Grant was wrong; evolutionary theory did not justify his prejudices. Evolutionary theory had no magical power to purify his motives and make all his decisions kind and just. On the other hand, it did not cause him to be who he was. Evolutionary theory was simply the rationalization he chose.

7. A variety of people you don’t like (such as communists, Nazis, racists, and eugenicists) used Darwin’s legitimacy with the scientific community to justify stupid agricultural plans and murderous, discriminatory government programs for people they didn’t like.

I think you’ve missed the point about using evidence to support claims — both in science an history.

Generally such bizarre claims as you’ve made, as noted above, require rather extraordinary evidence. No evidence at all is extraordinarily odd, but not extraordinary evidence.

I fully support using the term “Darwinism” not to refer to modern evolutionary theory, but rather to the false belief that Darwin somehow perfectly knew genetic science, even though Olivia Judson and Ernst Mayr clearly state that he did not.

You have me confused with your other “cretinist” enemies, and therefore you refuse to accept what I am saying:

1. Darwin proposed some theories that changed how people understood biology.
2. Darwin’s theories of heredity were helpful at the time, but ultimately wrong.
3. Mendel proposed the correct laws of heredity.
4. 20th-century scientists initially thought Darwin and Mendel were in opposition, and they argued over this for 30 years without consensus.
5. After a new combined theory was synthesized, it was not immediately accepted. The scientists themselves (such as Julian Huxley) therefore called it “Neo-Darwinism.”
6. Lysenko didn’t accept Mendel’s laws of heredity or the new combined theory because he had a traditional marxist view of Darwin’s theories and because he was a simple-minded bureaucrat.
7. A variety of people you don’t like (such as communists, Nazis, racists, and eugenicists) used Darwin’s legitimacy with the scientific community to justify stupid agricultural plans and murderous, discriminatory government programs for people they didn’t like.
8. A group of conservative Christians that you don’t like used Darwin’s legitimacy with communists, Nazis, racists, and eugenicists to justify saying that Darwin caused their crimes to happen.
9. The communists, Nazis, racists, and eugenicists were WRONG. Even if evolutionary theory were correct, it would not justify their actions.
10. The conservatives are WRONG. Darwin’s ideas did not magically “cause” anything to happen.
11. You are WRONG. Darwin did not have any correct theories of heredity, and modern genetic science does not require any knowledge of Darwin’s original work. Darwin is NOT routinely taught to biologists, but Mendel’s laws always are. Darwin provided a conceptual framework for modern biology, but nothing that can be applied to biotechnology.
12. A “Darwinist” is anyone who superstitiously worships or demonizes Darwin. If you think that all schoolchildren will turn into babbling morons without learning Darwin or that all scientists will start practicing magical rituals without learning Darwin, then you are a Darwinist. Likewise, anyone who believes that civilization is falling apart because of Darwin is a Darwinist.

Dr. Judson (Tatiana) said:

But I digress. To return to my argument: I’d like to abolish the insidious terms Darwinism, Darwinist and Darwinian. They suggest a false narrowness to the field of modern evolutionary biology, as though it was the brainchild of a single person 150 years ago, rather than a vast, complex and evolving subject to which many other great figures have contributed. (The science would be in a sorry state if one man 150 years ago had, in fact, discovered everything there was to say.) Obsessively focusing on Darwin, perpetually asking whether he was right about this or that, implies that the discovery of something he didn’t think of or know about somehow undermines or threatens the whole enterprise of evolutionary biology today.

It does not.