Terminology wars revisited: Darwinists, Darwinian evolutionists, and evolutionary biologists

To the post Terminology wars: "Darwinist" vs. "Darwinian evolutionist", Larry Moran (the evolutionary biologist who objected to the term "Darwinist" during my talk at U of T last Saturday, has left a comment, saying that he also does not like the term "Darwinian evolutionist" and asks to be called an "evolutionary biologist."

I hope he won't mind that I am quoting most of his post, to draw attention to his concerns, and then responding below:

I was the person who objected to your use of the term "Darwinist." The word is loaded with all kinds of implications. To those of us who work on evolution it means a person who believes in natural selection as the most important thing in evolutionary biology. This would include people like Richard Dawkins and others who are often referred to as Ultra-Darwinians.

Many of us are not Darwinists in that sense and we would never refer to ourselves as "Darwinists" unless we were specificially referring to our acceptance of Darwin's theory of natural selection. The term "Darwinian evolutionist" is even more objectionable because it labels someone as an evolutionst who tends to side with the Ultra-Darwinian camp.

As it turns out, there's a lot more to modern evolution than just natural selection and the things that Charles Darwin knew in 1859. To call all modern evolutionary biologists "Darwinists" would be like calling all modern physicists "Newtonists" and ignoring the contributions of Albert Einstein and the development of quantum mechanics in the twentieth century.

There's a strictly scientific controversy over the importance of natural selection, and the proper use of the term "Darwinist." It is quite wrong to label all evolutionary biologists as "Darwinists" as though they were all stuck in the nineteenth century. As long as there are some evolutionary biologists who object, then their wishes should be respected. I object, and I'm not alone as Denyse O'Leary recognizes. There's a perfectly good alternative that nobody will object to. Call us evolutionary biologists or even evolutionists.

Okay, fair enough, Larry. I'll run "evolutionary biologist" up the flagpole for a while and see who salutes. I always try to use terminology to which people cannot reasonably object - so far as is consistent with making clear where they stand in a controversy. So I may have to tweak it a bit.

But now, here is my main problem: While working on my most recent co-authored book with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard (Harper 2007), I came across a number of people who - to judge from their published writings - are completely committed fans of Darwin. But they have no clear relationship that I can determine to biology as I think you understand it.

For example,

- Writer Matthew Alper thinks that there is a specific “God” Part of the Brain (2001), which would be news to neuroscientists who image the traces of spirituality using fMRI and CATscans.

- Psychologist Susan Blackmore thinks that there is a unit of thought that is equivalent to a gene. Don't ask whether there is any coherent explanation for a unit of thought. (Religious memes, by the way, are apparently deceitful.)

- Lawyer Joseph Giovannoli thinks that there is such a thing as a psychogene, but don't look for it on a map of the human genome. It is all in the mind/brain/head/somewhere up there anyway.

- Software developer Richard Brodie thinks that memes are viruses of the mind (in other sources, memes are equivalent to genes - but hey, things do evolve, right?). (Note: Richard Brodie writes to say that he does not think viruses of the mind like religion are memes. Apologies for error.)

I call these people Darwinists assuming they are complimented, not offended, to be linked with their hero. I am not trying to put them down when I call them that.

But, Larry, I can sort of see why you wouldn't want to be classed with them, if you actually do science for a living.

I am sympathetic to your wish to reserve for evolutionary biology a level of respect due to a serious academic endeavor, and I would be happy to help. I do think, however, that you and others in your field might want to consider clearly distancing yourselves from the Darwin circus. If you don't, no one can do it for you.

Actually, I think the Darwin circus is the primary reason for controversy around the teaching of Darwinian evolution in schools. I doubt that many people care about the wing powder of peppered moths, the coat colours of urban squirrels, or whether Galapágos finch beaks are fat or thin from one year to the next. But the prospect of giving people with a far-out agenda access to the education system is about as popular today as it has always been.

If you like this blog, check out my book on the intelligent design controversy, By Design or by Chance?. You can read excerpts as well.

