To be fair to creationists and other enemies of “Darwinism”—most popularly Lockean Blank Slaters, as well as those who still blame him for the Nazis—there is such a thing as non-scientific Darwinism. And I don’t mean popular Darwinism, which is inaccurate enough. I mean the continuation of the sort of mechanistic materialism formerly associated with Descartes, Newton, Marx, etc. You know, the conception of natural history as God locked out, events being determined like dominoes tumbling in a row, things in the saddle and man as the horse, which no one really believes anymore but a century or more ago was in fashion.
There aren’t many Newtonian mechanists since Einstein and quantum mechanics, which despite bearing “mechanics” in its title has escaped being viewed as mechanistic (though still horrifying to many), and Marx has retreated back to economics, literary theory, and a smattering across the social sciences and history. But Darwin is still Hot Stuff, almost as if the Scopes trial never adjourned. So God fearing folk attach to him everything big, bad, atheistic, and red in tooth and claw implied by a scientific worldview, while popular Darwinists use legitimate and non-scientific arguments alike to browbeat the philistines.
This thread confuses non-scientific “macroevolution,” which is associated with brutal mechanistic materialism in their minds and called “Darwinism,” and proceeds to demonstrate that it isn’t scientific. Well, duh. But that’s the theory that put Darwin in the pantheon along with Galileo, Newton, Einstein, etc., which is natural selection. It really isn’t fair to blame science for how Darwin has been unscientifically used, and anyway you can’t defeat it by proving one of the things most associated with Darwin isn’t scientific while leaving alone the thing we all know is science and which he is most famous for.
There is no such theory as Darwinism, no, though there might be and certainly used to be an extra-scientific Darwinian intellectual faction, or several of them. There used to be an extra-scientific Newtonianism—which really was a carryover from previous thought, most famously Descartes. In fact it may have been the most popular way to describe the scientific worldview from the outside in the 18th and 19th centuries, before it was shattered by Einstein. There absolutely was and is still an extra-scientific Einsteinism, which we call relativism—though it, too, predates Einstein, going back at least to the ancient Greeks. I doubt there’s one in ten educated people who can explain physical relativity beyond the Special Theory, but we all know what there being no absolute measure between different perspectives means in other fields.
These “isms” were and are more or less organized. For Newton and Einstein, they gave concreteness to much bigger assumptions. It would be accurate to say there were entire generations of materialists and relativists who would’ve argued on as they did with or without Newton and Einstein, though they were no doubt happy to stamp their worldview with scientific credibility. With Darwin it was different, and from the beginning there was an organized movement to defend and spread it nit just within science but in the larger “culture wars,” if such a term is appropriate. Then there were the various and now infamous factions of “social Darwinism,” which were unscientific and sometimes pulled from explicit writings if Darwin but more often only implied.
Nowadays, the fight is mainly between creationists and pop-Darwinists like Dawkins and Dennett. I can go along with creationists and say they often make totally unscientific arguments, though non-scientific might be a better term since they aren’t meant to be scientific. Anyway, they can be called Darwinists and they do overplayed their hands and steal the label of science to emblazon the non-scientific hammer with which they cave in creationist skulls.
However, it won’t do to defeat Darwin by knocking down such arguments as un- or non-scientific. First of all it goes nowhere towards proving creationism is any more scientific. More importantly, everyone who matters knows most of these arguments aren’t scientific. Darwin’s scientific claim to fame is natural selection, and it is that which evolutionary biologists spend all day confirming. That is not touched by discrediting “macroevolution.” Which is why I say this thread is going after a straw man.
“Darwinism” is, at best, a loaded term - like a rorshach drawing in which every observer sees what he wants to (or doesn’t want to) see.
Einstein was rather preterbed at the postmodernists glomming on to his theory or relativity as any sort of confirmation that the universe is disjointed or that reality is meaningless. He saw relativity as an essential symmetry to the universe, that the effect of acceleration caused by gravity was functionally equivalent to the acceleration caused by mechanical force.
So Einstein would not be an “Einsteinist” in the sense that the postmodernists would have it.
I do not venerate Darwin, nor draw wildly extravagent philosophical extrapolations based upon his theory. I do not accept “Darwinism” by my own, or probably most others explanation of that (loaded) term. But I do accept the theory of natural selection of genetic variation as the most useful and predictive model to explain biological evolution.
How else are we going to explain the observations? What else is there?