What is Darwinism? by Poul Willy Eriksen

Coral Ridge Ministries release of the book and video Darwin's Deadly Legacy has accentuated the concept of 'Darwinism'. I have done some research into the subject, and I must say it isn't easy to figure out, what exactly is meant by Darwinism. Therefore I would appreciate some ideas about, what people understand by this word. Richard Dawkins uses it, Phillip Johnson uses it; but I doubt they mean exactly the same. Or do they?

In Germany Ernst Haeckel became the leading proponent of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.

Haeckel also used the term 'Darwinism', and a definition can be found in The Evolution of Man, vol. I chap. V, "The Modern Science of Evolution". Here Haeckel writes:

We owe so much of the progress of scientific knowledge to Darwin’s Origin of Species that its influence is almost without parallel in the history of science. The literature of Darwinism grows from day to day, not only on the side of academic zoology and botany, the sciences which were chiefly affected by Darwin’s theory, but in a far wider circle, so that we find Darwinism discussed in popular literature with a vigour and zest that are given to no other scientific conception. This remarkable success is due chiefly to two circumstances. In the first place, all the sciences, and especially biology, have made astounding progress in the last half-century, and have furnished a very vast quantity of proofs of the theory of evolution. In striking contrast to the failure of Lamarck and the older scientists to attract attention to their effort to explain the origin of living things and of man, we have this second and successful effort of Darwin, which was able to gather to its support a large number of established facts. Availing himself of the progress already made, he had very different scientific proofs to allege than Lamarck, or St. Hilaire, or Goethe, or Treviranus had had. But, in the second place, we must acknowledge that Darwin had the special distinction of approaching the subject from an entirely new side, and of basing the theory of descent on a consistent system, which now goes by the name of Darwinism.

In other words, earlier attempts to explain the origin of living things and of man had failed due to lack of a consistent system, and Darwin provided such a system. But which system? Continuing, Haeckel writes:

Lamarck had unsuccessfully attempted to explain the modification of organisms that descend from a common form chiefly by the action of habit and the use of organs, though with the aid of heredity. But Darwin’s success was complete when he independently sought to give a mechanical explanation, on a quite new ground, of this modification of plant and animal structures by adaptation and heredity. He was impelled to his theory of selection on the following grounds. He compared the origin of the various kinds of animals and plants which we modify artificially—by the action of artificial selection in horticulture and among domestic animals—with the origin of the species of animals and plants in their natural state. He then found that the agencies which we employ in the modification of forms by artificial selection are also at work in Nature. The chief of these agencies he held to be “the struggle for life.” The gist of this peculiarly Darwinian idea is given in this formula: The struggle for existence produces new species without premeditated design in the life of Nature, in the same way that the will of man consciously selects new races in artificial conditions. The gardener or the farmer selects new forms as he wills for his own profit, by ingeniously using the agency of heredity and adaptation for the modification of structures; so, in the natural state, the struggle for life is always unconsciously modifying the various species of living things. This struggle for life, or competition of organisms in securing the means of subsistence, acts without any conscious design, but it is none the less effective in modifying structures. As heredity and adaptation enter into the closest reciprocal action under its influence, new structures, or alterations of structure, are produced; and these are purposive in the sense that they serve the organism when formed, but they were produced without any pre-conceived aim.

And "[t]his simple idea is the central thought of Darwinism," Haeckel continues.

To me it sounds as if Haeckel considers adaptation to be an active principle that by itself will produce new or altered structures. The driving force behind this principle is the struggle for existence.

But leave that as it is. For Haeckel, Darwinism is inductive and therefore, since humans are living, the origin of man must follow the same rule as the origin of any other living things:

It is important to understand this very clearly. If all living things come from a common root, man must be included in the general scheme of evolution. On the other hand, if the various species were separately created, man, too, must have been created, and not evolved. We have to choose between these two alternatives. This cannot be too frequently or too strongly emphasised. Either all the species of animals and plants are of supernatural origin—created, not evolved—and in that case man also is the outcome of a creative act, as religion teaches, or the different species have been evolved from a few common, simple ancestral forms, and in that case man is the highest fruit of the tree of evolution.

Now, if the various forms of life are related through adaptation and heredity, the conclusion is that:

The general adoption of the theory of evolution has definitely closed the controversy as to the nature or definition of the species. The word has no absolute meaning whatever, but is only a group-name, or category of classification, with a purely relative value.

Modern day creationists have accepted this in so far as they do not consider species to be the units of creation; that role has been assigned to the originally created kinds, the baramins.

Haeckel ends the book in vol. II chap. XXX, "Results of Anthropogeny", with the words:

It is clear that the prejudices that stand in the way of a general recognition of this “natural anthropogeny” are still very great; otherwise the long struggle of philosophic systems would have ended in favour of Monism. But we may confidently expect that a more general acquaintance with the genetic facts will gradually destroy these prejudices, and lead to the triumph of the natural conception of “man’s place in nature.” When we hear it said, in face of this expectation, that this would lead to retrogression in the intellectual and moral development of mankind, I cannot refrain from saying that, in my opinion, it will be just the reverse; that it will promote to an enormous extent the advance of the human mind. All progress in our knowledge of truth means an advance in the higher cultivation of the human intelligence; and all progress in its application to practical life implies a corresponding improvement of morality. The worst enemies of the human race—ignorance and superstition—can only be vanquished by truth and reason. In any case, I hope and desire to have convinced the reader of these chapters that the true scientific comprehension of the human frame can only be attained in the way that we recognise to be the sole sound and effective one in organic science generally—namely, the way of evolution.

This would be what was originally understood by 'Darwinism'. But what does it mean today?