Terminology wars: "Darwinist" vs. "Darwinian evolutionist"

At my talk at the University of Toronto last Saturday on the development of the intelligent design controversy, an evolutionary biologist in the audience informed me that evolutionary biologists don't like the term Darwinist, even though they in fact use it, apparently, despite denials on the part of some (scroll down to Edward O. Wilson). So in the talk I was very careful to say "Darwinian evolutionist," wherever I could remember to do so, but was not necessarily consistent.

(Note: If you came here looking for a story about Baylor prof Francis Beckwith's credentials, go here.)

One difficulty is that Richard Dawkins, for example, appears quite comfortable calling himself a "Darwinist," thus so should I be.

And when it comes to purely conceptual ideas like meme theory (a theory about how ideas spread from one person to the next via Darwinian natural selection), it is not clear that any actual evolutionary biology is involved. For that reason, I am reluctant to allow evolutionary biologists to determine terminology in the further reaches of universal Darwinism.)

If you like this blog, check out my book on the intelligent design controversy, By Design or by Chance?. You can read excerpts as well.

Are you looking for one of the following stories?

A summary of tech guru George Gilder's arguments for ID and against Darwinism

A critical look at why March of the Penguins was thought to be an ID film.

A summary of recent opinion columns on the ID controversy

A summary of recent polls of US public opinion on the ID controversy

A summary of the Catholic Church's entry into the controversy, essentially on the side of ID.

O'Leary's intro to non-Darwinian agnostic philosopher David Stove’s critique of Darwinism.

An ID Timeline: The ID folk seem always to win when they lose.

O’Leary’s comments on Francis Beckwith, a Dembski associate, being granted tenure at Baylor after a long struggle - even after helping in a small way to destroy the Baylor Bears' ancient glory - in the opinion of a hyper sportswriter.

Why origin of life is such a difficult problem.

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Darwinism/Darwinist: Now a term of reproach?

Regular readers of this space will note that I have recently been publishing a number of pieces on why I determined about three years ago that Darwinism was failing as a theory and that ID would become a hot controversy in the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century.

If Darwinism is not failing, why would Darwinists now want to evade the name they accepted for nearly 150 years? Yes! Despite a clear history of a century and a half of acceptance, a key Darwinist actually did his best to make it sound like an insult. Read on!

Some wonder why I, a mere journalist, sense that Darwinism is doomed.

Well, I observe and interview people and study how they behave.

One curious fact is that the venerable term Darwinism/Darwinist now makes Darwinists uncomfortable.

This problem hit the top of my intray last year a Canadian church bureaucrat took me to task for using the term "Darwinism/Darwinist" in By Design or by Chance?, because, she insisted, that I was "following the ID lead" when I used the term "Darwinism."

Now, in the early stages of research, I had made a careful study of the terminology used in the debate. I knew that "Darwinism" was commonly used among Darwinian evolutionists - probably only because Darwinism (and Darwinist) is easier and briefer.

So at the time, I dismissed the churchcrat summarily by pointing out the following:

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See, for example, the following examples, where - for your convenience - I have highlighted the relevant words:

Here, for example, is Richard Dawkins:

I'm a Darwinist because I believe the only alternatives are Lamarckism or God ... ,
- Richard Dawkins

and

The theory of punctuated equilibrium is a minor gloss on Darwinism, one which Darwin himself might well have approved if the issue had been discussed in his time. As a minor gloss, it does not deserve a particularly large measure of publicity. (Dawkins R., "The Blind Watchmaker," [1986], Penguin: London, 1991, reprint, p.250)

The famous evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr said,

The real core of Darwinism is the theory of natural selection. This theory is so important for the Darwinian because it permits the explanation of adaptation, the `design' of the natural theologian, by natural means, instead of by divine intervention. (p. 138 Ernst Mayr (Foreword to M. Ruse, Darwinism Defended, Reading, Mass. Addison-Wesley, 1982, pp. xi-xii))

