Michael Egnor

All natural functional biological complexity arose through the mechanism of non-teleological heritable variation and natural selection.

That’s the Neo-Darwinian synthesis, in a nut-shell, and it’s the cornerstone of biology.

The Neo-Darwinian synthesis may be divided into two professions, so to speak, the union of which constitutes the orthodoxy. Jacques Monod called them “chance” and “necessity,” and it’s a useful shorthand.

Monod’s “chance” means absence of design. Chance means random in the sense of lacking teleology. There is no purpose in the raw material of Darwinian evolution. Of course, that doesn’t mean that the “random heritable variation” generator doesn’t obey natural laws. It does, like everything else, but it has no foresight. It’s random like flipping a coin is random. The coin obeys all the laws of physics, yet the outcome of the flip is random, in the sense that there’s no design to the result. If there is design, then the flip is dishonest, and not random at all.

Of course, most biological events that happened are invisible in the mists of deep time. Randomness is difficult to ascertain in modern casinos, and randomness is damned difficult to ascertain in the Precambrian. This not to say that we can’t draw reasonable inferences from the available evidence, but drawing self-evident inferences from helical blueprints and purposeful arrangements of parts “isn’t science,” so the Neo-Darwinian inference to chance is confessional, not empirical.
Monod’s “necessity” means survival; more rigorously, it means relative reproductive advantage. Natural selection. Whatever got here won the “relative reproductive advantage” death match. That’s what “survived” means. It got here.
So here’s the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis, colloquially:

P.Z. Myers and I finally agree on something! In a recent post, I described several actual Darwinian medicine “theories”:

‘Children Hate Vegetables Because of Ancestral Reproductive Advantage of Avoiding Toxins’ or ‘We Will Evolve Oiler Skin Because of Frequent Bathing’ or ‘X-Linked Color Blindness Evolved to Help Paleolithic Male Hunters See Camouflage.’

As I pointed out in my original post, these theories are real, and in fact represent the cutting edge of Darwinian medicine. Myers refers to these Darwinian medicine research projects as “silly”:

No, none of those very silly talks were given.

And he’s right. What he fails to note, however, is that these theories differ little in substance from the ephemeral corpus of Darwinian just-so stories. These silly stories are merely the application of silly mainstream Darwinian reasoning to medical practice. Perhaps it’s the application of this nonsense to something as tangible as medicine that makes the banality so obvious. The straight-faced assertion “polar bears evolved into whales by the mechanism of random genetic variation and natural selection,” a sort of ursine-baleen “chance and necessity,” doesn’t have the same risible punch as the “evolution” of childhood aversion to broccoli.

Several Darwinist bloggers have taken exception to my observation that Darwinian stories about the origin of diseases contribute little of significance to medical education, research, or practice. Orac responds:

…that creationist neurosurgeon with a penchant for laying down hunks o’ hunks o’ burnin’ stupid on a regular basis, that Energizer Bunny of antievolution nonsense, Dr. Michael Egnor has spouted off on evolution again in a way that got my attention. It came in response to a post by PZ about a conference he attended entitled Understanding evolution: the legacy of Darwin, which served as a launching pad for Dr. Egnor to go right down the rabbit hole…The stupid, it burns. It sears. My neurons are crying out in pain. Once again, Dr. Egnor trots out the tired old “Darwin inevitably leads to eugenics” coupled with his usual claims evolution has contributed nothing–or, as Dr. Egnor says it, nothing!–to medicine. Only Dr. Egnor could come up with something so utterly devoid of understanding, so scientifically ignorant, so full of the arrogance of ignorance…

Having gotten that off his chest, Orac, a surgical oncologist who doesn’t post under his real name, continues:

Re: P.Z. Myers’ recent post:

I’ll be spending my day at this symposium, “Understanding evolution: the legacy of Darwin”, most of today. It’s about to start, so I’m not going to say much before I focus on the lectures, but it is open to the public, so if you’re in the Penn neighborhood, come on down to Claudia Cohen hall, room G17 (which we have since learned is the famous old surgical demonstration auditorium), and listen in. I’ll report later on the contents of the talks.

I’m having trouble finding the program Myers is referring to (why wasn’t I invited!?), but Claudia Cohen Hall is on the medical campus at Penn, so I surmise that the presentations will be on eugenics (apologies for it, I hope), which is Darwin’s only legacy to medicine.

