Why I'm Not a Darwinist

Charles Darwin was the greatest scientist who ever lived. This may seem like an exaggeration to many people who take evolution for granted, and it appears downright ludicrous to those who reject evolution for religious reasons. But really, who are the other candidates? Newton is the only one who comes close and his contributions were nowhere near as significant and far-reaching as those of Darwin. Biology is much harder than physics.

Darwin discovered natural selection and he promoted and sold the idea of common descent. He founded evolutionary biology. Today evolutionary biology is one of the largest and most exciting fields in all of science.

We all know about evolutionary biology, but what is "Darwinism?" Ernst Mayr has an entire chapter devoted to the question ("What is Darwinism") in his book One Long Argument (Mayr, 1991). At the end of that chapter he says, ...

After 1859, that is, during the first Darwinian revolution, Darwinism for almost everybody meant explaining the living world by natural processes. As we will see, during and after the evolutionary synthesis the term "Darwinism" unanimously meant adaptive change under the influence of natural selection, and variational change instead of transformational evolution. These are the only two truly meaningful concepts of Darwinism, the one ruling in the nineteenth century ... and the other ruling in the twentieth century (a consensus having been reached during the evolutionary synthesis). Any other use of the term Darwinism by a modern author is bound to be misleading.

I agree with Mayr on this point. Darwinism refers to evolution by natural selection. But a "Darwinist" is not just someone who accepts the fact of natural selection, it's more than that. It's someone who prefers this explanation to all other possible mechanisms of evolution. This is the point made by Stephen Jay Gould in his famous 1982 Science paper, "Darwinism and the Expansion of Evolutionary Theory." (The Gould quote about semantics in the left sidebar is from that paper.) Gould defines modern Darwinism as ...

If we agree, as our century generally has, that "Darwinism" should be restricted to the world view encompassed by the theory of natural selection itself, the problem of definition is still not easily resolved. Darwinism must be more than the bare bones of the mechanics: the principles of superfecundity and inherited variation, and the deduction of natural selction thereform. It must, fundamentally, make a claim for wide scope and dominat frequency; natural selection must represent the primary directing force of evolutionary change.

Richard Dawkins is a Darwinist and Daniel Dennett is a Darwinist. I am not a Darwinist. I prefer a modern pluralist view of evolution as I explain in Evolution by Accident.

I am not a Darwinist, just as most of my colleagues in the Department of Physics are not Newtonists, and most of my friends who study genetics are not Mendelists. All three of these terms refer to the ideas of famous men (Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, Gregor Mendel) who made enormous contributions to science. But in all three cases, the modern sciences have advanced well beyond anything envisaged by their founders.

Call me an evolutionary biologist.