Darwin, has your time come to go?
Light of reason for the week, on why people should refrain from using phrases like Darwinian evolution.
In short, Darwin did more in one lifetime than most of us could hope to accomplish in two. But his giantism has had an odd and problematic consequence. It’s a tendency for everyone to refer back to him. “Why Darwin was wrong about X”; “Was Darwin wrong about Y?”; “What Darwin didn’t know about Z” — these are common headlines in newspapers and magazines, in both the biological and the general literature. Then there are the words: Darwinism (sometimes used with the prefix “neo”), Darwinist (ditto), Darwinian.
Why is this a problem? Because it’s all grossly misleading. It suggests that Darwin was the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega, of evolutionary biology, and that the subject hasn’t changed much in the 149 years since the publication of the “Origin.” [From Lets Get Rid of Darwinism - Olivia Judson - Evolution - Opinion - New York Times Blog]
Of course, it would be remiss not to point out that most people who use words like Darwinism are creationist crackpots, and I’ve always felt that when someone uses that term it places them in exactly the same category as the people refer to a car as a “horseless carriage.”
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