Poor Orac

Hank,

I have addressed "important" issues on here, including HIV/AIDS--and you continue to dodge, misrepresent, and repeat assertions that I and others on here have shown to be absolutely false. I may indeed post a discussion on the universal HIV testing recommendation, but if I do, it'll be a separate post.

It's up to 34 now. They must be breeding.

Bob
P.S. Typekey is claiming that you haven't signed on. Naughty typekey.

Indeed you're correct--they updated it since I last checked. Added that.

As far as typekey, my settings say I'm registered--I dropped a line to our tech guru to see if he could be of assistance.

Tara: "I know how IDers hate to be compared to HIV "dissenters" and vice-versa...."

And yet some of the top IDers cut their pseudoscientific teeth on HIV denialism. From what I've read, Phil Johnson still embraces HIV denialism. I'm not sure about Jonathan Wells, but his name does appear on HIV "dissenter" lists from, IIRC, the 1980's.

Interesting. Clearwater is the global headquarters of the Scientology nutters, and a goodly chunk of the businesses and citizens there have close ties to old El-ron's pyramid scheme. I wonder if there's a connection?

Thats a pretty puny list so far. Whilst I'm sure there are plenty of MDs who 'doubt Darwinism,' there are hundreds of thousands of MDs worldwide and I'm sure a large number of them embrace evolution. They are just unlikely to be motivated to sign a petition. Thats the way these things work, those who are strongly anti, who take the contrarian position, are more likely to band together.

"Microevolution," variously defined by creationists as "evolution within the 'kind,'" or "getting a new species of fruit fly from an old one," is just peachy; it's just dogs evolving into cats and the like that they're against.

Drosophila geneticist snarkiness: if someone wants to consider all Drosophilds to be a single kind, then I'm going to call mammals a kind (especially when you're just talking about eutherians). Nananananana! I'll give you a dog evolving into a cat, but there's no way a kangaroo could evolve into a kagaroo mouse.

RPM,

Kinds are defined pretty widely these days. The baraminology people (as respectable as you are going to get in the YEC world - a couple of them even have papers in biology journals) pretty much accept the standard picture of horse evolution for example.

http://www.bryancore.org/bsg/opbsg/002.html

MDs really aren't so bad. This is a classic example of a few rotten apples trying to spoil a perfectly good group. As I sit in my office (research section of a major hospital) and eat my lunch, I can say with confidence that I am within a 100 feet of more MDs that accept biological evolution without qualification than are contained in the silly list. While some MDs might get caught up in silly ideas that medicine is really all art and no science, most seem to be quite pro-science (even if they aren't up-to-date on many aspects of biological evolution).

Brent,

Exactly--and that's what Orac and others have stressed. But because MDs are 1) degreed, and 2) generally respected in their communities, their opinions can carry more weight than the average Joe (and even can surpasses the opinion of evolutionary biologists in the minds of many in the general public). I agree that folks who support ID are still the minimum in the group (and afarensis agrees, but the poll he links to still shows that 34% of doctors "agree more with intelligent design" than evolutionary biology. (Direct link to survey article here). Additionally, when broken down by religion, they found "...slightly more than half of Protestants (54%) agree more with intelligent design." That's a whole barrel of apples.

The thing about doctors is that, because of their lack of knowledge/understanding of Evolutionary Biology, they can get patients killed. Witness the case where a surgeon who performed a transplant of a baboon's heart into a human baby only to have the child die a short time later from the rejection.

When the surgeon was asked by his colleagues why didn't use the heart of a chimpanzee since chimps and humans share over 95% of their genetic material, the surgeon replied that he didn't believe in evolution. In essence, this physician put his beliefs before the welfare of his patient. That's not only idiotic but it displays an incomprehensible degree of hubris. I would never trust my fate to this doctor. I would much rather have a "Kevorkian" give me the lethal injection. At least I and the doctor would have no illusions about the outcome of the treatment.

GE

I wonder if we could come up with a counter list by just mining the list from Project Steve.

If PSSI would be serious about "This does not imply the endorsement of any alternative theory" they shouldn't give members one cd ("Unlocking the Mystery of Life") which claims to be "the scientific case for intelligent design".

