The Enchanted Porkfist

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July 23, 2008

There's no "I" in evolution. Well, OK, there is, but...

Evolutionary biologist (and cheeky monkey) Olivia Judson proposes abolishing the term "Darwinism" from the popular vocabulary.

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.”

He wasn’t, and it has...

Darwin was an amazing man, and the principal founder of evolutionary biology. But his was the first major statement on the subject, not the last. Calling evolutionary biology “Darwinism,” and evolution by natural selection “Darwinian” evolution, is like calling aeronautical engineering “Wrightism,” and fixed-wing aircraft “Wrightian” planes, after those pioneers of fixed-wing flight, the Wright brothers. The best tribute we could give Darwin is to call him the founder — and leave it at that.

I'm all for it. Lowering the cult-of-personality quotient is almost always a good idea, and might make it easier to have a discussion with this guy—

—who was once partly responsible for my safety on a hot-air balloon voyage. I, for one, do not welcome faith-based crew members when I'm about to ascend to 7,000 feet in a fucking wicker basket.

And while it's never easy to convince fundamentalists to actually study the same scientific method that makes their cell phones and teevees work, at least it helps to deprive them of a cheap ad hominem attack. I doubt that homeboy here would be quite as comfortable in an "Evolutionary Biology Lies" t-shirt.