Afarensis is a 3.5-2.8 million year old hominin from the Kada Hadar member of the Hadar formation in the Middle Awash, Ethiopia. He is approximately 41 inches tall, weighs approximately 60 pounds and has a cranial capacity of a whopping 410 cc (approximately). Afarensis is currently considered to be transitional between apes and humans and displays some traits of both. Since he spends a lot of time on the couch watching monster movies, some observers question whether he is an obligate biped (although no one has observed him climbing a tree). He also has a blog called 
Michael Egnor has a piece up on Evolution News and Views.
Chris O'Brien at Northstate Science and PZ have already commented on the post. The Panda's Thumb comments on the issue as well. In the meantime, I would like to put my two cents in as well.
Egnor is taking exception to an essay contest sponsored by the Alliance for Science. The subject of the essay (I should mention the contest is for high school students) is "Why would I want my doctor to have studied evolution?" In the post Egnor writes:
Doctors don't study evolution. Doctors never study it in medical school, and they never use evolutionary biology in their practice. There are no courses in medical school on evolution. There are no 'professors of evolution' in medical schools. There are no departments of evolutionary biology in medical schools.
Meet Dr. Glenn Conroy. Dr. Conroy received his Ph. D. from Yale and is the author of two excellent books on evolution. The first, Primate Evolution, covers the evolution of primates. The second, Reconstructing Human Origins: A Modern Synthesis picks up where Primate Evolution left off and covers the evolution of humans. In addition to being a member of the anthropology faculty at Washington University, in St. Louis, Conroy is on the faculty in the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology at the Washington University School of Medicine. What is the purpose of the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology? From the Website:
As one of the founding Departments of Washington University Medical School, we have a rich history of innovative scientific discovery dating back over a hundred years. Our faculty study a variety of scientific questions ranging from the evolution of man and behavior to the basis of brain development and function, using a broad repertoire of sophisticated experimental approaches.
According to Egnor, however:
Doctors don't study evolution. Doctors never study it in medical school, and they never use evolutionary biology in their practice.
So the Washington University Website must be incorrect, right?
Laboratories in the Anatomy & Neurobiology Department host thesis students from a variety of the PhD programs including the Neuroscience, Developmental Biology, Molecular Cell Biology, Molecular Genetics, and the Evolution, Ecology and Population Biology Program. We encourage students to consult directly with our faculty about these graduate programs.
Again, according to Egnor:
There are no courses in medical school on evolution. There are no 'professors of evolution' in medical schools. There are no departments of evolutionary biology in medical schools.
Yet if you look at the faculty you have a number of evolotionary biologists and anthropologists teaching classes. Over and above that they are getting students from a wide variety of evolutionary based disciplines.
Physical Anthropology has a long history of providing teachers in skeletal and soft tissue anatomy to medical schools. Occasionally, the flow goes the other way as was the case with T. Wingate Todd. Todd was an MD who became interested in anthropological matters - he worked with Sir Arthur Keith and Sir Grafton Elliot Smith, for example and eventually pioneered several methods of determining age from the skeleton.
Joan Richtsmeier is a Professor of Anthropology at Penn State. She is also a visiting professor in the Center for Functional Anatomy and Evolution at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, MD and a member of the faculty of the Center for Craniofacial Development and Disorders at Hopkins. Why would an anthropologist be on staff at such a place? Well, let's look at their profiles. Richtsmeier is interested in:
...the study of craniofacial form, change in form due to growth, and the relationship between ontogenetic mechanisms and phylogenetic change
In other words, she is studying various craniofacial pathologies or defects from an evolutionary point of view.
If you were really interested in looking further all you would have to do is examine the faculty listings on any anthropology web page and you would find countless examples of anthropologists working, teaching and doing research at countless medical schools across the country. The reason for this is that, contrary to Egnor, some pathologies can best be understood from an evolutionary viewpoint and anthropologists are, of course, the best persons to ask about the evolution of humans.
Update
The Panda's Thumb posts mentions that Egnor works at Stony Brook and mentions Sussman and Stern as being on the faculty of Anatomical Science at Stony Brook. To this we could add:
John Fleagle, who's Primate Adaptation and Evolution is a classic.
