Fact-Checking Professor Dave on Darwinism | Evolution News

Photo: "Professor Dave," via YouTube (screen shot, fair use).

Is Darwinism an obsolete term? Thats whatatheistYouTuber Dave Farina says in a recent videoattacking intelligent design.As I wrote previously, Farinas attacks on intelligent design do little more than recycle misinformation and stereotypes. This claim about Darwinism is a case in point. Farina alleges that the term Darwinism is no longer used by modern scientists, but only by creationists.

This is a common trope among anti-ID activists who do not work in the field of evolutionary biology. I had to debunk the same claim in my debate with Joshua Swamidass (Unbelievable?2021). Like Swamidass, Farina does not present any scientific evidence for this unsubstantiated assertion. Of course he does not, because he cannot, because it is factually incorrect.

As this nonsense is so often found in Internet forums discussing intelligent design, I here provide the peer-reviewed scientific evidence to put the point to rest once and for all.

MichaelRuse (1982)edited an anti-ID book titled Darwinism defended andRuse (2015)authored the entry Darwinism for an international encyclopedia, where he defined Darwinism [a]s the theory of evolution through natural selection. ErnstMayr (1984), co-founder of the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis, asked What Is Darwinism Today? Evolutionary biologist Stephen JayGould (1984)in his Tanner Lectures presented Challenges to Neo-Darwinism. Richard Dawkins, the famous atheist and popularizer of Darwins theory, did not at all think that Darwinism is obsolete but instead elevated it to the status of a general theory of everything that he named Universal Darwinism (Dawkins 1985). Some 18 years later Dawkins gave a whole lecture on Neo-Darwinism (Dawkins 2013). FranciscoAyala et al. (2002)debated Neodarwinism and infectious diseases transmission.Arber (2008)used computer modelling to explore the Molecular mechanisms driving Darwinian evolution.Deslile (2009)suggested a pluralistic proper foundation for neo-Darwinism. Evolutionist philosopher of biology DavidHull (2011)presented himself as Defining Darwinism in aspecial issueof a journal entirely devoted to this very question.Brooks (2011)asked in the same issue, How Darwinian is neo-Darwinism? andDepew (2011)pondered the future of Darwinism.Kampourakis & Gripiotis (2015)wrote inPerspectives in Scienceabout Darwinism in Context. DenisNobel (2015)wrote about Evolution beyond neo-Darwinism. Philosopher of science Jamie MiltonFreestone (2021)looked at Contemporary Darwinism as a worldview.Hancock et al. (2021)published a study in the prestigious journalEvolutionand concluded in the abstract, The Modern Synthesis (or Neo-Darwinism), , remains the foundation of evolutionary theory. Neo-Darwinism is alive and well. Even more recently,Brown & Hullender (2022)found that Neo-Darwinism must mutate to survive.

These are just a few examples of academic publications about (Neo-)Darwinism with that term in the title, which is not to mention the many studies that use the term in the text as a matter of course. An example from my own field of expertise is paleontologist DavidSepkoski (2012), who famously identified the five big mass extinction events, and who uses the term Darwinism all over the place in his bookRereading the Fossil Record.

Most of the above-mentioned scientists are renowned mainstream evolutionists, and none of them considers the term Darwinism as obsolete or no longer used in contemporary science. That totally debunks Farinas claim that only creationists use the term Darwinism but not real scientists. Even the uber-skeptical Wikipedia, which is dominated by a virtual Mafia of anti-ID activists who successfully conspired to erase my Wikipedia page (Benjakob 2017,Klinghoffer 2017), does not consider Neo-Darwinism to be an obsolete term. The prestigiousEncyclopedia Britannicaconcurs.

Farina apparently did not bother to do a minimum of fact-checking. This is embarrassing and appalling for somebody who claims to be a science educator.

However, there is still more misinformation being peddled by Farina. Next up I will tackle his critique of Casey Luskin and the fossil record relating to human evolution.

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Fact-Checking Professor Dave on Darwinism | Evolution News