The addition of an -ism suffix to any noun , especially a proper noun, usually puts the idea in people’s heads that an ideology is being referred to. Examples are Thatcherism, Marxism, Freudianism, Lysenkoism and Hegelianism. The -ism suffix can also mean an action, process or characteristic behaviour, and examples of these are volcanism and despotism, but for most people, placing -ism on the end of a word is interpreted in its Maureen Lipman sense (“You got an -ology, you’re a scientist!”) and taken to mean an ideological position.
In fact, this connotation of ideology is so strong that the suffix has, as far back as the seventeenth century, been stripped of its possible antecedents and used as a word in its own right. Type “ism” into the OneLook internet dictionary portal site, and the quick definition returned is “a belief (or system of beliefs) accepted as authoritative by some group or school”. The twenty-three ordinary dictionaries that the website turns up as containing “ism” as a word mostly agree on this, and the Webster’s Revised Unabridged, 1913 Edition goes as far as to define an “ism” as “a doctrine or theory; especially, a wild or visionary theory”.
In science, ideologies and other fixed beliefs are bad things, because they prevent us from testing an idea for its soundness by exposing it to potentially contradictory evidence. Instead, an ideology will usually try and wrap reality around its framework. The scientific method, on the other hand, is all about changing our ideas to fit reality. Failure to do this can lead to disaster, as the Soviet Union found out when it realised that being in the thrall of the bizarre ideas of the fraudulent agronomist Trofim Lysenko for several decades had set back their progress in biotechnology by the same amount of time. A scientifically minded person therefore, has a well-justified fear of ideology.
This fear is implicit in Olivia Judson’s recent article in the New York Times, in which she argues that the terms Darwinism and Darwinist should be abolished because they give the false impression that the field was the “brainchild of a single person” many years ago, and that (crucially for an ideology) it has not changed in a significant way since then. Judson recognises, though she does not say explicitly, that the use of the term Darwinism, especially by fundamentalist religious groups, allows the hearer to infer that evolutionary biology is just another ideology, deserving of no more support than any other idea or belief. In this way, such organisations can caricature the theory of evolution, and thus make it easier to attack.
Of course, evolutionary biology is not an ideology: it has changed enormously since the nineteenth century, while still retaining the core ideas that Darwin espoused a hundred and fifty years ago. This is the essence of a field of science, revolutions in understanding occur, but they very rarely change our viewpoint completely. The development of Einstein’s general theory of relativity did not wipe out Newton’s laws of gravity. Like all good theories, it explained why gravity worked as it did, noted that Newton’s equations worked perfectly accurately for most purposes, and predicted that there were occasions where Newton’s laws would break down – mainly under high velocities and strong gravities – and provided an explanation of what would happen under these circumstances, time slowing down being one of them. In other words, Einstein’s theories superseded those of Newton rather than completely replaced them. The only areas where a complete change of viewpoint took place were where the previous ideas were religious or ideological in nature. Examples of these are the heliocentric view of the solar system, or the development of modern medicine.
