I’m currently reading through The Structure of Evolutionary Theory by Stephen Jay Gould.  One thing that should be noted is that Gould was not a Darwinist.  Of course, he would argue that he was one, and it is certainly true that Darwin was his ideological idol.  However, Gould himself repeatedly points out errors in what he calls “strict Darwinism” (one of the biggest ones being that Gould believed in catastrophism, while Darwinism requires uniformitarian gradualism).

But this is not the time to critique Gould.  Instead, because I’m reading this book and have read others recently on the subject, I have been thinking about evolution.  Nearly all of Darwin’s scientific ideas that he used to formulate his concepts of Natural Selection, competition, and so forth have now been shown to be erroneous.  Yet, the core logic (as Gould puts it) of Darwinism remains the same.

I can think of no better argument that Darwinism is a philosophy instead of science.

After all, Darwin’s arguments were of the kind, “The occurance of X is evidence for my theory Y.”  Scientists later jettisioned X as being incorrect or unfounded, yet the theory Y remained.  Instead of X, they proposed a different explanation as to why Y was still true (we’ll call it X’).  If X’ is shown to be wrong, then we stipulate X”, etc.  At no point is Y questioned.

That is because the philosophy of Darwinism doesn’t change.  It is merely an idea that is in search of scientific evidence.  When the evidence seems to be there, the evidence is claimed to be proof; yet if that evidence is later shown to not imply Darwinism, why that doesn’t change the truthfulness of Darwinism.

Darwinism remains while science changes precisely because Darwinism is philosophical, not scientific.  But philosophy isn’t granted as much esteem these days as the hallowed term “science.”  This is why neo-Darwinists (there are no practicing scientific Darwinists anymore) continue to claim Darwinism has been scientifically “proven” even if the mechanism of how it occurs is still in question.