Here’s yet another discussion on whether “Darwinism” really exists, at the ID Facebook page.
Some of us find these discussions astonishing because we have run into any number of convinced Darwinists (or Darwinians or neo-Darwinians or whatever). As a rule of thumb, there is no proposition so foolish that, if it is dressed in Darwinian language, they will not entertain it.
Conversely, there is no doubt they will entertain.
Some of us think those facts mean something.
Atheist philosopher Jerry Fodor encapsulated the matter when he wrote, in What Darwin Got Wrong,
A view that looks to contradict it, either directly or by implication, is ipso facto rejected, however plausible it may otherwise seem. Entire departments, journals and research centres now work on this principle. In consequence, social Darwinism thrives, as do epistemological Darwinism, psychological Darwinism, evolutionary ethics – and even, heaven help us, evolutionary aesthetics. If you seek their monuments, look in the science section of your daily paper. We have both spent effort and ink rebutting some of the most egregious of these neo-Darwinist spin-offs, but we think that what is needed is to cut the tree at its roots: To show that Darwin’s theory of natural selection is fatally flawed. That’s what this book is about.
– Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, What Darwin Got Wrong (London: Profile Books, 2010), p. xvi.
Meanwhile, Pos-Darwinista provides us with a number of citations from the literature of the term Darwinist and similar terms up to 2005. Wonder what a further search would show.
Maybe the term is declining; terms sometimes do. The evidence would be interesting either way. But we need evidence to settle the matter, not bluster or hurt feelings.
Hat tip: Pos-Darwinista
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