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Other Usages of the TermThe term Darwinism has been used by Darwin's critics to describe the beliefs of those who promote evolutionary biology.[1] In this usage, the term has connotations of atheism. For example, in Charles Hodge's book What Is Darwinism?, Hodge answers the question posed in the book's title by concluding: "It is Atheism."[2][3][4] Likewise, modern creationists use the term Darwinism, often pejoratively. Casting evolution as a doctrine or belief bolsters religiously motivated political arguments to mandate equal time for the teaching of creationism in public schools.
Classical DarwinismIn the 19th-century context in which Darwin's Origin of Species was first received, "Darwinism" came to stand for an entire range of evolutionary (and often revolutionary) philosophies about both biology and society. One of the more prominent approaches was that summed in the phrase "survival of the fittest" by the philosopher Herbert Spencer, which was later taken to be emblematic of Darwinism even though Spencer's own understanding of evolution was more Lamarckian than Darwinian, and predated the publication of Darwin's theory. What we now call "Social Darwinism" was, in its day, synonymous with "Darwinism" — the application of Darwinian principles of "struggle" to society, usually in support of anti-philanthropic political agendas. Another interpretation, one notably favored by Darwin's half-cousin Francis Galton, was that Darwinism implied that because natural selection was apparently no longer working on "civilized" people it was possible for "inferior" strains of people (who would normally be filtered out of the gene pool) to overwhelm the "superior" strains, and corrective measures would have to be undertaken — the foundation of eugenics. In Darwin's day there was no rigid definition of the term "Darwinism", and it was used by opponents and proponents of Darwin's biological theory alike to mean whatever they wanted it to in a larger context. The ideas had international influence, and Ernst Haeckel developed what was known as Darwinismus in Germany, although, like Spencer Haeckel's "Darwinism" had only a rough resemblance to the theory of Charles Darwin, and was not centered around natural selection at all. While the reaction against Darwin's ideas is nowadays often thought to have been widespread immediately, in 1886 Wallace went on a lecture tour across the United States, starting in New York and going via Boston, Washington, Kansas, Iowa and Nebraska to California, lecturing on what he called Darwinism without any problems.[5] Darwinism as selectionism
Neo-Darwinism was not terribly popular in the scientific community, as most biologists felt that the complete segregation of development and heredity actions seems unlikely or unwarranted. After the development of the modern evolutionary synthesis in the 1930s, however, the selection theory became increasingly popular amongst biologists, and codified the more modern definition of Darwinism which we have today. Darwinian processesIn a modern definition of the term, a Darwinian process requires the following schema:
If the entity or organism survives to reproduce, the process restarts. Sometimes, in stricter formulations, it is required that variation and selection act on different entities, variation on the replicator (genotype) and selection on the interactor (phenotype). Darwinism asserts that any system given these conditions, by whatever means, evolution is likely to occur. That is, over time, the entities will accumulate complex traits that favor their reproduction. This is called Universal Darwinism, a term coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Most obviously, this can refer to biological evolution. However, it has other potential spheres, the best known of which is the meme, a concept of inheritance and modification of ideas introduced by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene and further refined by researchers such as Richard Brodie and Susan Blackmore. It has been disputed if this was a Darwinian process, since it is unproven that memes undergo random mutations. Perhaps surprisingly Darwinian theories have been proposed as explanations of the origin of the universe we live in. Lee Smolin's theory Cosmological natural selection explains the selection of a universe with the correct fundamental physical parameters to support complex matter such as stars and ourselves. Wojciech Zurek's theory of Quantum darwinism explains the selection of the our classical macroscopic world from underlying quantum processes. Another example to illustrate are computer systems (PCs). Taking the software as the replicator and the whole system as the interactor, it could be seen as a Darwinian system, however, the code does not change randomly, but is directionally changed or rewritten from scratch; also systems do not reproduce. Daniel Dennett (1995) in Darwin's Dangerous Idea argues for Universal Darwinism. References
See also
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