H. Allen Orr, a committed Darwinian biologist and opponent of ID, trashing one of Dawkins's notions (the "meme"), says:

... , it is simply not true that Darwinism works with any substrate, no matter what. Indeed Darwinism can't even explain old-fashioned *biological* evolution if the hereditary substrate doesn't behave just right. Evolution would quickly grind to a halt, for instance, if inheritance were blending, not particulate. With blending inheritance, the genetic material from two parents seamlessly blends together like different colored paints. With particulate Mendelian inheritance, genes from Mom and Dad remain forever distinct in Junior. This substrate problem was so acute that turn-ofthe-century biologists -- all fans of blending inheritance -- concluded that Darwinism just can't work. ...." (Orr H.A., "Dennett's Strange Idea: Natural Selection: Science of Everything, Universal Acid, Cure for the Common Cold ... . Review of "Darwin's Dangerous Idea," by Daniel C. Dennett, Simon and Schuster. Boston Review, Vol. 21., No. 3., Summer 1996.)

And here is Lynn Margulis, Professor of Biology at the University of Massachusetts. Margulis is, I take it, a naturalistic evolutionist, but a fan of the Gaia hypothesis rather than of neo-Darwinism. She calls the latter 'a minor twentieth-century religious sect within the sprawling religious persuasion of Anglo-Saxon biology,' and has said of proponents of the theory, that they,

wallow in their zoological, capitalistic, competitive, cost-benefit interpretation of Darwin---having mistaken him.... Neo-Darwinism, which insists on (the slow accrual of mutations), is in a complete funk. (Mann, C. (1991) "Lynn Margulis: Science's Unruly Earth Mother," Science, 252, 378-381), Behe, Darwin's Black Box 1, p. 26)

Harold, Franklin, writing about the complexity of cell, says,

We should reject, as a matter of principle, the substitution of intelligent design for the dialogue of chance and necessity (16); but we must concede that there are presently no detailed Darwinian accounts of the evolution of any biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations. There is room for discovery here, and for reflection too; nowhere is the appeal of Gould's "pluralistic Darwinism " more keenly felt than in the study of cell evolution. (The Way of the Cell, p. 204.)

All of these people are/have been pretty mainstream within the naturalistic movement in science over the last hundred years (unless you count Lyn Margulis out because she is a woman and an unruly Earth mother). In fact, for some (perhaps many) prominent Darwinian biologists, the terms Darwinism/Darwinist cover both the specific process of natural selection acting on random mutation and the philosophical view of naturalism that so many of them apparently believe:

I toyed with atheism from the age of about nine, originally because I worked out that, of all the hundreds of religions in the world, it was the sheerest accident that I was brought up Christian. They couldn't all be right, so maybe none of them was. I later reverted to a kind of pantheism when I realised the shattering complexity and beauty of the living world. Then, around the age of 16, I first understood that Darwinism provides an explanation big enough and elegant enough to replace gods. I have been an atheist ever since. (Dawkins R., "You Ask The Questions," Independent, 23 February 2003)

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However, I now think I may have been too hard on that churchcrat (or churchadmin? I don't mind raising her pay grade.)

You see, I have just discovered a most interesting fact from
Jonathan Wells' The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design . The churchcrat might have been misled by Darwinists themselves on this point. Wells writes,

Harvard sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson recently claimed that the word “Darwinism” was coined by enemies of Darwin to make him look bad. “It’s a rhetorical device to make evolution seem like a kind of faith, like ‘Maoism’,” said Wilson in Newsweek in November 2005. “Scientists,” Wilson added, “don’t call it Darwinism.” (P. 10)

But, as I myself have shown above, they do.

And, as Wells notes, they have done so since 1864, when Darwin's bulldog, T.E. Huxley was first recorded using the term, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (Wells, p. 10).

Wells notes that Ernst Mayr and Stephen Jay Gould used the term "extensively" in their writings and a host of biology hopefuls have also applied Darwinism's sacred name in the titles of their articles.

But come to think of it, while I was researching By Design or by Chance? "Christian evolutionists" used to fret when I used the term casually, in the very way that the Darwinists themselves use it.

Christian evolutionists, so far as I can tell, live in a sort of unreal world where one espouses Darwinism while pretending not to know what it means. So Ms. Churchcrat may have been honestly misled after all. She would be foolish to be more angry with me than with those who misled her, but you never know.

But if Darwinism is not failing, why would Darwinists now want to evade the name they accepted for nearly 150 years?