Category talk:Non-Darwinian evolution

Scope

What is the scope of this project? Looking at the article Non-Darwinian evolution, it should contain historical scientific ideas and scientists who proposed or propagated them. But it also contains amateurs who think they can disprove Darwinian evolution while they only prove their own ignorance of it, and their works, such as

• A.N.Wilson
• Thomas Nagel
• Stuart Pivar
• What Darwin Got Wrong
• Lysenkoism
• Michael Denton
• Beyond Natural Selection
• Brian Goodwin
• Evolution and the Humanities

I don't know whether this is in accordance with WP:FRINGE. I think that at least all the non-biologists should be removed from the category.

Whatever the scope of the category is, it should be clarified to avoid misunderstandings. So, it should say something like this:

This category contains historical scientific ideas and scientists who proposed or propagated them. The main article for this category is Non-Darwinian evolution.

Or:

This category contains historical scientific ideas and scientists who proposed or propagated them, as well as fringe authors who oppose Darwinism from an amateur viewpoint. The main article for this category is Non-Darwinian evolution.

So, which should it be? --Hob Gadling (talk) 07:14, 29 October 2018 (UTC)

Well, I'm not a categoriser (I find the exercise Sisyphean), but there is good reason to include authors, however odd, who have written at length on the matter. The men you mention are as follows:

• A.N.Wilson, a famous novelist, wrote a 2017 biography of Darwin, mixing history with "fatally flawed" speculation on evolutionary theory.
• Thomas Nagel is a (famous) philosopher of science who has attacked both standard neoDarwinism and "intelligent design".
• Stuart Pivar is a "classic crackpot" and writes "pseudoscience", see the article.
• Michael Denton says he's an "evolutionist" but argued for evidence of design in nature, inspiring the "intelligent design" movement. His views on evolution have since changed.
• Brian Goodwin is a mathematical biologist who argues for self-organization rather than natural selection. He's been called "fringe" (among many other things) but is part of a genuine scientific debate with neoDarwinist biologists; they may not like his papers but they don't just ignore them.

I think all five of these authors are rightly in the category. Your second scope definition is closer to the mark; non-Darwinian evolution is not wholly fringe, some parts of it (like neutral molecular evolution) now accepted science alongside natural selection. Even Goodwin's self-organisation has a grain of truth, cell membranes do self-organise, though their components are subject to selection. I'd suggest the word "fringe" is not really justified here, but "non-scientists" certainly is. You could say something like "sometimes bordering on pseudoscience." Perhaps. Chiswick Chap (talk) 10:00, 29 October 2018 (UTC)

Most of these are clearly pseudoscientists, not just "bordering on" it. Being famous for something else, such as writing novels or philosophy, is not a contradiction to that.

So we have one voice for including those people, one against. Anybody else?

Oh, I forgot: This cat is in the Categories "Biology theories", "Evolutionary biology" and "History of evolutionary biology". Most of the pages I listed should not be in those categories. (Does Lysenkoism count as History of evolutionary biology?) --Hob Gadling (talk) 10:44, 29 October 2018 (UTC)

The category is mainly for historical scientists (especially around the period of eclipse of Darwinism) but there are also some modern proponents (including pseudoscientists). I am in the process of sorting out the sub-categories - orthogenesis, mutationism, Lamarckism etc. Skeptic from Britain (talk) 14:27, 29 October 2018 (UTC)