I vaguely remember the baboon heart transplant, but not that the surgeon disclaimed evolution as the reason for going through with it. If that is so, shouldn't there be legal grounds for closing down PSSI for promoting malpractice?

Tara,
I enjoy your blog and I didn't intend to sound like a disagree with the idea that more MDs should have a better understanding of biology. I'm a fellow PhD epidemiologist with a background in biology and I wish that MDs were more like "us" in their grasp of the importance of a population level perspective (I think that understanding evolution is critical to such a perspective). I just was trying to provide a little positive perspective on the state of MD support for evolution. I often am said to be too cynical, so I was trying to look on the bright side (glass half full). MDs on average are much closer to the position of the typical biologist, than they are to the position of the typical Joe general public. Another quote from the survey you cited is, "The majority of all doctors (78%) accept evolution rather than reject it and, of those, Jews are most positive (94%), Catholics are next (86%) followed by Protestants (59%)." Focusing too much on the bad MDs might make the creationists look good, since it gives them credibility to be compared to anyone with a degree. I think that the focus should be on the vast majority (4 out of 5) that accept evolution and how they likely use it to improve their care of patients. Showing why good MDs are better because they use evolution is more convincing than showing why bad MDs are worse because they reject evolution. In my opinion, positive examples will be more accepted, since they won't make MDs feel as defensive.

Remember though that organ rejection can happen (and usually does) for genetic disagreement at a level much smaller than between species, ie. human bodies rejecting tissue from other humans, so maybe this doctor just had a hard time managing tissue rejection in general.

"Remember though that organ rejection can happen (and usually does) for genetic disagreement at a level much smaller than between species, ie. human bodies rejecting tissue from other humans, so maybe this doctor just had a hard time managing tissue rejection in general."

Yeah. I'm hip to that, Britton. I think what the surgeon's colleagues were asking was - since he was trying transplant an organ from a non-human specie to a human, why didn't he use one that was genetically closer to humans than that of a baboon? That would seem to be logical, unless one did not accept evolution as true. The sawbones would therefore not likely have thought of the what the closest relative to humans was.

GE

Mining Project Steve results in 24 MDs and, depending on how you count them, 30+ PhDs in medicine and medical research. Project Steve wins and has snazzy t-shirts too!

Bah. Not a single Steve, Stephan or any other variant. Pathetic. They better move faster if they pretend to catch up with the three (4?) DI has signed up in their list.

I doubt they will ever be able to catch up with the steve project, of course.

Hope that helps,

Grey Wolf

This observation goes to the heart of the deniers' strategy: make the charges, no matter how ludicrous; force legitimate scholars to refute them; repeat the charges even after they have been disproved, since few people have the time, inclination, or ability to study the matter-they are left simply to believe that there is "some question" or "controversy" about the matter. In this way (it has been observed), new lies do not replace old discredited ones but simply accumulate. Students of the old Soviet propaganda machine will see familiarities between Holocaust deniers and the KGB, though of course the deniers lack a broad network of "moles," fellow-travelers, and dupes within the establishment media.

ID peddlers are ignorance-promoting scum.
Different stripe, same hide.

http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9402/reviews/berke.html

From Wikipedia

In 1979 the Institute for Historical Review (IHR) was founded by the neo-Nazi Willis Carto as an organization dedicated to publicly challenging the "myth of the Holocaust." The IHR sought from the beginning to attempt to establish itself within the broad tradition of historical revisionism, by soliciting token supporters who were not from a neo-Nazi background such as James J. Martin and Samuel Edward Konkin III, and by promoting the writings of French socialist Paul Rassinier and American anti-war historian Harry Elmer Barnes to attempt to show that Holocaust denial had a broader base of support besides just neo-Nazis. The IHR brought most of Barnes' writings, which had been out of print since his death, back into print. However, most of IHR's supporters were neo-Nazis and anti-Semites, and while IHR included token articles on other topics and sold some token books by mainstream historians in its book catalog, the vast majority of material published and distributed by IHR was devoted to questioning the facts surrounding the Holocaust.

Gosh, it sure sounds familiar, don't it?

attempt to show that Holocaust denial had a broader base of support

Vile propagandists.

Let's name some of the most repugnant: Behe, Dembski, Luskin, Ahmansen, Johnson, Wells ...

