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Charles Darwin in 1868

Darwinism is a set of movements and concepts related to ideas of transmutation of species or evolution, including ideas with no connection to the work of Charles Darwin.^[1][2][3] The meaning of Darwinism has changed over time, and varies depending on who is using the term.^[4] In the United States, Darwinism is often used by creationists as a pejorative term but in the United Kingdom the term has no negative connotations, being freely used as a short hand for evolutionary theory.^[5]

The term was coined by Thomas Henry Huxley in April 1860,^[6] and was used to describe evolutionary concepts, including earlier concepts such as Malthusianism and Spencerism. In the late 19th century it came to mean the concept that natural selection was the sole mechanism of evolution, in contrast to Lamarckism, then around 1900 it was eclipsed by Mendelism until the modern evolutionary synthesis unified Darwin's and Gregor Mendel's ideas. As modern evolutionary theory has developed, the term has been associated at times with specific ideas.^[4]

While the term has remained in use amongst scientific authors, it is increasingly regarded as an inappropriate description of modern evolutionary theory.^[7][8][9] For example, Darwin was unfamiliar with the work of Gregor Mendel^[10], having as a result only a vague and inaccurate understanding of heredity, and knew nothing of genetic drift.^[11]

Huxley's conception of Darwinism

As "Darwinism" became widely accepted in the 1870s, caricatures of Charles Darwin with an ape or monkey body symbolised evolution.^[12]

While the term Darwinism had been used previously to refer to the work of Erasmus Darwin in the late 18th century, the term as understood today was introduced when Charles Darwin's 1859 book On the Origin of Species was reviewed by Thomas Henry Huxley in the April 1860 issue of the Westminster Review.^[13] Having hailed the book as, "a veritable Whitworth gun in the armoury of liberalism" promoting scientific naturalism over theology, and praising the usefulness of Darwin's ideas while expressing professional reservations about Darwin's gradualism and doubting if it could be proved that natural selection could form new species,^[14] Huxley compared Darwin's achievement to that of Copernicus in explaining planetary motion:

What if the orbit of Darwinism should be a little too circular? What if species should offer residual phænomena, here and there, not explicable by natural selection? Twenty years hence naturalists may be in a position to say whether this is, or is not, the case; but in either event they will owe the author of "The Origin of Species" an immense debt of gratitude...... And viewed as a whole, we do not believe that, since the publication of Von Baer's "Researches on Development," thirty years ago, any work has appeared calculated to exert so large an influence, not only on the future of Biology, but in extending the domination of Science over regions of thought into which she has, as yet, hardly penetrated.^[6]

19th Century usage

"Darwinism" soon 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 similar to that of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck than to that of Darwin, and predated the publication of Darwin's theory. What is now called "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 favoured 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 voluntary corrective measures would be desirable — 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 on natural selection at all.

While the reaction against Darwin's ideas is nowadays often thought to have been widespread immediately, in 1886 Alfred Russel 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.^[16]

Other uses

The term Darwinism is often used in the United States by promoters of creationism, notably by leading members of the intelligent design movement, as an epithet to attack evolution as though it were an ideology (an "ism") of philosophical naturalism, or atheism.^[17] For example, Phillip E. Johnson makes this accusation of atheism with reference to Charles Hodge's book What Is Darwinism?.^[18] However, unlike Johnson, Hodge confined the term to exclude those like Asa Gray who combined Christian faith with support for Darwin's natural selection theory, before answering the question posed in the book's title by concluding: "It is Atheism."^[19][20][21] Creationists use the term Darwinism, often pejoratively, to imply that the theory has been held as true only by Darwin and a core group of his followers, whom they cast as dogmatic and inflexible in their belief.^[22] Casting evolution as a doctrine or belief, as well as a pseudo-religious ideology like Marxism ^[23] , bolsters religiously motivated political arguments to mandate equal time for the teaching of creationism in public schools.

However, Darwinism is also used neutrally within the scientific community to distinguish modern evolutionary theories from those first proposed by Darwin, as well as by historians to differentiate it from other evolutionary theories from around the same period. For example, Darwinism may be used to refer to Darwin's proposed mechanism of natural selection, in comparison to more recent mechanisms such as genetic drift and gene flow. It may also refer specifically to the role of Charles Darwin as opposed to others in the history of evolutionary thought — particularly contrasting Darwin's results with those of earlier theories such as Lamarckism or later ones such as the modern synthesis.

