2008

At the beginning of 2008, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences stated in its booklet Science, Evolution, and Creationism, that “Evolutionary biology has been and continues to be a cornerstone of modern science.” It seems that their assertion did not pan out very well for the rest of 2008. Two groups recently released lists of top science news stories and breakthroughs for 2008: The Access Research Network and the leading journal, Science. None of their top breakthroughs came as a result of evolutionary biology. Science‘s top breakthrough was a method where scientists discovered how to harvest stem cells from living patients, a find which has huge potential for treating diseases. This is an extremely important scientific breakthrough, to be sure, Read More ›

During the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial three years ago, biologist Kenneth Miller claimed that biochemist Michael Behe’s arguments in Darwin’s Black Box regarding the irreducible complexity of the blood-clotting cascade were false. Miller’s testimony led federal district court judge John Jones to assert in his decision that “scientists in peer-reviewed publications have refuted Professor Behe’s predication about the alleged irreducible complexity of the blood-clotting cascade.” But an analysis of Miller’s arguments demonstrates that he refuted Behe in no way whatsoever, and that in fact it was Behe who refuted Miller at trial, although Judge Jones ignored Behe’s testimony. Miller continues (I am told) to go around lecturing on this topic, claiming that the blood-clotting cascade of lower vertebrates demonstrate that Read More ›

There is an internet cottage industry of physicians and scientists who regularly excoriate alternative medicine and other non-traditional or even fringe approaches to health or to scientific understanding. Steven Novella, Orac, and a host of other faux “defenders of science” decry the danger to the public from vaccine “denial,” homeopathy, acupuncture, chiropractic, among others. Now, I agree with my medical colleagues that the scientific basis for most of these practices or viewpoints is missing or minimal. I don’t believe that the scientific evidence supports the view that vaccines cause autism. I am not a supporter of “alternative medicine,” and I objected when an effort was made some years ago to expand alternative medicine here at Stony Brook. Alternative medicine, like traditional medicine, must be subjected to strict standards of evidence for safety and efficacy. Most types of alternative medicine fail to meet those standards, and therefore should not be endorsed by the medical profession.

Yet there is an irony in the efforts of “defenders of science” to protect the public from treatments and theories that are outside of the mainstream of medical practice. The greatest iatrogenic danger to patients isn’t chiropractors or homeopaths or vaccine “deniers.” It’s the doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel working in the traditional medical paradigm.

Science journalist Suzan Mazur has been reporting extensively about scientists’ doubts about Darwinian evolution and a forthcoming paradigm shift — a shift that we are assured by the likes of Eugenie Scott is not coming, does not exist, and is simply a ploy by “creationists.” Scott, and dogmatists like her, continue to insist there is no controversy or disagreement amongst scientists about the mechanisms that Darwin championed, namely natural selection acting on random mutation. Mazur’s interviews underscore what we’ve been saying all along. There is a controversy, and it deserves to be heard.
Mazur and those she interviews and covers are not friendly to the idea of intelligent design. In an interesting twist,

[Note: For a more comprehensive defense of Ben Stein’s documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, please see: NCSE Exposed at NCSEExposed.org] Over at alivingdog.com, blogger Gord Wilson has just posted a lengthy interview with the lead writer of Expelled, Kevin Miller. The interview is enlightening on several levels, and covers a wide range of topics from media suppression, to the lawsuits against the film, to Richard Dawkins appearance. Well worth reading. G: I would say what his argument doesn’t explain is Richard Dawkins. It doesn’t explain why he’s so passionate, why he’s so smart, why he writes so well. And if he’s right, the game’s over.K: Why does it matter to him? I came to that question over and over. Why Read More ›

Dr. Steven Novella has post entitled “More Neuroscience Denial,” and of course it’s about me.

Dr. Michael Egnor has written two more posts reiterating his neuroscience denial over at the Discovery institute. This reinforces the impression that neuroscience denial is the “new creationism” – the new battleground against materialism as a basis for modern science.

