Science and Film: What do the movies tell us about the humanistic side of science? – Razor Lecture

Michael Ruse, Ph.D. | Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy | Director of the Program in the History and Philosophy of Science | Florida State University

Film is not just entertainment. It can provide the basis of a learning experience about social issues to do with or created by science. Thus, Inherit the Wind about science and religion; Contact about women in science; and Kinsey about sexual orientation. This talk explores some of these movies and what they can tell us about ourselves and the world within which we find ourselves.

Michael Ruse was born in England in 1940, moved to Canada in 1965, and down to Tallahassee in 2000. He is now in his 54th year as a philosophy professor and fears he might be approaching the half-way point. He is the author or editor of over sixty books, including The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw (Chicago, 1979), Monad to Man: The Concept of Progress in Evolutionary Biology (Harvard, 1996), Can a Darwinian be a Christian? The Relationship between Science and Religion (Cambridge, 2001), and Darwinism as Religion: What Literature tells us about Evolution (Oxford, 2017). The founding editor of the journal Biology and Philosophy, he is a Guggenheim winner, a Gifford lecturer, the recipient of four honorary degrees, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.