In the United Kingdom the term retains its positive sense as a reference to natural selection, and for example Richard Dawkins wrote in his collection of essays A Devil's Chaplain, published in 2003, that as a scientist he is a Darwinist.^[24]

See also

Evolutionary biology portal

• Darwinism (book)
• Modern evolutionary synthesis
• Neo-Darwinism
• Neural Darwinism
• Social Darwinism
• Darwin Awards
• Pangenesis - Charles Darwin's hypothetical mechanism for heredity
• Universal Darwinism

Notes

References

External links

• Universal Darwinism
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry
• What is Darwinism
• The Darwinian Revolution

From Wikiquote

Creationism, Intelligent Design and Evolution

Western thought

Hebrew scriptures

• "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork." Psalms 19:1.

• "Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind: 'Who is this that speaks so ignorantly? Stand up like a man: I will question you, and you will answer me. Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you are so smart. Who determined its measurements--surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone, when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" Job 38:1-7.

Greek and Roman quotes

• In the Timaeus, Plato wrote the following question and answer sometime around 350 BC:

"Is the world created or uncreated? -- that is the first question.

Created, I reply, being visible and tangible and having a body, and therefore sensible; and if sensible, then created; and if created, made by a cause, and the cause is the ineffable father of all things, who had before him an eternal archetype."[1]

• "Only because the people see
  

So much in land and sky

For which they do not know the cause,

They think Divinities are working there.

If they could but see that

Nothing can be created from nothing,

Then they would advance one more step

Toward the answer that they seek:

Those eternal elements became

Everything that is,

Without interference from Gods."

--Lucretius, " De rerum natura," written about 60 BC

• "Gutta cavat lapidem, non vi sed saepe cadendo." (The drop excavates the stone, not with force but by falling often.)

--Publius Ovidius Naso, Epistulae Ex Ponto (Letters from the Black Sea)

Christian New Testament

• "For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of men who by their wickedness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse; for although they knew God they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools." Romans 1:18-22.

• "First of all you must understand this, that scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, following their own passions and saying:

'Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things have continued as they were from the beginning of creation.'

They deliberately ignore this fact: that by the word of God the heavens were created long ago, and an earth formed out of water and by means of water, through which the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished." 2 Peter 3:3-6.

19th century and earlier

• "This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being."
  -Isaac Newton ("General Scholium," in Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Isaac Newton. 1687)

• "I do not feel obliged to believe that same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect had intended for us to forgo their use."
  -Galileo Galilei

• "Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books."
  -Francis Bacon

• "Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night. God said 'Let Newton be!' and all was light."
  -Alexander Pope

• "Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied with the view that each species has been independently created. To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual. When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled."
  -Charles Darwin [2]

• "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science."
  -Charles Darwin

• "When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled."
  -Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

• "The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.... Every influx of atheism, of skepticism, is thus made useful as a mercury pill assaulting and removing a diseased religion, and making way for truth."
  -Ralph Waldo Emerson

• "History warns us, however, that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions; and, as matters now stand, it is hardly rash to anticipate that, in another twenty years, the new generation, educated under the influences of the present day, will be in danger of accepting the main doctrines of the 'Origin of Species' with as little reflection, and it may be with as little justification, as so many of our contemporaries, twenty years ago, rejected them. Against any such a consummation let us all devoutly pray; for the scientific spirit is of more value than its products, and irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors."
  -Thomas Huxley, The Coming of Age of "The Origin of Species (1880); Collected Essays, vol. 2

• "The antagonism between science and religion, about which we hear so much, appears to me to be purely factitious–fabricated, on the one hand, by short-sighted religious people who confound a certain branch of science, theology, with religion; and, on the other, by equally short-sighted scientific people who forget that science takes for its province only that which is susceptible of clear intellectual comprehension; and that, outside the boundaries of that province, they must be content with imagination, with hope, and with ignorance."
  -Thomas Huxley, The interpreters of Genesis and the interpreters of Nature (1885)

• "The antagonism of science is not to religion, but to the heathen survivals and the bad philosophy under which religion herself is often well-[163]nigh crushed. And, for my part, I trust that this antagonism will never cease; but that, to the end of time, true science will continue to fulfil one of her most beneficent functions, that of relieving men from the burden of false science which is imposed upon them in the name of religion."
  -Thomas Huxley, in an essay to William Gladstone, [3]

• "I attacked the foundations of morality in Erewhon, and nobody cared two straws, I tore open the wounds of my Redeemer as he hung upon the Cross in The Fair Haven, and people rather liked it. But when I attacked Mr. Darwin they were up in arms in a moment."
  -Samuel Butler, Evolution Old and New, 1879, p. 54.