Earlier this month, the peer-reviewed science journal PloS Genetics published its latest earth-shaking contribution to the field of genetics: a personal interview with none other than Judge John Jones of Kitzmiller v. Dover fame. The interview was conducted by Jane Gitschier of the Institute for Human Genetics at the University of California San Francisco, who gushes over the Judge like a school-girl with a crush on her teacher. The non-scientist might be forgiven for thinking that a journal bearing a name like PLoS Genetics would restrict its articles to, well, genetics… or at least, to biology… or at the very least, to science. Not to worry! If the article extols Judge Jones, a lack of scientific content apparently is no Read More ›

Today marks the third anniversary of Judge John Jones’ attempt to ban science classroom discussions of intelligent design in the Kitzmiller v. Dover case. In the three years since Jones’ decision was announced, it has not worn well. Judge Jones’ supposedly devastating critique of intelligent design turned out to be cut and pasted (factual errors and all) from a document written by lawyers working with the ACLU. Law professors (including some who oppose intelligent design) have skewered Jones’ embarrassing judicial opinion as poorly argued and unpersuasive. And many of the alleged factual claims on which Judge Jones based his opinion have been refuted. In the meantime, public interest in intelligent design has continued to grow, as has support for academic Read More ›

Mike Dunford and I have disagreed several times over the past couple of years about issues in the ID-Darwinism debate. Mr. Dunford was very upset recently that I had made a minor error in quoting him in a recent blog post. Of course, he offered no answer to my scientific critique of his earlier post, and one has the suspicion that his pique may be related to his difficulty in formulating a credible scientific answer.

He fired off an e-mail to the Discovery Institute. Here’s his closing paragraph:

…I would not dream of taking a position on whether or not you should continue to provide a platform for someone who is apparently incapable of meeting the basic standards of academic discourse, but I would like to see a public retraction and apology appear on your site. [emphasis mine]

I’m the “someone” he’s referring to. I have of course corrected the error, and have set out to review Mr. Dunford’s “basic standards of academic discourse.”

Here are examples of Mr. Dunford’s own “standards of academic discourse,” culled from his blog posts from the last couple of years. Keep in mind that Mr. Dunford is a trained scientist:

From Mr. Dunford’s post on 12/9/08:

Dr. Michael Egnor: Neurosurgeon, Stony Brook Faculty, and all around Dishonest Twit…based on the level of intellectual integrity that he just demonstrated, he’s not someone I would trust to train a dog, much less a doctor. ….I’m simply going to highlight the most egregious case of flat-out, nose-growing, pants-on-fire lying…I don’t know if Dr. Egnor’s dishonesty is substantial enough that I would have gotten him expelled from school, but I do know that any student I caught pulling a stunt like that would flunk.

When I was a resident in neurosurgery I had a professor who had the annoying habit of claiming credit for quite a few advances in neurosurgery to which, by the record, he had made no contribution. He would frequently confide to me, in the operating room, “Mike, ya know that operation that we just did. I really developed it, back in the 50’s.” Invariably, the actual record of the development of the operation had nothing to do with my narcissistic professor.

Claiming credit for advances that to the uninitiated seems credible is common in medicine and science. Darwinists have an annoying habit of attributing all sorts of advances in medicine and biology to Darwin’s theory. Darwinists have asserted that genetics, molecular genetics, taxonomy, microbiology, population genetics, and many other fields of medicine and biology would have been impossible had it not been for Darwin’s insight (‘survivors survive’). Even a cursory look at many of these fields (e.g. molecular genetics) reveals that Darwinism obviously had nothing to do them; the elucidation of the structure and function of DNA didn’t have a damn thing to do with ‘natural selection’ (except that Watson and Crick practiced ‘survival of the fittest’ in their competition with Linus Pauling and their treatment of Rosalind Franklin). The discovery of the genetic code had everything to do with biochemistry, biophysics, and molecular biology. Nineteenth century fairy tales about the origin of species may have provided some comic relief. It had nothing to do with the science.

In a recent post I observed that Darwinism, while essential to eugenics, contributes nothing of value to medicine.

Darwinist blogger Elf M. Sternberg took the bait. Elf started with the usual sneers, calling me a “creationist,” accusing me of of “rejecting the germ theory of disease” and of attributing disease to “demonic influences,” and then he points out my “absolutely insane ‘graf'”from my essay:
I had written:

Fairy tales about the origin of illnesses and adaptations are worthless to medicine. The materialistic philosophical basis for Darwinism and the inference that humans evolved by natural selection have been catastrophic to medicine. Any genuine insight claimed by Darwinists, such as the dynamics of antibiotic resistance or of heterozygote advantage in such diseases as sickle cell anemia and malaria, is really gained by the relevant basic sciences.

Elf sees my fatal stumble. He replies: