An NSF-sponsored paper is currently doing the rounds, claiming the evolutionary biology can help to "save the world". The associated NSF press materials are even titled: "How evolutionary principles could help save our world".The full paper is accessible here. It's contents are reasonable: it points out how important evolutionary theory is in the modern world. However, one of the interesting things about the paper to me is that it only discusses blinkered Darwinism. Universal Darwinism - to my mind the best and truest version of Darwinian evolution - doesn't get referenced. There's no mention of the idea that culture also evolves.
If the authors understood that Darwinism applied to technology, science, economics, medicine, politics, law - and many other areas - the article would surely have had to put an even greater value on the topic.
I don't know how much longer we'll be seeing these blinkered Darwinism papers. The scientific community evidently has a lot of inertia. From my side of the paradigm shift, blinkered Darwinism looks pretty stupid. Presumably eventually it will become a matter of scientific embarrassment that well-educated humans were so slow to understand the full scope of Darwin's discovery.
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