OK, but your argument is primarily still with them. My offer still stands - if you convince them that they are using the term incorrectly, I will likewise concede.
How many reference to evolution roll of the press each day? Hundreds? Thousands? … Of course, you will be always able to track down instances of sloppy usage. As I have pointed out before, there is a well established understanding of the basic meaning of evolution, and some qualifying prefix or adjective is not required just because ID and YEC exists.
2 Likes
Or … you can just continue to wrongly use it right along with a few anti-religious provocateurs; and then continue to be misunderstood because of your less-than-updated use of terms. Don’t expect too many here to follow suit, though. Why choose misleading language when you can be more accurate instead?
Watch out for those rabid adherents of Accommodationism. Nobody should have any trouble understanding with perfect clarity any Accommodationist manifesto. If they found it confusing at all, that would be total failure for the cause!
5 Likes
We aren’t trying to communicate with them, we are trying to communicate with you.
What do you think it brings to the conversation?
2 Likes
This is not true. The issue over Evolution is order vs lack of order, or to put it another way Does the universe have meaning and purpose? Dawkins says that the universe does not have meaning and order and uses his Selfish Gene evolutionary biology to justify that philosophical, theological stance.
The question is about what is good science and good theology. YEC uses bad theology and Dawkins uses bad science to support their views. I think that we must be able to call a spade a spade on freeing ourselves of this false conflict between faith and science.
No one is innocent in this debacle. We all need to take responsibility for our mistakes and seek the way to find wholeness in our intellectual life.
1 Like
Yesterday
Well Nikolai, it seems you have your answer…
Today
2 Likes
Please forgive me for predicting it.
Dispute all day if you wish, but I see at least 3 instances where Darwinian evolution is specifically qualified by natural selection in your quotes. No matter.
2 Likes
Precisely the reason one might avoid using the overly-broad, blanket, and non-specific term “evolution”, no?
Essentially, the same things Coyne defends using the term for… Clarity, accuracy, brevity, honor to its discoverer… But I have no particular fondness for the term if it is truly unclear.
Well, in fairiness, it was someone else that reminded me that Dawkins et al used the term. My first observation was that it was used in rather prestigious academic settings; Oxford, Cambridge, Princeton, UCLA, etc… I mean, Harvard currently has a class on “understanding Darwinism”. I have a hard time seeing the claim that the terminology is limited to a few anti-religious provocateurs.
But I’m still baffled by the claim that this is a categorically “wrong” use. It was always quite right and acceptable use, at least until recent years, apparently. When did this change, exactly? “less-than-updated”? Surely any “update” in this terminology must be a rather recent development, no? It seems to have been used quite happily and uncontroversially by proponents of the theory in recent years, this really is the first time I’m hearing any controversy about it. When, exactly, did all this change?
1 Like
This much I do concede … there is indeed a wide use and application of that word that does allow for much generality and imprecision … and yes … mischief when it is bandied about with ideological motivations. My own solution to this then is to refer to it as “biological evolution” when I wish to communicate about common descent of life from some original life form. As such, this is still a broad enough term to include the theory as Darwin understood and developed it in his time as well as what it still is today.
As to the history of when or how it was outdated, I am happy to accept the word of practitioners here who are professionally knowledgeable of the field and (I have good reason to believe) are less ideologically driven in their use of it than such as Dawkins.
Darwin’s understandings of the mechanisms involved were crude compared to what we know today. Since genomics didn’t even exist yet in his time, much less with all the advances it has had with the whole DNA revolution, it does make sense to me that Darwin truly did have a 30,000 ft view of the thing with no virtually access to the mechanistic details that would have to wait. His overall speculations were mostly right (but with significant refinements and additions necessary) for as far as they could go. So I suppose that is why there can even remain confusion among some about how much difference there is in today’s understandings from Darwin’s own. Thanks to your own challenges here, those who know most have been elaborating on what some of those necessary changes have been. I’m happy to learn from their answers, and your own challenges that provoke the educational response.
