The Prophet Darwin and the Use of Names

We spend a lot of time working on our EvoBeaker labs for teaching about evolution, and Darwin's name comes up often both in our labs and in the scientific and educational writing we read as background for our work. Perhaps too often. There is a tendency for "Darwin" to get affixed to "natural selection" so that the theory and the person become almost synonymous. This seems not to concern most evolutionary biologists, but makes me uncomfortable, and a recent paper called "Putting Darwin in His Place" shows I am not alone.

The authors of that paper claim that creationist literature has an "almost pathological obsession with Charles Darwin". They argue that this is because "attaching a proper name to a viewpoint suggests that it is individual, rather than part of a consensus, and marks it as incomplete." So Freudian interpretations of human behavior are questionable, and Newtonian physics has been superseded by a more complete understanding (which is not called Einsteinian).

Certainly Darwin's achievement ranks up there with other scientists whose names are constantly invoked—"Newton's laws of motion" for instance, or "Platonic ideals". In that sense, using "Darwin's theory of natural selection" is consistent with other fields in honoring someone who made a great contribution. But often this is shortened to "Darwin's theory" or "Darwinism". To me, this sounds like "the gospels of Paul"—it has a pseudo religious ring to it. As if somehow without the prophet Darwin, evolution and natural selection would not exist. I have no problem with giving people their due, but I would save it for sidebars and popular science literature, and let the ideas stand for themselves in the main flow of scientific and educational literature.