Putting Darwin in His Place: The Need to Watch Our Language

Abstract

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In this article, we examine the use of language in debating evolution, and suggest careful choice of the terms by which we describe both ourselves and our opponents. Present-day evolution science is solidly based on fact, and is as far advanced from original as present-day chemistry is from Dalton's atomic theory. For this reason and others, the common practice of referring to our current understanding of evolution as Darwin's theory is ill judged, inaccurate, and a public relations blunder. Only partly tongue-in-cheek, we also propose language to describe the opponents of evolution science. We suggest Supernaturalist as a blanket term for all creationists and intelligent design advocates who deny that biology can ever be explained by the ordinary laws of nature. Within these, we distinguish resurgent Paleyists who maintain that biological complexity must be the handiwork of a Designer, Flintstone creationists who believe that humans and dinosaurs coexisted on a young Earth, and Occasional creationists who believe in repeated separate divine creations on multiple occasions for different kinds of organism. Introduction We celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species, his most important book and one of the most influential in the entire history of science. There is much to celebrate; but for this very reason, we suggest, we should be careful to distinguish between own contributions and the vastly extended scientific framework that incorporates them. To do otherwise diminishes Darwin by ignoring the subtlety of his thought, and distorts the many-stranded scientific logic that leads to our present understanding of evolution. In addition, in the United States at least, describing evolution science as Darwinism (let alone Darwin's theory) plays into the hands of those who distort or deny it for the sake of their own religious or political agenda. The first of these points was discussed in this journal by Paul Farber (2003). This article will mainly concern itself with the second. Finally, since framing (or labeling) is a two-way street, we suggest labels that accurately reveal the divisions and inconsistencies among the opponents of evolution science. Darwin in Context Darwin was born in 1809, the year that Madison took over the presidency from Jefferson. He died in 1882, the year Jesse James was shot. His watershed book, The Origin of Species, was first published in 1859, shortly before the American Civil War. He did not know about genes, mutations, molecular biology, information theory, DNA, population dynamics and ecology, or the age of the Earth. Not realizing the discrete nature of inherited information, he could know neither how variation arose, nor how variation could be copied without diluting it. His fossil record was full of major gaps, while the use of biochemistry to explore phylogeny lay almost a century in the future. account required a novel mechanism of inheritance. We have that, in the science of genetics. It required ways of generating new variations. We have that, in the processes of mutation, gene transposition, and gene doubling. It required ways in which new organs could come into being. We have that at the level of function in the process known as exaptation, where a feature originally developed for one function, such as the feathers that kept dinosaurs warm, acquire a separate function in their descendants. We are also moving closer to it at the molecular level, with the discovery of control genes, which can turn whole blocks of genetic information on and off (see Carroll, 2005). It required vast expanses of time, and now, thanks to radioactive dating, we have that to an extent far beyond 19th-century imagination. (For a thorough treatment of this, with comments specifically directed at students troubled by the six orders of magnitude difference from the literalist interpretation of Genesis, see Wiens, 2002. …