Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Intellectual Darwinism (2nd nomination)


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was   delete.  Sandstein  08:36, 26 May 2012 (UTC)

Intellectual Darwinism
AfDs for this article: 
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I feel it's a shame that this article hasn't improved, but is still relying on the shaky foundations of blog posts and opinion pieces, violating WP:RS. It smells even more of WP:NEO and I can't find any of the arguments that it met WP:N very convincing (a Google search does not notability establish, nor does the abstract, unsourced idea that this is a well established term). The author originally asked for a chance to give the article to have 'a chance to grow' but later admitted he admitted he himself had 'been swayed towards delete throughout the discussion. I was just trying to find more sources to see if the article was salvagable'. I think, in lieu of some new foothold appearing to bring the article up to standard, it does not deserve to stay. Rushyo  Talk  17:28, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Delete, slipshod neologism with no fixed usage. Entry fails to make the case that this is either notable or consistently used. Hairhorn (talk) 17:38, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Delete While I am sure that there is natural selection in the evolution of human ideas, this article does not establish that "Intellectual Darwinism" is consistently used as a name for it.  The three sources cited in the article use the expression in three different ways. Borock (talk) 22:23, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Evaluating this subject involves more than just reading the current article or seeing what the "article establishes". You'll need to look at more than merely "the three sources cited in the article", given that there was a lot of stuff pointed out in the previous AFD discussion, which was .  At the very minimum, all of that needs to be evaluated as well.  After all, what weight would you give to an opinion that didn't?  Uncle G (talk) 12:18, 19 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Behavioural science-related deletion discussions. &#9733;&#9734;  DUCK IS JAMMMY &#9734;&#9733; 12:19, 19 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Feel free to peek at the previous version, or even replace the material I removed in February. I think you'll find the comments I made in my edit summary still apply: that this was just a laundry list of mentions with no consistent usage. Hairhorn (talk) 16:02, 19 May 2012 (UTC)


 * Comment Please note that the word "Darwinism" is usually used in a negative sense. A more NPOV title would be something like "Evolution of ideas." (If that's the intended topic of the article.) Borock (talk) 15:56, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Weak Delete The term has been used in other works:
 * Victorian Anthropology. GEORGE W. STOCKING, JR. Free Press (Macmillan), New York, and Collier Macmillan, London, 1987 "the purely visible was displaced not just by intellectual Darwinism but by an overall shift of attention to subsurface order, the general hidden."
 * Microserfs. Douglas Copeland. Harper Perennial (May 30, 1996) "in the information Dark Ages before 1976, relationships and television were the only forms of entertainment available. But now we have VCRs, tape rentals, PCs, modems, touch tone dialing, cellular phones, ATMs, bar coding, Federal Express, satellite TV, CDs and calculators of other worldly power that are so cheap they practically come free with a tank of petrol"
 * Journal of the American Medical Association. Robert M. Cook-Degan. Review of Natural Obsessions, a book by Natalie Marie Angier: ..."the brutal intellectual darwinism that dominates the high-stakes world of molecular genetics research."
 * Yet I !vote delete, because I don't find reliable coverage of the term itself, only the term used in other works. In some cases there is short parenthetical explanation of the concept, but it's not the focus of any work.  As such, it clearly falls into the realm specifically referred to in WP:NEO: "To support an article about a particular term or concept we must cite what reliable secondary sources, such as books and papers, say about the term or concept, not books and papers that use the term."  The books and articles that I have found do not focus on the term itself, but only explain it, as if it should be unfamiliar to the reader.  To me, this is exactly the situation WP:NEO tries to avoid.  Liv it ⇑ Eh?/What? 15:54, 24 May 2012 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.