rationalskepticism.org

Wortfish wrote:Once again, I'm calling out your lack of knowledge in this matter. It was Darwin himself who coined the term "evolutionist", and not any creationist: http://quotes.yourdictionary.com/author ... win/154031

It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent theist and an evolutionist.

When somebody says something like that I perk up, because I do appreciate a bit of information like "who coined the term x." I was disappointed though. It'd be good to check your sources and determine their validity if you're going to "call out" members here for "lack of knowledge."

You didn't cite any actual source in support of your assertion that "Darwin himself . . . coined the term 'evolutionist.'" Instead you gave a link to an undated quotation. That quotation comes from a letter Darwin wrote in 1879. That seems rather late in the game, so I checked the Oxford English Dictionary. Darwin actually is listed as having used the term in 1873, but the earliest citation is from 1866, in The Ladies' Repository. It's possible that an anonymous reviewer in a long-forgotten journal coined the term, but I doubt it. Given that the review is of a book by Herbert Spencer, who used the term "evolution" to refer to his own theory of the development of life published years before Darwin's On the Origin of Species, and definitively superseded by that work, perhaps a more likely candidate would be Spencer. The first to use the term "evolution" in describing a biological process appears to have been Albrecht von Haller.

As far as I've been able to discover, apparently Darwin did not in fact coin the term and he certainly didn't coin the term "evolution," which is nowhere to be found in On the Origin of Species.

Wortfish wrote:As the dictionary definition states, to be an "evolutionist" is to believe in the principles of evolution by natural selection.

I would not dispute your claim here; however certain Creationists have distorted the usage, it is correct that one of the meanings of "evolutionist" is "a person who believes in the theories of evolution and natural selection."