Medicine

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 ›

[Editor’s Note: The three individual installments of this series can be seen here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. The final complete article, What’s Up with Ronald Numbers? An Analysis of the Darwinist Metanarrative in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, can be found here.] The noted scholar Ronald Numbers is often cited as an objective authority on the history of the debate over evolution. But when he recently co-authored an article in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, “Defending science education against intelligent design: a call to action,” I was surprised that Numbers used invective language and clearly incorrect claims to discredit the theory of intelligent design. My first two pieces on the article are here and here. Now I want Read More ›

[Editor’s Note: The three individual installments of this series can be seen here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. The final complete article, What’s Up with Ronald Numbers? An Analysis of the Darwinist Metanarrative in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, can be found here.] Ronald Numbers is a well-known historian of science, but when he co-authored a recent article in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, “Defending science education against intelligent design: a call to action,” I was surprised by the invective language the authors used in comparing peer-reviewed scientific monographs by ID proponents to religious “tracts. Unfortunately, the flaws of this article go far beyond merely employing inflammatory remarks. Given Numbers’ previously more objective scholarship, I was surprised to find Read More ›

While the New England Journal of Medicine recently refused to publish a pro-ID letter-to-the-editor commenting on the Kitzmiller ruling, other medical journals are still clearly open to discussion on these matters. Michael R. Egnor, professor of Neurosurgery at S.U.N.Y. Stony Brook has published a letter in the Journal of Clinical Investigation entitled Defending Science from Censorship. The letter responds to an anti-ID article published in Journal of Clinical Investigation entitled “Defending science education against intelligent design: a call to action,” which had many co-authors, including the notable names Elliot Sober, Ronald Numbers, and Terese Berceau. The original article by Berceau, Sober, & Numbers et al. is surprising for something published in a scholarly journal: it uses uncommonly inflammatory rhetoric to Read More ›