• "There is more religion in men's science, than there is science in their religion."
  -Henry David Thoreau

• "The church is not a pioneer; it accepts a new truth, last of all, and only when denial has become useless."
  -Robert Ingersoll

• "It is in the uncompromisingness with which dogma is held and not in the dogma, or want of dogma, that the danger lies."
  -Samuel Butler, The Way Of All Flesh

• "Religions die when they are proven to be true. Science is the record of dead religions."
  -Oscar Wilde

• "The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence."
  -Thomas H. Huxley

20th century

Sourced

• "[Darwin's] triumph has won for us a common height from which we see the whole world of living beings as well as all inorganic nature; phenomena of every order we now regard as expressions of natural causes. The supernatural has no longer a standing is science; it has vanished like a dream, and the halls consecrated to its thralldom of the intellect are becoming radiant with a more cheerful faith."
  -Charles Otis Whitman, 1919 (posth.)

• "The main task of any theory of evolution is to explain adaptive complexity, that is, to explain the same set of facts that Paley used as evidence of a creator."
  -John Maynard Smith, "The status of neo-darwinism", in C.H. Waddington, ed., Towards a Theoretical Biology (University Press, Edinburgh, 1969)

• "I am not arguing with the scientist who explains the elephant, but only with the sophist who explains it away."
  -G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man.

• "It is absurd for the evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything."
  -G.K. Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas.

• "In all their polemics, the anti-creationists invariably avoid discussing the actual scientific evidence for macro-evolution. If there were any such evidence, they could easily settle the whole conflict, merely by presenting the evidence! Instead they seem compelled to resort to bombast ridicule, defamation, intimidation, and distortion. Surely that great body of working scientists, largely uninvolved so far in the creation/evolution conflict will soon begin to see that a two-model approach to all scientific study is salutary and will persuade their more emotional brethren to open their minds to potential truth wherever it might be found."
  -Henry Morris, founder of the Institute for Creation Research

• "Any competent biologist is aware of a multitude of problems yet unresolved and of questions yet unanswered. After all, biologic research shows no sign of approaching completion; quite the opposite is true. Disagreements and clashes of opinion are rife among biologists, as they should be in a living and growing science. Anti-evolutionists mistake, or pretend to mistake, these disagreements as indications of dubiousness of the entire doctrine of evolution. Their favorite sport is stringing together quotations, carefully and sometimes expertly taken out of context, to show that nothing is really established or agreed upon among evolutionists. Some of my colleagues and myself have been amused and amazed to read ourselves quoted in a way showing that we are really anti-evolutionists under the skin."
  -Theodosius Dobzhansky, Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution, 1973 [4]

• "No geological difficulties, real or imagined, can be allowed to take precedence over the clear statements and necessary inferences of Scripture."
  -Henry Morris [5]

• "Biochemists and biologists who adhere blindly to the Darwinism theory search for results that will be in agreement with their theories and consequently orient their research in a given direction, whether it be in the field of ecology, ethology, sociology, demography (dynamics of populations), genetics (so-called evolutionary genetics), or paleontology. This intrusion of theories has unfortunate results: it deprives observations and experiments of their objectivity, makes them biased, and, moreover, creates false problems."
  -P.-P. Grasse, Evolution of Living Organisms: Evidence for a New Theory of Transformation (Academic Press, 1977), p. 7

• "IN SHORT, three concepts, evolution, in the minimal sense of "descent with modification" (no "emergence," no "higher and lower" allowed), variation, in the sense of Mendelian micro-mutation, tiny changes in the structure or arrangement of the genes, the ultimate material of heredity (no sweeping or sudden alterations allowed), and natural selection, the decrease in frequency of those variants that happen in each successive generation to be less well adapted than others to their particular environment: these three form a tight circle within which, in happy self-confirmation, neo-Darwinian thinking moves. To those who believe in it, this circle is an ample intellectual dwelling place, roomy enough in fact to house all the immense achievements of modern biological research. To those not so convinced, however, the circle seems a strangely constricted one. They may even agree with the Professor Emeritus of Zoology at Cambridge that ‘no amount of argument, or clever epigram, can disguise the inherent improbability of orthodox (Darwinian) theory.’"
  -M. Grene, "The Faith of Darwinism", Encounter, November 1959, p. 50 (emphasis in original)

