It is a shame when otherwise intelligent people fall prey to one of the favorite rhetorical ploys of the ID conmen, namely, referring to one of the best-established theories in the natural sciences--the theory of evolution by natural selection--as "Darwinism" and referring to those (essentially all biologists, and almost all educated people) who accept the theory as "Darwinists." The phraseology is no accident on the part of the ID shills: it is meant to suggest that a discovery about regularities in the natural world made originally by a man named Charles Darwin, and since confirmed and elaborated by thousands of other scientists, is something like the 'ideology' of an individual, so that "Darwinism" and "Darwinist" should have the vaguely pejorative connotation that, at least in American public culture, "Marxism" and "Marxist" have. Thomas Nagel's recent embarrassment, at least, did not make this mistake, though several of his "defenders"--none of whom actually defended what he had done on the merits, of course--did.
UPDATE: More on this rhetorical trick from the always excellent and well-informed Eugenie Scott and Glenn Branch.
ANOTHER: Christopher Hitchcock (Cal Tech) writes:
One comment on your post on the use of "Darwinism" by ID theorists. There is actually another reason for this. "Darwinism" is sometimes used by Gould and defenders of punctuated equilibrium theory to describe the view that evolution is a gradual, uniform process. Thus there are lots of juicy quotes from Gould et al explaining why "Darwinism" is false. To the unsuspecting reader, it sounds as if Gould (of all people) is rejecting evolution. Creationists and ID types love to use those quotes.
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