Good riddance, Darwinism  I’ve never liked the term “Darwinism.”
To me it has always been more of a watchword that might indicate
that I was talking to a creationist, a term I generally do not
encounter unless I’m reading or hearing an argument against a
straw-man version of evolution. (I’m not a big fan of
“evolutionist,” either.) It may have been useful in the past,
when evolution by natural selection (as popularized by Darwin)
was competing with other systems like Neo-Lamarckism and
orthogenesis, but today it doesn’t have any relevance. (It
should also be noted that A.R. Wallace wrote a book on natural
selection called Darwinism. Despite his own work on the same
subject he calls evolution by natural selection “Darwin’s
theory.”) If anything it continues the myth that Darwin is the
be-all and end-all of evolutionary science, and while he
certainly deserves a lot of credit On the Origin of Species is
not some kind of secular Bible where every word is dogma.
Olivia Judson, as she explains in her newest essay