Wow that’s some pretty incoherent stuff you’ve got there. Biologists are denied tenure for believing in Natural Selection? Lamarck believed in common descent? Darwin did not treat common descent (‘like confessing to a murder’) as a big new idea? Sex roles follow from sexual selection?

I see you are an adherent of the “making stuff up” school of argument.

It is perfectly clear, and not an all controversial, that Lamark and earlier thinkers proposed the tree of life – that animal species were related through common ancestors, and that the seeming gaps were the result of extinctions.

If he proposed multiple parallel origins, he would not have needed to explain the gaps. That he explained gaps as due to extinctions, makes it clear his tree is intended as a history, as development over time from a single root, or a very small number of roots, one root for all veterbrates, as a history, not as a scheme of classification.

Darwin’s contribution, as he makes perfectly clear, was natural selection. If you read Darwin, he does not treat common descent as a big new idea, but as something that is widely suspected, something that has long been in the air. Darwin tells us what his big new ideas are:

Darwin’s big new idea was natural selection, and all of the important and violently controversial ideas that follow from natural selection, such as sexual selection resulting in sex roles and sexually specific behavior, sociobiology resulting in an innate sense of property and intuitions about rights, races as the precursor of speciation, and so on and so forth.

If a idea about biology can get you beaten up and denied tenure, it is Darwinism. If it cannot, it is not. Common descent will not get you into trouble, therefore is not Darwinism.

http://evolvingthoughts.net/2009/04/10/the_first_use_of_a_taxonomic_t/