Fred Grine who edited the classic Evolutionary History of the "Robust" Australopithecines.
William Jungers who edited Size and Scaling in Primate Evolution
Susan Larson.
Meave Leakey - only one of the most famous names in Paleoanthropology - is an Adjunct Professor!
Update 2:
Since Burt Humburg mentioned that the use of animal models comes from an evolutionary paradigm let's add one more anthropologist to the list. Michael Siegel received his Ph. D. in anthropology from the City University of New York. He currently works at the Center for Craniofacial Development and Disorders at Johns Hopkins> What is he doing there?
So the question is, why would an anthropologists be using Rhesus monkeys, baboons and chimps to model human midfacial growth? Why would an anthropologist use animal models to understand coronal suture synostosis? It only makes sense if the approach is evolutionary...
Update 3: QrazyQat, in a comment, mentions the UK. I blush that I forgot about the UK! From the UCL Department Of Anatomy and Developmental Biology:
The Department was rated grade 5A in the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise. The research falls into four main areas: Cell and Developmental Biology, Neuroscience, Evolutionary Anatomy, and the History of Medicine and encompasses the full spectrum of biomedical investigation, from molecular analysis of cell signalling processes to the history of medical practices in classical times.
Among the faculty at UCL are: Fred Spoor and Christopher Dean both of whom have made significant contributions to anthropology. Who else is on the faculty? A lot of people interested in Cellular Neurobiology, Neuroanatomy, Developmental Neurobiology, and Molecular Neurobiology. One wonders how a neurosurgeon such as Egnor can be unaware of these fields?
Back in the US, anthropologist Carol Ward is on the faculty of the Department of Pathology and Anatomical Sciences at the Unniversity of Missouri as well as the Anthropology Department. She will soon be moving to Integrative Anatomy in the MU Pathobiology Area Program.
Comments
Nice finds, Afarensis. One really has to wonder whether Egnor really is this ignorant, or he is simply just putting us all on.
Posted by: Dave Carlson | March 10, 2007 3:38 PM
You forgot to close an italics in your post.
Posted by: Reed A. Cartwright | March 10, 2007 3:46 PM
I believe it was Twain that said "It is impossible to make a man understand something when his livelihood depends on him not understandng it."
Posted by: MarkP | March 10, 2007 4:07 PM
It wasn't just italics, there was an unclosed hyperlink as well. Fixed now.
Posted by: afarensis, FCD | March 10, 2007 4:11 PM
I wish Michael Egnor was my patient. He wrote an article for the Discovery Institute arguing that there's no reason for doctors to study evolution. If Egnor was my patient, I'd have a use for all that expired influenza vaccine. I could jut give him the same vaccine year after year as there would be no reason to give a new one. (We'll ignore the question of whether he'd even need to repeat the influenza vaccines. After all--he ignores basic biology.)
Egnor would also be great as an HMO patient. No need to use those expensive new antibiotics under any circumstance. As antibiotic resistance cannot occur, I could always stick with the older, cheaper antibiotcs.
More at Liberal Values
Posted by: Ron Chusid | March 10, 2007 6:45 PM
Not directly apropos, but as an aside, in the UK primatology -- which in North America is part of Anthropology departments -- is part of Pyschology departments. There's a lot of overlap between anthro with an evolutionary bent, and medicine. Forensics, for instance, often has both people with background/training as medical doctors as well as people with background/training as physcial anthropologists.
Posted by: QrazyQat | March 10, 2007 7:05 PM
Here's one of the divisions of my university's medical department: http://www.cip.ed.ac.uk/
"The CIP aims to foster supportive, outward-looking and cohesive multi-disciplinary programmes of research into fundamental physiological mechanisms and pathways relevant to human function and disease. CIP investigators exploit rapid advances in the enabling technologies available from genomics, proteomics, imaging and informatics to allow development of predictive modelling and in vivo analysis to understand the function of gene products at the cell, organ and whole animal level. Importantly CIP investigators exploit the most appropriate model organisms/systems to investigate the key physiological question being posed - a delicate balance between high biomedical relevance (eg, human, mouse, rat) and high genetic power (lower organisms such as Drosophila and fish)."
Posted by: Adam Cuerden | March 11, 2007 7:41 AM