• "Another philosophical question regards the very definition of the word 'selection'. One of the original formulations of selection was 'the survival of the fittest'. If you open a standard textbook of genetics 'fitness' will probably be defined as 'the ability to survive' or something similar. But if the 'fittest' are defined as 'the best survivors' then the idea of natural selection becomes 'the survival of those best at surviving'. So what else is new? If there is no more to Darwinism than a truism then the whole theory rests on very shaky ground."
  -B. Leith, The Descent of Darwin: A Handbook of Doubts about Darwinism (Collins, 1982), p. 21

• "I have quoted some voices of dissent coming from biologists in eminent academic positions. There have been many others, just as critical of the orthodox doctrine, though not always as outspoken —and their number is steadily growing. Although these criticisms have made numerous breaches in the walls, the citadel still stands—mainly, as said before, because nobody has a satisfactory alternative to offer. The history of science shows that a well-established theory can take a lot of battering and get itself into a tangle of contradictions—the fourth phase of ‘Crisis and Doubt’ in the historic cycle and yet still be upheld by the establishment until a breakthrough occurs, initiating a new departure, and the start of a new cycle. But that event is not yet in sight. In the meantime, the educated public continues to believe that Darwin has provided all the relevant answers by the magic formula of random mutation plus natural selection—quite unaware of the fact that random mutations turned out to be irrelevant and natural selection a tautology."
  -Arthur Koestler, Janus: A Summing Up (Picador, 1983), pp. 184–185

• "The trouble was that in reading widely during my early teens I ran into the Darwinian theory, for a little while with illusions and then with less respect than adults with bated breath were wont to show. The theory seemed to me to run like this: ‘If among the varieties of a species there is one that survives better in the environment than the others, then the variety that survives best is the one that best survives.’ If I had known the word tautology I would have called this a tautology. People with still more bated breath, called it natural selection. I made them angry, just as I do today, by saying that it did nothing at all. You could select potatoes as much as you pleased but you would never make them into a rabbit. Nor by selecting oak trees could you make them into colonies of bats, and those who thought they could in my opinion were bats in the belfry."
  -Sir Fred Hoyle, Mathematics of Evolution (Memphis, Tenn.: Acorn Enterprises, 1999), p. 2

• "The fact that the theory of natural selection is difficult to test has led some people, anti-Darwinists and even some great Darwinists, to claim that is a tautology. A tautology like ‘All tables are tables’ is not, of course, testable; nor has it any explanatory power. It is therefore most surprising to hear that some of the greatest contemporary Darwinists themselves formulate the theory in such a way that it amounts to the tautology that those organisms that leave most offspring leave most offspring. And C. H. Waddington even says somewhere (and he defends this view in other places) that ‘Natural selection … turns out … to be a tautology.’ However, he attributes at the same place to the theory an ‘enormous power … of explanation.’ Since the explanatory power of a tautology is obviously zero, something must be wrong here."
  -Karl Popper, "Natural Selection and the Emergence of Mind", Dialectica 32(3-4), 1978, p. 344 (ellipses in original)

• "The theory of natural selection may be so formulated that it is far from tautological. In this case it is not only testable, but it turns out to be not strictly universally true."
  -Karl Popper, "Natural Selection and the Emergence of Mind", Dialectica 32(3-4), 1978, p. 346 (ellipses in original)

• "The statistical probability that organic structures and the most precisely harmonized reactions that typify living organisms would be generated by accident, is zero."
  -Ilya Prigogine (Chemist-Physicist) Recipient of two Nobel Prizes in chemistry I. Prigogine, N. Gregair, A. Babbyabtz, Physics Today 25, pp. 23-28

• "The concept of relative adaptation removes the apparent tautology in the theory of natural selection. Without it the theory of natural selection states that fitter individuals have more offspring and then defines the fitter as being those that leave more offspring; since some individuals will always have more offspring than others by sheer chance, nothing is explained.… Unfortunately the concept of relative adaptation also requires the ceteris paribus assumption, so that in practice it is not easy to predict which of two forms will leave more offspring."
  -Richard Lewontin, "Adaptation", Scientific American 239(3), September 1978, pp. 166–167

