Evolutionary Progress and Cultural Value: An Analysis of the Divergence Between Ernan McMullin and Michael Ruse

The relationship between science and values is a classic and important issue in the philosophy of science. Ernan McMullin, a philosopher of science, believes that as science matures, the pursuit of epistemic values leads to the gradual exclusion of non-epistemic values. Michael Ruse, a philosopher of biology, emphasizes the uniqueness of this issue in evolutionary biology: the expulsion of progressivist cultural values actually stems from the influence of another cultural value, rather than purely from the pursuit of epistemic values. Therefore, the concept of evolutionary progress cannot completely escape the entanglement of cultural values. Even today, biologists still use other concepts to discuss a metaphor sympathetic to progressivist cultural values. By sorting out the discussions on evolutionary progress among evolutionists in different periods, this paper aims to show that Ruse’s view that “the concept of evolutionary progress is necessarily bound to cultural values” is wrong. Although Ruse correctly points out the uniqueness of this topic in evolutionary biology, his argument hinges on Thomas Huxley’s distinction between professional science and popular science. Huxley confined evolutionary progress to the latter—an area with looser academic norms—which complicates the process of expelling cultural values. More importantly, this paper argues that Ruse’s central mistake is his failure to distinguish between two fundamentally different kinds of value: the cultural values imported by human beings into the concept of evolutionary progress, and the survival values that arise from the functional performance of organisms themselves. The former can, in principle, be excluded from mature scientific discourse; the latter cannot, because they are constitutive of what evolutionary progress describes. By conflating these two categories, Ruse wrongly concludes that even today, the concept of evolutionary progress still cannot be separated from the influence of cultural values.