A quick follow-up to yesterday’s Darwin Day post: it’s hardly an original insight to note that Creationists will often refer to evolution as “Darwinism” and people who accept evolution as “Darwinists”. I may be wrong on this, but I don’t think I’ve heard an actual evolution proponent refer to themselves in that way. I don’t call myself a Darwinist or Darwinian (the latter has always sounded to me like something out of Tolkien) any more than I would call myself an Einsteinian or Einsteinist for accepting relativity, or a Schroedingerian or Heisenbergian or whatever for teaching quantum mechanics.

I suppose it’s another way to both discredit evolution by making it sound like the work of a single person instead of a vast collaboration operating over 150 years, and a way of making evolution proponents out to be followers of a cult. By falsely religionizing (I know it’s not a word, but it should be) evolution, it can be declared to be a belief system. In such a false view, there is an equivalence between “Darwinism” and “Creationism”, even though there is strong evidence for evolution and none for Creationism.