“Darwinian Evolution”

Faith & Science Conversation
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Yes, we could do this all day. People use language the way they choose, and it is still a fact that many people use Darwinism in a derogatory way to mean something other than simply “evolutionary theory.”

On these boards you have many people who have repeatedly experienced the label Darwinism as a slur or insult of some kind. You are identifying yourself with the ID movement, which uses Darwinism in a derogatory way all the time. When you and others were asked not to use it, it was because it distracts from your communication. People will get hung up on the perceived negative connotations. Now, you can ignore this and say it means what you say it means and no one has the right to be offended, but that isn’t how communication works.

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Enjoyed the article. I think the idea of attaching Darwin’s name to turn the discussion away from scientific issues towards ideology is key in how it is most often used

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This is why all the prefixes and adjectives actually obfuscate communication. There is no real official name, but in academia at large, everyone simply uses “evolution” to denote the consensus understanding, unless the topic is purposely more narrowed. There is no misunderstanding between the speaker and the hearer. Job done.

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I once read somewhere along the way that there are very few absolute synonyms in the English language, and those to be found belong to technical terms. This is because, although the denotations might be more or less the same, the connotations and associations which are conveyed by a particular choice of word are significant. As a translator, I expect you would know more that most. This is certainly true with respect to this thread.

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Yes, meanings are ultimately determined by how people use words in contexts in communities, not by dictionaries.

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Sure. As mentioned, I have no affinity for the word - I used “Darwinian” and “Darwinism” as I thought them helpful qualifiers, but if it is genuinely unhelpful I can find other language. But I simply find it supremely amusing that Biologos itself was happily using, clarifying, and explaining its use of the term “Darwinism”, and now all of a sudden I’m being chided for using it… because it is “almost exclusively pejorative from anti-evolution camps”…!?!

Maybe, just maybe, the term “Darwinism” was adopted by myself and other ID proponents because that was the term being used by Biologos and other evolution proponents as their own self-descritpion??

Sure, and normally I just let such things slide myself, but since we’re on the topic… I will point out that I find the use of “anti-evolution” to be similarly offensive. I genuinely find it to be derogatory, only used by detractors, it is not a self-descriptor anyone would use, and has many unfortunate or unclear connotations. So since we’re on the topic, I would humbly request that such terminology similarly be retired.

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I’m curious where you see BioLogos using Darwinism self-descriptively.

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I’m happy to use creationist. But many ID folks find that offensive. What do you prefer? Design proponents? How is one to express the designation of being ideologically opposed to evolutionary theory? Anti-Darwin?

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That was the term they used. Seems they have since moved away from such, but that was the source of what I quoted earlier. Very clear reasoning and rationale behind the term “Darwinism” and why they used it in the past.
Further on in the article it notes:

More recently advocates of Creationism, Intelligent Design and even New Atheism have made claims that the acceptance of Darwinism is synonymous with atheism. They argue that Darwinism is incompatible with a theistic worldview. BioLogos finds no basis for those claims, and the term Darwinism is used on this Web site only in reference to the scientific theory of evolution, not to an atheistic worldview.

And toward the end of the article, it is noted:

Darwinism is the scientific theory of evolution by natural selection, subsequently synthesized with Mendelian genetics and modern molecular biology. BioLogos accepts the correctness of this evolutionary model based on a massive database of supporting evidence, but views God as the author of this process. Thus evolution is the answer to “How?” but God is still the answer to “Why?”.

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What is the link?

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https://web.archive.org/web/20110525115737/http://biologos.org/questions/biologos-darwinism-social-darwinism/

I found this as I had I found another page quoting the biologos website as supporting “Darwinism”, so I figured it must have been an older article no longer on the site currently.

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Yes, it’s an old article from back when the organization first started that’s been removed. I don’t think it is representative of the way that BioLogos currently uses the word. A lot happens in discourse in a decade. I’ve written for BioLogos and I’m pretty sure that if you tried to call the evolutionary model, “Darwinism” it would not get through editing.

