Since his retirement from Guelph, he had taught at Florida State University and was the Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy (2000–20??).

In 1986, he was elected as a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Canada and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

[4] Michael Ghiselin criticised Ruse as a "politically correct" "academic bigot", disagreed with Ruse's narrative about phylogenetics, and accused him of "completely ignor[ing] recent work such as by Carl Woese, "neglect[ing] data" that contradict his thesis.

Ironically, in Ghiselin's view, Ruse's own epistemological ideal for science relied on the idea of Progress.

[7] Ruse founded the journal Biology and Philosophy, of which he was Emeritus Editor,[8] and had published numerous books and articles.

[10] In 2014, Ruse was named the Bertrand Russell Society's award winner for his dedication to science and reason.

[13][14] According to Ruse in 2009, "Richard Dawkins, in his best selling The God Delusion, likens me to Neville Chamberlain, the pusillanimous appeaser of Hitler at Munich.

Ruse said new atheists do the side of science a "grave disservice", a "disservice to scholarship", and that "Dawkins in The God Delusion would fail any introductory philosophy or religion course",[13][14] and that The God Delusion makes him "ashamed to be an atheist".