Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Darwinism
I understand this guys point... but I kinda feel like he's missing it, too. I mean, from my experience, the only people repeatedly using the term "Darwinism" are exactly the people who are TRYING to belittle the science. No self respecting biologist, anthropologist, geneticist, etc etc would ever use the word "Darwinism" to describe the science of what they do. It's the crazy nutters who believe the world is only 6,000 years old, our ancestors were chimpanzees and dinosaur bones were put in the ground by God, who call evolutionary science "Darwinism". At any rate, an interesting piece nonetheless.
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Certainly, evolutionary biology has developed by leaps and bounds, showing us exactly the ways in which Darwin was wrong when he wrote his treatise 150 years ago (of course, the ways that he was wrong actually pointed to the deeper rightness of his overall thesis).
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely, the word "Darwinism" is an attempt by Creationists to re-frame the issue as the crazy ideas of the 200 year old mad scientist, and why oh why is science not moving on from it (these assertions are, of course, patently wrong)?
Still, though, we ascribe Newton certain honor in referring to the Newtonian Laws of Motion, although they've been disproved for the last 100 years or so (but are still essential rules of thumb for all of us living on Earth on our macro-scale).
Removing Darwin from Evolutionary Biology, as this article would seem to encourage, would be like removing Lincoln (the other big bicentenary birthday coming up on Thursday) from the history of the African American experience because he didn't integrate the schools. It's simply not relevant to question at hand.