I finally died
Which started the whole world living
Carl Safina blames the term “Darwinism” for holding up science, and I think he’s wrong.
Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live
Science has marched on. But evolution can seem uniquely stuck on its founder. We don’t call astronomy Copernicism, nor gravity Newtonism. “Darwinism” implies an ideology adhering to one man’s dictates, like Marxism. And “isms” (capitalism, Catholicism, racism) are not science. “Darwinism” implies that biological scientists “believe in” Darwin’s “theory.” It’s as if, since 1860, scientists have just ditto-headed Darwin rather than challenging and testing his ideas, or adding vast new knowledge.
As I’ll get to below, I don’t think it’s the scientists you have to worry about here.
Using phrases like “Darwinian selection” or “Darwinian evolution” implies there must be another kind of evolution at work, a process that can be described with another adjective. For instance, “Newtonian physics” distinguishes the mechanical physics Newton explored from subatomic quantum physics. So “Darwinian evolution” raises a question: What’s the other evolution?
What’s the other evolution? We discuss time evolution of the wave function in quantum mechanics. Evolution is used generically as a term to mean change over time in many non-biological systems. So while Darwinian evolution may not be the best term, there are non-biological kinds.
And Darwinian selection is synonymous with natural selection, at least as far as I understand the terminology. The other kind? How about artificial selection?
Into the breach: intelligent design. I am not quite saying Darwinism gave rise to creationism, though the “isms” imply equivalence. But the term “Darwinian” built a stage upon which “intelligent” could share the spotlight.
Maybe I just hang out with the wrong crowd, but it’s been my experience that the worst offenders in this category are the cdesign proponentsists, not the scientists. I’d argue that anyone who regularly uses Darwinism to describe evolution should fail the biology portion of any scientific literacy test. In other words, it’s the ones who don’t understand evolution, even at a superficial level, who are turning it into an -ism. I strongly suspect that it’s either intentional, for the purpose of casting it as an ideological belief system rather than science, or stems from the almost complete cluelessness of someone parroting arguments they don’t understand. And removing Darwin isn’t really going to stop this, even if you could, because in my younger days hanging out on talk.origins I saw many uses of evolutionism. They are going to portray this as ideology no matter what. They have to. It’s one of the fallacious arguments they try and use to tear down evolution. To place the blame on Darwin’s name is to not understand the argument — it’s a symptom, not the disease itself.
The second half of the article is fine, in documenting things that happened after Darwin framed the theory. I just think that it makes almost no difference to the problem — the ones doing the most to promote the objectionable terminology are the ones least likely to care about getting these facts right. The truth is their enemy in this fight, so they have nothing to gain. To expect them to stop churning out straw-man arguments and start discussing the real theory of evolution is highly optimistic.
“the ones doing the most to promote the objectionable terminology are the ones least likely to care about getting these facts right”
I would say that you’re right, from my reading of biology blogs. Scientists conspicuously avoid referring to the theory of evolution as “Darwinism”, so much so that one can use that as an immediate scientist/crackpot acid test. I seem to recall reading that the only exception is that in the UK, ‘Darwinism” is more commonly used, probably for historical reasons.
The NYT article does seem to be making an argument equivalent to a physicist saying, “We’ve got to stop calling ‘gravity’ by the term ‘Newton’s sticky fields’!”