A recent essay in PLoS biology bemoans that researchers are not using the term “evolution” nearly often enough in research papers. The essay lays out the horrendous possibilities that this could mean:
A critical question is whether avoidance of the word “evolution†has had an impact on the public perception of science. To investigate this, we examined whether the use of the term “evolution†in the scientific literature affects the use of this word in the popular press, i.e., whether there is evidence for “cultural inheritance†of word use. We searched articles on antimicrobial resistance in national media outlets, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Fox News, and the BBC (Text S1). Our results showed that the proportion of times the word “evolution†was used in a popular article was highly correlated with how often it was used in the original scientific paper to which the popular article referred (Figure 2). This clearly shows that the public is more likely to be exposed to the idea of evolution and its real-world consequences if the word “evolution†is also being used in the technical literature.
So please, keep using the word “evolution” in your papers! If you don’t, the public won’t be orthodox evolutionists, and the NCSE can’t talk about how much evolution is used in the biological literature! Nevermind if you think that “evolution” might not be the right or most specific word for what you’re doing, you need to use the word evolution more, or your papers won’t have the needed amount of propoganda value for the press!