• "It may be true that scientism and evolutionism (not science and evolution) are among the causes of atheism and materialism. It is at least equally true that biblical literalism, from its earlier flat-earth and geocentric forms to its recent young-earth and flood-geology forms, is one of the major causes of atheism and materialism. Many scientists and intellectuals have simply taken the literalists at their word and rejected biblical materials as being superseded or contradicted by modern science. Without having in hand a clear and persuasive alternative, they have concluded that it is nobler to be damned by the literalists than to dismiss the best testimony of research and reason. Intellectual honesty and integrity demand it."
  -Conrad Hyers, The Meaning of Creation: Genesis and Modern Science

• "Today, almost half a century after the publication of the Encyclical, fresh knowledge has led to the recognition that evolution is more than a hypothesis. It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge … [however,] theories of evolution which, in accordance with the philosophies inspiring them, consider the mind as emerging from the forces of living matter, or as a mere epiphenomenon of this matter, are incompatible with the truth about man. Nor are they able to ground the dignity of the person."
  -Pope John Paul II, [6]

• "I meet many people offended by evolution, who passionately prefer to be the personal handicraft of God than to arise by blind physical and chemical forces over aeons from slime. They also tend to be less than assiduous in exposing themselves to the evidence. Evidence has little to do with it: what they wish to be true, they believe is true.… The clearest evidence of our evolution can be found in our genes. But evolution is still being fought, ironically by those whose own DNA proclaims it—in the schools, in the courts, in textbook publishing houses, and on the question of just how much pain we can inflict on other animals without crossing some ethical threshold."
  -Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World, p. 325.

• "One way or another, Darwinists meet the question ‘Is Darwinism true?’ with an answer that amounts to an assertion of power: ‘Well, it is science, as we define science, and you will have to be content with that.’ Some of us are not content with that, because we know that the empirical evidence for the creative power of natural selection is somewhere between weak and non-existent. Artificial selection of fruit flies or domestic animals produces limited change within the species, but tells us nothing about how insects and mammals came into existence in the first place. In any case, whatever artificial selection achieves is due to the employment of human intelligence consciously pursuing a goal. The whole point of the blind watchmaker thesis, however, is to establish what material processes can do in the absence of purpose and intelligence. That Darwinist authorities continually overlook this crucial distinction gives us little confidence in their objectivity."
  -Phillip E. Johnson, [7].

• "What kind of God can one infer from the sort of phenomena epitomized by the species on Darwin's Galapagos Islands? The evolutionary process is rife with happenstance, contingency, incredible waste, death, pain and horror.… The God of the Galapagos is careless, wasteful, indifferent, almost diabolical. He is certainly not the sort of God to whom anyone would be inclined to pray."
  -David Hull, reviewing Phillip Johnson's Darwin on Trial for Nature

• "Science is fundamentally a game. It is a game with one overriding and defining rule:

1. Let us see how far and to what extent we can explain the behavior of the physical and material universe in terms of purely physical and material causes, without invoking the supernatural."
   -Richard Dickerson, Journal of Molecular Evolution 34:277, 1992

• "Religious opposition to evolution propels anti-evolutionism. Although anti-evolutionists pay lip service to supposed scientific problems with evolution, what motivates them to battle its teaching is apprehension over the implications of evolution for religion."
  -National Academy of Scienceshttp://www.ncseweb.org/resources/articles/4550_antievolutionism_and_creationi_2_13_2001.asp]

• "The discipline of biology will not only survive but prosper if it turns out that genetic information really is the product of preexisting intelligence. Biologists will have to give up their dogmatic materialism and discard unproductive hypotheses like the pre-biotic soup, but to abandon bad ideas is a gain, not a loss. Freed of the metaphysical chains that tie it to nineteenth-century materialism, biology can turn to the fascinating task of discovering how the intelligence embodied in the genetic information works through matter to make the organism function. In that case chemical evolution will go the way of alchemy—abandoned because a better understanding of the problem revealed its futility—and science will have reached a new plateau."
  -Phillip E. Johnson, Reason in the Balance, p. 92

• "16O has exactly the right nuclear energy level either to prevent all the carbon from turning into oxygen or to facilitate sufficient production of 16O for life. Fred Hoyle, who discovered these coincidences in 1953, concluded that "a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology."
  -Hoyle, Fred "The Universe: Past and Present Reflections," in Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, 20. (1982), p.16

• "The most preposterous notion that H. sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history."
  -Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love (1973)

• "I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is a mystery but is the explanation for the miracle of existence, why there is something instead of nothing."
  -Alan Sandage (winner of the Crawford prize in astronomy) Willford, J.N. March 12, 1991. Sizing up the Cosmos: An Astronomers Quest. New York Times, p. B9.