In my opinion, positive examples will be more accepted, since they won't make MDs feel as defensive.

MDs should feel defensive. To the extent they have exceptional numbers of creationist idiots in their ranks, they need to raise their standards.

Got it?

Thanks.

dr stanley b(everec) gathinston iii is a fake name submitted by me. i made the entire submission up, and they didnt even bother to check it. the name is also an anagram; 50 points if you can figure it out.

so they started a group called "PISSY" ?

geez....and I thought Christian Researchers Against People

was bad.

You speak about Holocaust denial, one can also refer to the Japanese government's endorsement of the denial that the Nanking Massacres during WWII or Imperial Japanese aggression ever occuring, and nearly a whole Japanese nation at that. They've even come out with the novel method of rewriting Japanese education standard history books discounting facts against the government or Japanese ultra nationalist stance, and its mightily effective method at that.

My guess is that the people who doesn't want evolution to be known are drawing parallels to the Japanese grand scheme.... they can: 1st by trying to discredit anything or everything factual about evolution, 2nd by peddling the "alternative" albeit scientifically vacuous ID theory, and 3rd (if we are not vigilant) - my guess is they'll like to see evolution studies banned or "re-written" outright

and they have a successful model to work from...

You've got it all wrong. These PSSI people are doing a public service. Now we have a list of doctors who you should avoid at all costs...
Let's hope they can flush out all of them!

PSSI's statement is actually more weaselly than DI's, IMO:

"As medical doctors we are skeptical of the claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the origination and complexity of life..."

I, too, am unconvinced that RM + NS accounts for the origination [sic] of life. Of course, however you define it, 'Darwinian macroevolution' doesn't even attempt to explain the origin of life. So the remainder of that sentence:

"...and we therefore dissent from Darwinian macroevolution as a viable theory."

just shows that the signatories don't even have a rudimentary understanding of evolution. Rather pathetic.

"I, too, am unconvinced that RM + NS accounts for the origination [sic] of life."

Of course the origination of life and evolution are different issues. The origination (origin) of life is matter of the having an idea about what kind of self-replicating chemicals were present 3.5 billion years go to produce living organisms. Whereas evolution is concerned with what happened when life appeared on the this planet.

"Of course, however you define it, 'Darwinian macroevolution' doesn't even attempt to explain the origin of life."

The theory of evolution is not designed to explain the origin of life. It explains how life developed once it was present on Earth.

"So the remainder of that sentence:

"...and we therefore dissent from Darwinian macroevolution as a viable theory."

just shows that the signatories don't even have a rudimentary understanding of evolution. Rather pathetic."

Yes. It's rather pathetic and dangerous.

GE

Britton, GE,
Thamks, I see that a more balanced view about tissue rejection problems and lack of donors probably means that animal organs are a grey area. I still feel that a baboon organ was outside normal practice, but perhaps this was a last resort operation.

i spent all my time ranting about how A. doctors aren't scientists and B. it's an abuse of authority to imply that doctors actually have a greater understanding of evolutionary theory and evidence for and against it than anyone else. They don't. It's an attempt to use the white coat to maintain a false sense of respect for their opinions.

#$@$##W$ ARGH

"i spent all my time ranting about how A. doctors aren't scientists and B. it's an abuse of authority to imply that doctors actually have a greater understanding of evolutionary theory and evidence for and against it than anyone else. They don't. It's an attempt to use the white coat to maintain a false sense of respect for their opinions."

You mean we've misunderstood you, Cowboy?

GE

I'm lost...you referring to my political digressions on PZ's blog?

Oh, the above comment was supposed to be headed up by a link to my post on PSSI. Which would've made my statement a lot more intelligible.

Tara,

2 quick points:

1. A mere 17 physicians critique evolution? How many physicians in total are there -- what 100,000 or so? 17 outta the whole number don't seem too radical to me. In fact, I would expect much more, given the states of Utah, Mississippi, Alabama, etc, etc.

2. You write: I know how IDers hate to be compared to HIV "dissenters" and vice-versa,

I'm not and IDer, nor an HIV "dissenter" -- whatever that means -- so I don't care about the comparison, but still, one huge, enormous distinction is this. ID is a philosophical belief. It has no tangible consequences on treatment, patients, medicine that I can see.