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The biggest objection is to the term Darwinianism as if this were a philosophy, or the idea of one person. It is no such thing. The term “Darwinian Evolution” is reminiscent of this and is typically an excuse to treat “Origin of the Species” as a religious/philosophical text which it is not. Evolution is a scientific theory subject to corrections and elaborations due to trillions of pieces of evidence that have been found and continue to be found. Quoting the text of “Origin of the Species” to critique the scientific theory of evolution is silly and exactly the kind of willful ignorance that we are tired of getting from the flat earth creationists or whatever.

However scientists and publications may use “Darwinian evolution” in place of “Biological Evolution” to distinguish it from other kinds of evolution like that of ideas, technology, or prebiotic evolution in the study of abiogenesis. The meaning taken from words are often context dependent and whether you think it is fair or not, the fact is that there are words which are offensive depending on who uses them.

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I use Darwinism because it is the term Dawkins uses to identify his take on evolution in “The Blind Watchmaker”. His argument is very clear, and he also convincingly argues that new exotic evolutionary mechanisms (neutral mutation and company) are just footnotes on the original two mechanism of random variation and natural selection.

I highly recommend reading Dawkins’ book TBW, because it very concisely and clearly encapsulates the position that ID was founded to argue against. In fact, almost all the main ID topics appear first in Dawkins’ book: irreducible complexity, complex specified information, DNA is a computer code, the Cambrian explosion, etc. Dawkins’ book is great because he doesn’t just pooh pooh said concepts as most modern ID critics do, since he came up with the concepts first! He takes all the ID arguments seriously, and then spends the whole book explaining how the Darwinian mechanism of random variation and natural selection can generate complex specified information (i.e. the appearance of design), and finally explains from first principles why the Darwinian mechanism is the only possible driver of evolution. It is a fantastic book and really clarifies the whole debate, and also explains why the ID movement is going on about “Darwinism” and “Darwinian evolution” all the time. I think you really need to read TBW if you don’t want to talk past ID proponents, and really get where they are coming from. You’ll see that a lot of the things ID proponents say are not just quaint, silly ideas that some reactionary religious fundies came up with to try and preserve their faith. The things IDists say are actually from mainstream evolutionary theorists, who are summarized by Dawkins.

To briefly summarize Dawkins’ argument in TBW:

  1. biology gives the appearance of highly improbably sequences arranged to hit highly specific functions that are not defined in hindsight, i.e. we aren’t dealing with the sharpshooter fallacy here when discussing the appearance of design.
  2. making the step from zero to what we see today is mathematically untenable, since big steps are most likely to land in some unviable region of the DNA landscape.
  3. therefore, the only possible way to go from zero to today is many very small steps, so viability can be preserved at each point in history
  4. small random steps alone (e.g. neutral mutation) is not enough to get specificity, which is why we also need the second component of natural selection
  5. feedback loops like competitive evolution and mating signals serve as the impetus of natural selection that push evolution in a progressive direction, i.e. an arms race or accentuating mating features
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Forgive me, perhaps I’ve misunderstood you, it strikes me as a little narrow to bases your entire understanding of evolution off of one book by one author. For sake of argument, wouldn’t you take issue if you found me arguing against ID based on an definition of ID drawn from one book by Michael Behe?

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Also, using a definition that works best for one’s own counter-argument doesn’t strike me as particularly good scholarship or academia. A definition of Evolution should be chosen because it is most accurate not because it best aligns with what the ID movement is trying to argue against.

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Not really. I’d be really happy to discuss ID with anyone who took their view from any one of the main ID authors, especially Dembski. I’d like to meet just one critic who’s carefully read an ID book from end to end for understanding. It’d make discussions so much easier, since we wouldn’t spend all the time clarifying all the common misconceptions that pretty much every ID critic I talk with.

Dawkins is not the only evolutionary proponent I’ve read, but he is by far the clearest and does the best at explaining why the concept he calls Darwinian evolution is such a compelling idea. I actually don’t care to argue against other concepts, since personally I don’t care too much whether the earth is old or young, whether common descent is true, whether Genesis is literally true, etc.

