This is something I don't fully understand when I look on this forum.
Every time a Creationist of any stripe or someone who says they're 'critical of evolution' talks about the theory of evolution, they only ever refer to it as Darwinism.
Darwinian evolution is no longer the accepted model for the theory of evolution. It has been superseded by the modern synthesis, and there have been talks of replacing it with the extended evolutionary synthesis or even the post-modern synthesis.
So I have to ask: why is it always Darwinism that is railed against?
This is not a direct answer to your question, but I think it is relevant. It is a brief note I wrote ten years ago, largely to myself, but I've posted it on one or two fora since. I can see a pedagogical argument against it, but I still think the political argument outweighs that.
Evolution – Is Darwinism Dead?
What we call something is, or at least should be, less important than what it is. Our understanding of evolutionary mechanisms is still far from complete and not fully integrated. Large steps have been taken over a century and a half. Is it important to mark those steps through different terminology? Important yes, but not necessarily essential.
Darwin's idea was accepted with surprising alacrity by the scientific community, supporting the claim by some that it was an idea whose time had come. (And Wallace’s independent derivation of the theory served to offer confirmation of that notion.) Yet by the turn of the century Darwinism was all but dead as people gravitated to mutation and the concepts of Mendel rediscovered by Bateman, de Vries and Corren. When the two concepts were fused in the 1930s and 40s did the resultant concept merit a new name? One could hardly call it Haldane/Huxley/Dhobzhanksy/Fisher/Simpson/Stebbins/Wright/ Mayrism, so the Modern Synthesis was born.
And now, more than half a century later, we've learnt even more about the mechanisms and processes, so much more that some people think a new name is in order. Is it?
I said at the outset that what we call something is, or at least should be, less important than what it is. But is this true? Darwin may have been the right man in the right place at the right time, but he ignited a revolution that is arguably of greater scientific importance than any other. His handful of principles still lies at the heart of evolutionary thought – descent with modification from a common ancestor. So my view is simple. Let's just call the current hypothesis and those that will develop in future, Darwinism. Direct, concise, effective.
And it has the secondary advantage that it will likely annoy the Creationists.
(Note: I've replaced a phrase, since it is, I think, disallowed by CF rules.)