3 Likes
thoughts are very much appreciated, as always. I can’t speak for Dawkins himself, but his use of the term Darwinian never seemed to me to be particularly polemical or ideological, simply descriptive. he is certainly ideological and polemical enough in many ways, but I just don’t see it here. But even with Jerry Coyne, who often is as polemical and ideological as they come… when he specifically outlined his reasons for using the term, there certainly didn’t seem to me anything particularly ideological about such. Maybe you can tell me if you saw such, but I certainly am not seeing anything so ideological, unless we are including in his “ideology” a perhaps overzealous desire to maintain an honorific status for Charles Darwin and his unique scientific contribution?
1 Like
From the Discovery Institute:
The theory of evolution makes no comment on whether life has meaning and purpose. None.
People are calling it Darwinian evolution, not Dawkinsian evolution.
2 Likes
If you go to a biology symposium, and in that context a poster features a discussion on evolution, with that term not defined further, what are the chances anyone will be confused that Larmarkism, or cosmological evolution, is the topic? Generally, if the lecture is focused on anything other than some aspect of a modern update to the neo Darwinian framework of the theory, that is when qualifiers might be expected. So the term is not overly-broad; it communicates - the reader simply and accurately understands what the writer intended to convey.
Now Coyne and Dawkins are on a mission, and if Darwin invokes provocative baggage to some creationists, that is a double bonus in their minds. But it’s not quite right to narrow the reference to evolution by broadening the definition of Darwinism, and even the subsequent neo Darwinism does not really capture the full picture of a modern understanding of population genetics.
Now it is still a somewhat free country, so one can use Darwinism, or atheistic Darwinism, or evil atheistic amoral eugenics Darwinism, if you please. It is just nothing warns of an incoming, “if people evolved from monkeys, how come there are still monkeys”, like a new poster leading with “why do Darwinists>>>>”
2 Likes
Descriptive of what? What do you think Darwinian evolution is, and what do you think the modern theory of evolution includes?
Read any of these articles:
https://answersingenesis.org/search/?refinement=&language=en&q=darwinism
1 Like
How then do you distinguish the terms Darwinian (evolution) and Darwinism?
1 Like
This is a really good point, Eric, and it deserves a much broader discussion.
Unfortunately, there is a history here. Proponents of capitalized Intelligent Design have spilled a whole lotta ink in the cause of refuting the explanatory capability of “Darwinian evolution.” ID proponents have deemed “irreducible complexity” to be beyond the capabilities of mutation + drift + recombination + cooperation + natural selection. Thus the argument that natural selection could be a way for God’s invisible hand to steer biological processes has typically fallen on deaf ID proponent ears.
With a little extra time, I could point to many discussions on this very forum where ID proponents have vehemently dismissed natural selection as a teleological component.
If you could think of a way to sway ID proponents toward your perspective, you would do a lot to bring reconciliation between the two camps (EC and ID) that both believe in intelligent design.
Best,
Chris
5 Likes
In the latest podcast NT Wright used it…
You make no consideration about the relationship between Science and Philosophy and Science and Theology. Even if the “theory” does not make any comment, Dawkins and Dennett and others who are the most prominent advocates of Evolution have made many of them, so it is a valid topic of discussion.
If on the first page of the Selfish Gene Dawkins declares that The Origin of the Species is the most important book about the nature of humanity ever, then he if no other opened the debate, which should be a discussion.
Dawkins & Co. are claiming to be carrying the banner of Darwinism. Dawkins claims that the Selfish Dene is an extension of the4 Survival of the Fittest. He is probably right because Dawkins has modeled his ideology after that understanding of evolution.
Now things are changing. New ideas are being expressed among scientists about Natural Selection. Some people say these are new ideas, while it seems that Dawkins & Co want to say the Selfish Gene still reigns. BioLogos seems to stand with Dawkins for some reason. I do not for scientific and other reasons. .
I typically use a dictionary…
Darwinian evolution or Darwinism?