On His Birthday, A Call to End Darwin Worship

It's funny how those who go on and on about the supposed "cult of Darwin" just complain about Darwin and do little to foster the understanding they say they want!

I too find it strange that Darwin is so reverred by the NCSE, AAAS, PandasThumb, etc. If they were simply trying to find a way to encourage young people to pursue a career in biology, it seems that they would pick a less polarizing figure.

I think Safina misses an essential angle of how the media and scientists actually need to 'frame' stories. Darwin's life and the voyage of the Beagle are fascinating and serve to illustrate how he came up with the theory of natural selection. So, highlighting him as an individual is not a bad thing as long as yo do not present him as the end of the story of natural selection and the not the beginning, which if you like around science and the media at the moment, in the UK at least, is not what is happening. Second, isn't 'Darwinian evolution' just evolution by natural selection so actually a reasonable term?

Well, there is Simple Darwinian Fitness, which seems to be a current concept. We measure light in einsteins and force in newtons, and no one objects. I have heard a darwin defined as a 1% change in the genetic makeup of a population in one generation. That unit does not seem to be in general use. How come physicists and chemists get to use great folk's names for units and we biologists don't?

His essay is fine except for the part that his premise is wrong.

Scientists don't talk about "Darwinism", creationists do.

Darwinian Evolution would more properly refer to the specific theory that Darwin himself proposed, as opposed to, say, the modern theory of evolution which differs from Darwin's in numerous significant details, or other variations proposed by other scientists down through the years, or Lamarckian evolution.

How does not focusing on the sexy man himself help us? I'm confused.

"Darwinian evolution" is just used to distinguish it from previous evolutionary hypotheses that have been discredited, such as "Lamarckian evolution" or "directed evolution". I prefer the term "evolution by natural selection", but either way, describing which kind of evolution I accept based on the evidence does not imply in any way that the other ideas about evolution are valid.

I studied biology for an undergraduate and a master's degree, and I've never seen as much ink about Darwin-linked evolution as I have in the past week or so, leading up to his 200th birthday.

So, I'm not sure it's really an ongoing problem. But if it is, this is a fine piece of record-setting. The clarity of this person's prose makes me smile:

"Almost everything we understand about evolution came after Darwin, not from him. He knew nothing of heredity or genetics, both crucial to evolution. Evolution wasn't even Darwin's idea."

How ridiculous. Having grown up a creationist and surrounded by creationist family and friends, I can say with a fair amount of confidence that dropping "Darwinian" from things like evolution, selection, and speciation won't make the slightest bit of difference.

The anti-evolution movement has nothing to do with Darwin the man; it is about one thing and one thing only: The Bible says everything was created one way, evolutionary theory says it happened a different way. And without a doubt, the main driver behind that is the Bible says God created us seperately and specially, evolutionary theory says we share a common ancestry with apes.

I have to laugh whenever I see these attempts to argue "If we phrased our arguments this way, we might make more progress". Sometimes, it really is very simple and not difficult to figure out.

And BTW, "Darwinian evolution" does carry specific connotations in various circles. Often it refers to gradual evolution, positive selection, and/or anagenic speciation.

yeah, and while we're at it, let's stop admiring that creep Einstein and just talk about relativity.

the problem is not Darwin (who I almost never hear any evolutionary biologist talk about, and i'm in an evolutionary biology department). the problem is people who hate/fear secularism. he's a handy target, but it could just as easily be anything or anyone else.

I've got to agree with jim.

Safina makes a huge mistake of fact and frame by taking it as given that scientists are propounding any such "Darwinism". There was no need to take ownership of the idea like that before rejecting it.

If we would only stop focusing so much on the man, and more on evolutionary science, then it might boost public understanding.

Out of curiosity, what is the antecedent to 'we'? I find that the people who most often use this term are either discussing evolution in historical context or are creationists (though many scientists embrace it as a backlash to the creationists).

Carl Safina's essay is on one level, deeply misguided, and on another, quite timely. It is arguable that completely retiring the term "Darwinism" would be wise. And it is on this level, where I would be inclined to be charitable and give Safina the benefit of the doubt.

However, I'm not in a charitable mood. Safina's perspective is so factually misinformed as to discredit it immediately.

Let's be careful and not be any more anxious to conflate "Darwinian" and "Darwinism" than we would be to conflate "evolutionary" with "evolutionism". But Safina does precisely this.

Using phrases like "Darwinian selection" or "Darwinian evolution" implies there must be another kind of evolution at work, a process that can be described with another adjective. For instance, "Newtonian physics" distinguishes the mechanical physics Newton explored from subatomic quantum physics. So "Darwinian evolution" raises a question: What's the other evolution?

Into the breach: intelligent design.

First of all, this seems to be mere word game capable of being played with any adjective+noun. You can play it too with proper adjectives like: "Newtonian Physics", "Mendelian genetics", and "Cartesian geometry".