• "Amazing fine tuning occurs in the laws that make this [complexity] possible. Realization of the complexity of what is accomplished makes it very difficult not to use the word 'miraculous' without taking a stand as to the ontological status of the word."
  - George Ellis (British astrophysicist) Ellis, G.F.R. 1993. The Anthropic Principle: Laws and Environments. The Anthropic Principle, F. Bertola and U.Curi, ed. New York, Cambridge University Press, p. 30

• "We are, by astronomical standards, a pampered, cosseted, cherished group of creatures.. .. If the Universe had not been made with the most exacting precision we could never have come into existence. It is my view that these circumstances indicate the universe was created for man to live in."
  - John O'Keefe (astronomer at NASA) Heeren, F. 1995. Show Me God. Wheeling, IL, Searchlight Publications, p. 200.

• "Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, one with the very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the conditions required to permit life, and one which has an underlying (one might say 'supernatural') plan."
  - Arno Penzias (Nobel prize in physics) Margenau, H and R.A. Varghese, ed. 1992. Cosmos, Bios, and Theos. La Salle, IL, Open Court, p. 83.

• "As we survey all the evidence, the thought insistently arises that some supernatural agency—or, rather, Agency—must be involved. Is it possible that suddenly, without intending to, we have stumbled upon scientific proof of the existence of a Supreme Being? Was it God who stepped in and so providentially crafted the cosmos for our benefit?"
  - George Greenstein(American astronomer) Greenstein, George. The Symbiotic, Universe: Life and Mind in the Cosmos. (New York: William Morrow, (1988), pp. 26-27

• "When I began my career as a cosmologist some twenty years ago, I was a convinced atheist. I never in my wildest dreams imagined that one day I would be writing a book purporting to show that the central claims of Judeo-Christian theology are in fact true, that these claims are straightforward deductions of the laws of physics as we now understand them. I have been forced into these conclusions by the inexorable logic of my own special branch of physics."
  - Frank Tipler(Professor of Mathematical Physics) Tipler, F.J. 1994. The Physics Of Immortality. New York, Doubleday, Preface.

• "A life-giving factor lies at the centre of the whole machinery and design of the world."
  - John Wheeler(American physicist) Wheeler, John A. "Foreword," in The Anthropic Cosmological Principle by John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler. (Oxford, U. K.: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. vii.

• "Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing and delicately balanced to provide exactly the conditions required to support life. In the absence of an absurdly-improbable accident, the observations of modern science seem to suggest an underlying, one might say, supernatural plan."
  - Nobel Laureate Arno Penzias, co-discoverer of the radiation afterglow (Quoted in Walter Bradley, "The 'Just-so' Universe: The Fine-Tuning of Constants and Conditions in the Cosmos," in William Dembski and James Kushiner, eds., Signs of Intelligence. 168)

• "We go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing of the world. We give little thought to the machinery that generates the sunlight that makes life possible, to the gravity that glues us to an Earth that would otherwise send us spinning off into space, or to the atoms of which we are made and on whose stability we fundamentally depend. Except for children (who don't know enough not to ask the important questions), few of us spend much time wondering why nature is the way it is; where the cosmos came from, or whether it was always here; if time will one day flow backward and effects precede causes; or whether there are ultimate limits to what humans can know."
  - Carl Sagan (From an introduction to "A Brief History of Time" by Stephen Hawking)

• "This is an exceedingly strange development, unexpected by all but the theologians. They have always accepted the word of the Bible: In the beginning God created heaven and earth... [But] for the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; [and] as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."
  - Robert Jastrow (God and the Astronomers [New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1978], 116. Professor Jastrow was the founder of NASA’s Goddard Institute, now director of the Mount Wilson Institute and its observatory.)

• "As we survey all the evidence, the thought insistently arises that some supernatural agency -or, rather, Agency - must be involved. Is it possible that suddenly, without intending to, we have stumbled upon scientific proof of the existence of a Supreme Being? Was it God who stepped in and so providentially crafted the cosmos for our benefit?"
  - George Greenstein (astronomer) Greenstein, G. 1988. The Symbiotic Universe. New York: William Morrow, p.27.