P.Z. Myers and Steven Novella have recent posts on a new front in the war between materialism and reality. Having convinced only a small fraction of Americans that chance and tautology — i.e. Darwinism — adequately explains life (despite a court-ordered monopoly on public education for the last half-century), materialists are moving on to your mind.

Materialism posits that your mind is meat. No soul, no spirit, just chemicals, congealed by natural selection to dupe you into believing that you’re more than an evanescent meat-robot.

It’s a hard sell, but that’s not to say that materialists haven’t tried. In the first half of the 20th century, behaviorists (e.g. B.F. Skinner) proposed that internal mental states were irrelevant or didn’t exist at all. All that mattered in the study of the mind was stimulus and response. Behaviorism turned out, unsurprisingly, to be a sterile avenue of research, as one might guess about a theory of the mind that denied or ignored mental states. As a theory of the mind, it is now largely regarded as insane, even by materialists. Behaviorism may be the only scientific theory to be finally extinguished by a joke:

“Skeptical” atheist Steven Novella has a blog post on “Mande Barung,” an Indian version of the Himalayan Yeti and the North American Bigfoot. Novella ruminates on the credulity of one Dipu Marak, a local passionate believer in the shy mythical creature. Debunking Yeti sightings is low-hanging fruit for skeptics like Novella, whose skepticism knows no limits — except for his own materialist ideology, about which he is credulous to the bone. One wonders why atheist “skeptics” need to explain to their readership — presumably compliant atheist skeptics all — that Yeti probably don’t exist.

Logan Gage explains why. Gage has a superb essay entitled, “Which Secular Superstition do you Believe?” Gage asks:

…[Who] is more likely to believe wild eyed superstitions these days, the religious or irreligious?

The answer, Gage observes, is unambiguous:

Danio, guest blogger at Pharyngula, has a post advocating the denial of legal protection for health care workers who, because of religious beliefs or other moral objections, refuse to provide services such as abortions or contraception. It’s hard to believe that any person with even a modicum of respect for individual rights would support taking legal sanction against physicians, nurses, and pharmacists who, because of genuine deeply held religious belief or other moral principles, believe that such acts as abortion or contraception are immoral. From the standpoint of traditional medical ethics, healthcare professionals are only under legal compulsion to provide care in a life-saving emergency. The controversial “treatments” in dispute are not emergencies, and are certainly not life-saving. That abortion and contraception aren’t life-saving is actually the point of the doctors, nurses, and pharmacists who are acting on conscience.

Danio quotes HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt, who supports the conscience protections of the federal policy:

This is the first in a series of posts in which I will discuss the medical and ethical aspects of persistent vegetative state (PVS). As I noted in an earlier post, I believe that the emergence of PVS as an accepted medical diagnosis is in part a consequence of the emergence of strict materialistic theories of the mind in the late 20th century, especially the theory called “functionalism,” which is the theory that the mind is what the brain does, in the same way that running a program is what a computer does. If the mind is entirely caused by the brain, in a way analogous to the running of a software program on a computer’s hardware, it stands to reason that there would be situations in which damage to the brain would cause the “mind program” to irreversibly crash. This leads to rather obvious ethical implications. Ideas have consequences, and the materialist understanding of the mind has had direct and disturbing consequences for the medical treatment of people handicapped by severe brain injuries. I will explore this connection between philosophy of the mind and clinical medicine in a future post.

PVS came to wide public attention with the death in 2005 by dehydration and starvation of Terri Schiavo, a young woman with severe brain damage caused by a cardiac arrest (probably from an electrolyte imbalance) in 1990. She died because her feeding tube was removed by court order at the request of her husband, who claimed that she had told him that she would have wanted to be deprived of nourishment under these circumstances. The deprivation of water and nourishment to a handicapped person, even with the pretext of accommodating that person’s wishes, obviously raises ethical issues, and I’ll discuss them in future posts. I’ll address primarily the medical and neurological issues in this post.

Larry Moran has a post on Sandwalk excoriating Matt Nisbet for his criticism of P.Z. Myers’ recent desecration of the Eucharist. Myers, a vocal Darwinist and militant atheist, obtained a Eucharistic Host, nailed it, threw it in the garbage, and photographed it, along with a Qur’an and a copy of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion.
Nisbet, sensitive to the implications of Myers’ performance art, took Myers to task: