The philosopher of science Ron Amundson, reviewing the book for The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, notes that Ruse thanks E. O. Wilson for urging him "to write a really big book", and quotes Peter J. Bowler as calling it "an important book on the status of evolutionism that will almost certainly become embroiled in controversy".[5] Amundson observes that Ruse claims that evolutionary biology has nearly always been seen as only doubtfully a professional scientific discipline, and that Ruse's thesis is that this is because it has always been tied to "culturally biased concepts of progress".[5] Whether this is actually "bad" is, suggests Amundson, almost irrelevant as long as biologists have thought it so, but since normative (value) judgements such as of progress cannot be derived from observation they are from a methodological point of view not part of science.