• "I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption ... For myself, as no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneous liberation from a certain political and economic system, and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom."
  - Aldous Huxley (REPORT, June 1966. "Confession of Professed Atheist," A. Huxley)

Unsourced

• "The human mind is not capable of grasping the Universe. We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceilings with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. But the child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books - a mysterious order which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects."
  -Albert Einstein

• "To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today."
  -Isaac Asimov

• "We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for awhile, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces."
  -Carl Sagan

• "Evolution is a bankrupt speculative philosophy, not a scientific fact. Only a spiritually bankrupt society could ever believe it.… Only atheists could accept this Satanic theory."
  -Jimmy Swaggart

• "We are convinced that masses of evidence render the application of the concept of evolution to man and other primates beyond serious dispute."
  -The Pontifical Academy of Sciences

• "We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of the culture."
  -Pastor Ray Mummert, creationist/intelligent design proponent, March 2005

• "The really amazing thing is not that life on Earth is balanced on a knife-edge, but that the entire universe is balanced on a knife-edge, and would be total chaos if any of the natural 'constants' were off even slightly. You see," Davies adds, "even if you dismiss man as a chance happening, the fact remains that the universe seems unreasonably suited to the existence of life -- almost contrived -- you might say a 'put-up job'."
  -Dr. Paul Davies (noted author and Professor of Theoretical Physics at Adelaide University)

• "...how surprising it is that the laws of nature and the initial conditions of the universe should allow for the existence of beings who could observe it. Life as we know it would be impossible if any one of several physical quantities had slightly different values."
  -Professor Steven Weinberg (Nobel Laureate in High Energy Physics [a field of science that deals with the very early universe], writing in the journal "Scientific American".)

• "It is, for example, impossible for evolution to account for the fact that one single cell can carry more data than all the volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica put together."

• "It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design."
  - Anthony Flew Professor of Philosophy, former atheist, author, and debater

• "What turns a mere piece of matter from being mere matter into an animated being? What gives certain special physical patterns in the universe the mysterious privilege of feeling sensations and having experiences?"
  - D.R. Hofstadter

• "Young earth creationism is essentially the position that all of modern science, 90% of living scientists and 98% of living biologists, all major university biology departments, every major science journal, the American Academy of Sciences, and every major science organization in the world, are all wrong regarding the origins and development of life....but one particular tribe of uneducated, bronze aged, goat herders got it exactly right"
  --Chuck Easttom

Eastern thought

Hindu scriptures

Passage from the Creation Hymn in the Rig Veda (exact date of writing debated; around 3100-1500 BC)

• "The non-existent was not; the existent was not at that time. The atmosphere was not nor the heavens which are beyond. What was concealed? Where? In whose protection? Was it water? An unfathomable abyss?

There was neither death nor immortality then. There was not distinction of day or night. That alone breathed windless by its own power. Other than that there was not anything else.

Darkness was hidden by darkness in the beginning. All this was an indistinguishable sea. That which becomes, that which was enveloped by the void, that alone was born through the power of heat.

Upon that desire arose in the beginning. This was the first discharge of thought. Sages discovered this link of the existent to the nonexistent, having searched in the heart with wisdom.

Their line [of vision] was extended across; what was below, what was above? There were impregnators, there were powers: inherent power below, impulses above.

Who knows truly? Who here will declare whence it arose, whence this creation? The gods are subsequent to the creation of this. Who, then, knows whence it has come into being?

Whence this creation has come into being; whether it was made or not; he in the highest heaven is its surveyor. Surely he knows, or perhaps he knows not."

See also

The following pages include extensive additional material on this subject:

• Charles Darwin
• Richard Dawkins
• Thomas Henry Huxley
• Stephen Jay Gould
• Intelligent Design
• Evolution

From Wikisource

Darwinism may refer to:

• Darwinism by Alfred Russel Wallace
• Darwinism by John Fiske

Definition from Wiktionary, a free dictionary

English

Wikipedia has an article on:

Darwinism

Wikipedia

Noun

Darwinism (uncountable)

1. The principles of natural selection set out by Charles Darwin in the Origin of Species (1859) and other writings.

Derived terms

• social Darwinism

Related terms

• Darwinian
• Darwinist
• natural selection
• Nobel Prize
• survival of the fittest

Translations