Carl Safina has a provocative essay in The New York Times, Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live. I’m sure others will jump all over this, so I’m not going to go exegetic on the essay. Though I disagree with the overly broad assertions, it is elegantly written and points to a reality: there is a cult of Charles Darwin. Where after all is the cult of Isaac Newton? Albert Einstein week? The remembrance of Gregor Mendel? Ruminations on the legacy of Antoine Lavoisier? But that cult is a reaction to the fact that there exists an organized lobby aimed at tearing down the science which Darwin established.
But I am not clear as to Safina’s intended audience. I am curious to find out which evolutionary biologists speak of “Darwinism.” The reality is that most of the time evolutionary biologists use the term Darwinism it is when they are addressing Creationists. While evolutionary biologists tend to use Darwinism as a synonym for evolution in a conditional manner, Creationists invariably characterize their opposition as “Darwinists.”* It is Creationists, some unwitting elements of the public, as well as intellectuals who work at the interface of the popular domain, the Creationism Wars, and philosophy & history, who join the anti-evolutionists in painting evolution as the child of Darwin alone, in style if not substance.
I know that Richard Dawkins does use the D-words relatively frequently. But even in The Selfish Gene he uses the term “Darwinism” and “Darwinian” 18 and 32 times respectively, and “evolution” in 111 instances. To perhaps make an analogy, perhaps one might think of Charles Darwin as the Steve Jobs of evolutionary theory. But one must never forget the Steve Wozniaks such as R. A. Fisher. And evolutionary biologists certainly do not. In Narrow Roads of Gene Land: Volume 2 W. D. Hamilton refers to Darwin on 61 pages, Fisher 44, Sewall Wright 19, J. B. S. Haldane 55, and so on.
* Eugenics after all was is perceived to be grounded in a “Social Darwinist” context, not a “Social Evolutionary” one. The use of the term is therefore critical to obtain maximum rhetorical leverage before brandishing the inevitability of the gas chambers lest Darwinism reign supreme…. (see the comments for a clarification of what I mean here. I don’t really think Darwin had anything to do with Hitler, but many people do, and Creationists use that as rhetorical leverage).
Update: John Hawks gets into the weeds and whacks Safina good. I don’t really disagree. I will also repeat what John said abut Darwin having a lot of ideas. His verbal arguments were quite often the starting point for the models of later workers in the field.
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