But games aside, there is no actual breach at all. In fact, there is a proper complement to "Darwinian", apparently unknown to Safina. Let me point you to but one seminal paper concerning the topic. Here is the gist:

Non-Darwinian evolution. (subscription required)
King JL, Jukes TH.
Science. 1969 May 16;164(881):788-98.

Most evolutionary change in proteins may be due to neutral mutations and genetic drift.

Darwinism is so well established that it is difficult to think of evolution except in terms of selection for desirable characteristics and advantageous genes. New technical developments and new knowledge, such as the sequential analysis of proteins and the deciphering of the genetic code, have made a much closer examination of evolutionary processes possible, and therefore necessary. Patterns of evolutionary change that have been observed at the phenotypic level do not necessarily apply at the genotypic and molecular levels. We need new rules in order to understand the patterns and dynamics of molecular evolution.

This isn't a marginal view and hundreds if not thousands of papers talk about Darwinian evolution in contrast to neutral evolution with this very sense in mind. This can be verified with a casual browsing of Pubmed or ISI Web of Science citation search engines.

While it is arguable that the term "Darwinism" should be put to rest, the term "Darwinian" is very much alive and well and for precisely the reasons mentioned by Safina. Though a surprising number of Darwin's ideas concerning evolution (notably natural selection) remain useful, there are in fact many aspects of evolution that were not discussed by Darwin. And it is in contrasting these new ideas to the older ones that using the term "Darwinian" is most common and fruitful.

And to bring the topic back to the subject of this blog, do you really think that the frame that "Evolution really is well supported, it is just that those quirky biologists have a pesky Darwin fetish they need to kick." is really the best frame for defending evolution? May I suggest a substitution instead?

"Evolution really is well supported independent of arguments from authority. It is just that those quirky science journalists and public intellectuals have a pesky habit of not describing the field as it really is."

Who worships Darwin? Where can I find his shrines or read on the tenets of his faith?

Other than my basic introductory classes years ago, I've heard far more about Darwin from creationists and so called science communicators, journalists and editors who should really know better than I have from actual scientists.

Trying to make out that evolution = "darwinism" and "darwinism" = a religion and therefore faith is already being taught in the science classroom so "why are you discriminating against us?!?!?" is a pretty standard creationist tactic.

I'm not entirely sure that article is aimed where you might think it is. To me, "Darwinian evolution" is a concept of evolution based purely on the areas and theories Darwin worked on, just like "Newtonian physics" is exactly the same based on the areas and theories Newton worked on. Masses of evidence and experiments have been done to develop, update and revise evolution subsequently, just as happened with physics.

Yet somehow you don't hear about many people preaching the evils of Newtonianism, despite his rather more crackpot ideas about alchemy.

Agree with Riman above. When we refer to Darwinian evolution among ourselves (biologists) we are referring to evolution as Darwin understood it. We are differentiating his understanding from our understanding. It presupposes that the others in the group know the differences. When talking to groups who may not know the difference (e.g. students) I first explain the basic differences before proceeding with the talk in which I detail the accumulation of knowledge.

Safina misses the point entirely, that point being what Jim points out that "Scientists don't talk about 'Darwinism', creationists do." That cannot be overstated. Search the scientific literature on evolution from the past century, and one will rarely encounter the words Darwinism or Darwinist. But read the tracts of creationists or the "scholars" at the Discovery Institute and one will find the two words liberally sprinkled throughout. Safina is a scientific Don Quixote tilting at windmills that don't exist.

Coming in late on this, but my thoughts (written before most of the posts above--never got around to submitting it!):

I don't think "focusing so much on the man" is an issue. What I think you mean is "don't deify him", which would be fair enough. If you present only the science, you risk de-humanising the science, leaving it essentially done by metaphorical robots!

You are right that the science needs to be presented somewhere in the mix.

"Darwinism" is a label created by creationists, to "frame" their opposition. I'm happy to be corrected, but I've only ever seen this term used by scientists in the context of "what creationists call us", so I'm confused by Safina writing as this term were created by and used by scientists. (Darwinism also seems to be used by some people outside of biology, e.g. in philosophy, sociology; that it's not used within biology I think should be something for these people to think about harder.) Safina also mixes "Darwinism" and "Darwinian evolution" as if these were from the same camp and same line of argument. (The latter simply says that what is being referring to is an historical view on evolution, just as we might refer to the Lamarckian evolutionary model.)

The "stuck with Darwin" thing is very much the creationists' issue, not biologists'. It's very common biologists for to object to creationists' fixation on a Darwinian view of evolution, talking about evolution only in the light of this old, now historical, work.

My responses to these responses can be found at:
http://carlsafina.wordpress.com/2009/02/17/you-say-you-want-an-evolutio…