The only question in my mind is whether we can empirically detect intelligent intervention. Everything else is secondary. Dawkins does an excellent job explaining why what we think is intelligent intervention in the biological record is actually just a mathematical illusion, and makes plenty of hard, potentially testable claims in his argument.

ID isn’t arguing against evolution. As I mentioned before, numerous ID proponents are fine with old earth, common descent, etc. The only real, fundamental point of contention amongst all the ID proponents is that unguided variation seems incapable of generating what we see in the biological record, and thus we can empiricaly detect intelligent intervention. This whole debate is entirely encapsulated by Dawkins’ use of the term “Darwinian evolution” and that’s why IDists keep using the term, because that is the only thing they fundamentally care about.

Also note the fundamental question, how do we explain all this CSI in biology, did not start with evangelical fundies. Dawkins and other secular scientists are the first to bring up this problem. As such, it is not only evangelical fundies who ask the question, nor even the only ones who think the Darwinian answer and other existing answers in the ‘scientific consensus’ are severely lacking.

Personally, I don’t know much biology, never have had formal exposure to evolution beyond what I get in high school biology and reading through Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life” during a great books track in undergrad (currently self teaching by reading Dawkins and others, and bioinformatics). I come at this from a comp sci, information theory perspective, so at least in that area what the IDists say I know to be dead on, and the critiques from people such as Shallit and English are extremely off base. So, while I don’t have the expertise to make pronouncements on biological (only evolutionary algorithms), the treatment of ID within the areas I have credentialed expertise makes my highly skeptical the ID arguments are treated any better outside my expertise, since at least the tone and argumentative format I see from the critics appears very similar. However, I’m still digging into the evolution material to see for myself how well the ID arguments are treated.

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Hi Daniel! I’m not going to comment on the correctness or appropriateness of referring to evolution as “Darwinian”, as that has probably been thoroughly debated by now, but I just wanted to say that as a practicing evolutionary biologist, I never use the term “Darwinian evolution” in my publications, talks, grants or event talking with colleagues. We just drop the Darwinian part. I think I referenced Darwin in two publications: one because it was actually relevant to cite him, and the other because I used him as a representative of humans in a figure.

I imagine it’s like physicists probably not (usually) referring to physics as “Newtonian”, although I guess perhaps that’s a useful term to distinguish from relativity and quantum mechanics.

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It seems that you and I have much in common. Both of us accept the genetic aspect of evolution, but do not think that it is enough to explain how the process works. We both have read Dawkins to find out what evolution is about.

Why? Because other people recommended him. He is by far the best known spokesman for this science. If her is mistaken, then someone better needs to write a replacement for the Selfish Gene. I have tried to promote E. O. Wilson’s The Social Conquest with no response.

As I have said before, the problem with ID is that they assume that God would have to directly intervene to guide evolution in a particular direction. That is not true. God guides evolution through changing the environment. While Darwin saw some evidence of this, he built the basis of his understanding of Natural Selection on the population theories of Malthus and modeled it on Adam Smith and competitive capitalism.

The NT makes the Logos/Jesus Christ/ God’s Rational Word as the basis for the Design/Purpose of the universe. To give Darwin credit he got much right and that is why his ideas are still strong today, bit Surprise, Surprise they are not perfect. He got variation basically right, but NS somewhat off. He did posit a God like figure to implement it, but th4e real idea of ecology did not exist in his time and the Victorians preferred war to peace.

Anyway I have found that the environment is the basis for Natural Selection as the way God guides evolution, and that this very compatible with Christianity. I will be glaqs to share more if you are interested. .

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They don’t assume that. The basic question is can we reliably detect design. If God intervenes in an undetectable manner, that is outside the purview of ID. Personally, I am only interested in the empirical question that ID asks, not whether there is some way to make religion compatible with science. To me the science comes first.

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