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Teaching evolution is "teaching Darwin" as much as genetics is "teaching Mendel" or the theory of relativity is "teaching Einstein."

Now, I would agree that the HISTORY of the modern evolutionary principles start with Charles Darwin, but that doesn't mean evolution is studying darwinism. Darwin didn't claim to be a prophet or a leader or anything for SCIENCE to study. He was just a man who happened to have a rational idea in a superstitous time... and now his principles are the basis of modern biology.

I don't think many schools would spend a whole semester only on Relativity. It would only make sense to teach Newton's laws as well, for example, and probably make some reference to quantum mechanics, and other significant developments in physics. It's no skin off Einstein's nose that there are other theoretical ideas also worthy to be taught. There are even continuing debates as to whether Einstein is correct in all situations, and there is no great harm in mentioning such that questions have been asked.

By Darwinism, of course I refer to the General Theory of Evolution, which remains virtually unchanged since the days he propounded it.

I'm afraid you really don't confront my contention that The New York Times and similar Darwinist outposts simply will not permit anything to be taught that puts Darwin into question, not even in courses that are 95% Darwin and 5% ID. Not even permitting a teacher to mention that there is a book about ID in the school library, if kids care to look it up in their own time--which seems to have been the origin of one of these flareups of rigid intolerance on the part of the Darwinists.

You do realize that many of Darwins critics were atheists, right? Darwin's problem is that he constructed a post hoc fallacy (Variation within species ergo variation creates new species). It went against all empirical biology of the day and still goes against empirical biology today. Why is it that we only find mythical common ancestors? Where's the honest to goodness real living common ancestor? How about sharks? They've been on the planet for 600 million years. TOE predicts they should be the common ancestor to millions of species, a sizable fraction of them alive today.

I think we are seeing archaeologists studying the fossil record suffering from the Percival Lowell effect. He swore there were canals on Mars, and a sizable number of astronomers independently confirmed his observations. They were all wrong.