Medicine

Almost two years ago, I blogged about how conclusive evidence of function had been discovered for the appendix. Now function has been discovered for the appendix. Again. A recent news article on Yahoo.com actually frames the issue fairly well: The body’s appendix has long been thought of as nothing more than a worthless evolutionary artifact, good for nothing save a potentially lethal case of inflammation. Now researchers suggest the appendix is a lot more than a useless remnant. … In a way, the idea that the appendix is an organ whose time has passed has itself become a concept whose time is over. “Maybe it’s time to correct the textbooks,” said researcher William Parker, an immunologist at Duke University Medical Read More ›

Last month, I blogged about a pre-med student who recently took the MCAT and found emotionally-charged pro-evolution-biased language on reading comprehension questions. As he concluded, the MCAT exam is “just supposed to be a way to evaluate how you process information, and they don’t want to influence your reasoning by making you answer emotionally charged questions. This passage was distracting while I was taking the test. It was distracting because it’s about an emotionally controversial topic, and I don’t agree with everything they said. This crosses the line.” Following that post, another pre-med student (who is about to matriculate into medical school) contacted me and had this to say about the distracting pro-evolution bias on the MCAT: I sat for Read More ›

I recently wrote about evolution indoctrination on a test given to measure science knowledge and intelligence in high school students. One of my friends, who is no religious fundamentalist but is a smart young pre-med student who is a skeptic of Darwinism, is presently studying hard to take the medical school entrance examination: the MCAT. Like most MCAT takers, he is studying by taking practice tests with real questions from actual MCAT tests given in the past. The MCAT has a section that tests reading comprehension skills: you read a passage, and then you answer questions about the passage. You don’t have to agree with the passages to answer the questions; you just have to be able to accurately explain Read More ›

Dr. Jonathan Wells has been engaged in a blog debate with several Darwinists about a recent advance in research on bacterial resistance to antibiotics. In a recent post, Dr. Wells observed:

According to a February 26, 2008 report in ScienceDaily, a team of French scientists has unraveled the structure of a protein that allows bacteria to gain resistance to multiple antibiotics. Frédéric Dardel and his colleagues crystallized two forms of the antibiotic-modifying enzyme acetyltransferase and showed that it has a flexible active site that can evolve to enable bacteria to break down various antibiotics and render them useless. The research may aid in the design of new antibiotics to deal with this form of resistance, which is becoming a serious medical problem.

This is very good news! Unfortunately, Darwinists will probably claim — as they have done many times in the past — that their theory was indispensable to the achievement.

Yet Darwinian evolution had nothing to do with it.

Darwinist blogger Orac recently took issue with my observation that Darwin’s theory plays no important role in medicine. Orac, a surgical oncologist, insisted that Darwin’s theory is very helpful in modern cancer research. He wrote: Now, using the principles of evolution, Maley et al have found one potential indicator of which patients with Barrett’s esophagus will progress to cancer and which will not. Basically, they adapted a diversity measure from ecology and evolution known as the Shannon diversity index. I’m going to have to leave it to my evolutionary biology colleagues to tell me more whether this was appropriately done, but for purposes of this paper the authors treated each sample ot as a single organism but as thousands of Read More ›

A short time ago I posted a story on the celebration in London of the 150th birthday of Karl Pearson, one of the fathers of mathematical statistics and an ardent Darwinist and eugenicist. The celebration focused on Pearson’s contribution to mathematical statistics, which was substantial, but neglected his contribution to eugenics, which was substantial, too.

The only word that Darwinists use less frequently than ‘design’ is ‘eugenics’. It’s disappeared down the Darwin memory hole following the Second World War because the Nazi programs that applied Darwinism to medicine made the real nature of eugenics so apparent that it could no longer be denied. So it was forgotten.

Some Evolution News & Views (ENV) readers may have noticed that yesterday we posted Michael Egnor’s response to a pro-evolution essay contest for students. Who is Michael Egnor? We recently reported how Egnor has been asking Darwinists how much information can be produced via Darwinian mechanisms, but has not been receiving satisfactory answers (see here and here). Michael Egnor, M.D. is professor of neurosurgery and pediatrics at State University of New York, Stony Brook and an award-winning brain surgeon who has been named one of New York’s best doctors by New York Magazine. He is now an official part of the ENV team, and we’d like to welcome him on board.

What happens when a professor of neurosurgey who is a Darwin-skeptic and just happens to be a brain surgeon visits a popular Darwinist blog? He leaves with unanswered questions. Last week Rob Crowther highlighted how Dr. Michael Egnor visited Time magazine’s science blog where a reporter admitted his Darwinist bias and was unable to answer Egnor’s question: “how much new information can Darwinian mechanisms generate?” Egnor is professor of neurosurgery and pediatrics at State University of New York, Stony Brook and an award-winning brain surgeon who has been named one of New York’s best doctors by New York Magazine. Egnor recently took his questions to P.Z. Myers’ popular science blog Pharyngula, where Egnor continues–unanswered–to press Darwinists for how Darwinian mechanisms Read More ›