr, David Hull and Robert Richards, among many others. Along with presentations of original research, Michael always left plenty of time for informal interactions that included a boat ride to nearby Wakulla Springs to appreciate the beauty of North Florida’s many springs. And he always included one big, informal party at his beautiful home whose walls were lined in books, with enormous banquet tables in the backyard garden that his wife Lizzie lovingly maintained. One especially memorable conference was in honour of E.O. Wilson’s 80th birth year. Michael hosted dozens of people in that garden with delicious food and a giant slab of a cake decorated with plastic ants! Students relished the opportunity to interact with Michael’s invited guests, and we both benefitted from the intellectual stimulation of those events. Importantly, many of these events resulted in edited collections such as Darwin’s Companion to the Origin that Michael co-edited with Bob Richards (eds. 2008) and more than one of his encyclopedias and dictionaries (ed. Ruse 2013; eds. Ruse, Travis & Wilson 2011).
Michael is best known for his deep commitment to philosophy, analysing assumptions, examining meanings and explaining the nature of science as in the Arkansas trial about creationism and evolution. But he was just as much a fine historian, especially skilled in the history of ideas. His Darwinian Revolution: Nature Red in Tooth and Claw remains an enduring classic. Unlike many philosophers, Michael did not cherry-pick from historical cases to make a philosophical point. He did the work, digging into published and unpublished works to study especially evolution and especially Darwin in his context.
Indeed, it isn’t an accident that a special retrospective collection assessing the book in its 25th year appeared in Journal of the History of Biology. Betty’s contribution there illustrates the durability of Michael’s original 1979 insights (Smocovitis 2005).
His love affair with Darwin’s celebrated theory continued to the end of his life, with Michael continuing to produce books and blogs for scholars and for wide audiences. Michael wrote with clarity, wit and erudition, and although he sprinkled his language with spicy swear words, he had masterful control of the English language. He was first and foremost a scholar, a person with an enormous love of books and learning, who also had an expansive, colourful, and indeed irreverent side from which many of us benefitted. His enjoyment of that visit to South Africa and memories of the people and warm welcome there is typical of his love of life and of the world of ideas and friends. We all continue to benefit from Michael Ruse’s contributions.
References
Beatty, J., 2024, Leiter report. A philosophical blog, viewed 20 May 2025, from https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2024/11/in-memoriam-michael-ruse-1940-2024.html.
Hull, D.L., 1974, Philosophy of biological science, Prentice-Hall, Hoboken, New Jersey.
Maienschein, J. & Ruse, M. eds., 1999, Philosophy and ethics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
Richards, R.J. & Ruse, M. eds., 2008, Cambridge companion to the ‘Origin of Species’, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
Ruse, M., 1973, The philosophy of biology, Hutchinson University Library, London.
Ruse, M. ed., 2013, Cambridge encyclopedia of Darwin and evolutionary thought, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Ruse, M. & Hull, D.L. eds., 1998, The philosophy of biology, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.
Ruse, M., Travis, J. & Wilson, E.O. eds., 2011, Evolution: The first four billion years, Belknap Press of Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Smocovitis, V.B., 2005, ‘It ain’t over “til its over”: Rethinking the Darwinian revolution’, Journal of the History Biology 38(1), 33–49. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-004-6508-z
Footnote
1. See https://logosjournal.com/article/anti-vaxxers-and-the-covid-crisis-the-sorry-story-of-the-pernicious-influence-of-a-pseudo-science/.
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