On the other hand, the AIDS cult has huge consequences, since an HIV+ stigma often wrecks lives and opens the door to toxic medications, where grade 4 adverse events from the drugs (meaning severe or life-threatening), outnumber medical complications from the disease.

That's a huge distinction. More so, now that the CDC is gonna push more HIV testing on the public -- as Harvey Bialy presciently noted here -- doesn't this portend the potential for a whole lotta grief, misery and false positive tests?

Are there any Libertarians left who think this is a good idea?

Hank Barnes

"Nothing in biology makes sense, except in the light of evolution"

doctor trianing is narrow enough in scope as it is (and already suffers too much from presenting the body as a mechanical device) without ID raising its ugly head. But evolutionary context has the ability not only to shape our perspective on the 'normal' and 'diseased' body and mind (i think there's no field more than psychiatry where evolutionary thinking needs to be applied), but also to clue us in on how certain diseases came to be and how our bodies became so susceptible to them. Evolution can help us understand everything from Type II diabetes to obstetric complications due to maternal-infant conflict.

One trusts that Dr. Bialy doesn't wish to be noted for his prescience rather that the science behind HIV testing is accurate on a clinical level. However, the link to which you point was pre-presciently noted two days prior on NAR:

CDC Wants Routine AIDS Virus Testing

"dr stanley b(everec) gathinston iii is a fake name submitted by me. i made the entire submission up, and they didnt even bother to check it. the name is also an anagram; 50 points if you can figure it out."

Believe anything creationist drs - 50 pts?
49 if the parentheses were supposed to go somewhere?

Hank Barnes says:

I'm not and IDer, nor an HIV "dissenter" -- whatever that means

If you don't know what it means, how do you know you're not one?

As I understand it, an HIV "dissenter" (or "denier" or "skeptic", whichever the nom de jour) is one who does not accept the scientific consensus that HIV causes AIDS, and/or that HIV is can be transmitted through sex - or for some others, that the virus called HIV even exists at all.

-- so I don't care about the comparison, but still, one huge, enormous distinction is this. ID is a philosophical belief.

True, but the ID proponants don't see it that way. They see it as a perfectly valid scientific endeavor, or at the worst a potentially valid one.

It has no tangible consequences on treatment, patients, medicine that I can see.

I refer you to Orac's site and you can argue that case there.

On the other hand, the AIDS cult has huge consequences, since an HIV+ stigma often wrecks lives and opens the door to toxic medications, where grade 4 adverse events from the drugs (meaning severe or life-threatening), outnumber medical complications from the disease.

Some might say the real consequences are the opposite. That AIDS "dissention", which you are apparently not part of even though you don't know what it is, causes people to avoid getting treatment for a deadly disease and in fact helps to spread it around by denying the efficacy of certain vectors of transmission and discouraging risk reducing behavior.

ID is a philosophical belief. It has no tangible consequences on treatment, patients, medicine that I can see.

Hank, it's statements like this that cause me to assume that the only reason you're here is to stir up shit, and you don't bother to read what I or anyone else here writes. Some medical consequences of denying evolution were noted in previous comments, and I've written extensively on the topic before.

Thanks for the link-love to the Sternberg review. I nominated you for a spot. Favors traded?

Tara,

Stay focused, girl. I'll retract my comments on ID to help you.

The issue is whether it's a good idea or not to test EVERYBODY for HIV. See, Bialy's piece in Lew Rockwell.

Do you think this is a good idea or not? I submit it is a bad idea -- for many reasons. One salient, scientific reason is that the AIDS "drugs" cause grade 4 serious adverse events. (See, Reisler et al in Journal of AIDS.)

I will quote Reisler:

All 4 classes of antiretrovirals (ARVs) and all 19 Food and Drug Administration-approved ARVs have been directly or indirectly associated with life-threatening events and death.

Since when does medicine kill you?

Appreciate you learned response to these scientific questions.

Hank B

For an HIV skeptic head on over to Dean's World. Dean Esmay is an example of the sensible man with an unsensible ideation. Make sure to check out his HIV archives.

Such as creationists, HIV skeptics, Holocaust deniers, and a number of other groups are examples of people who will not admit they could be wrong about something, because it threatens their world view, and often their sense of self worth. For some people to admit there may be something to their bete noir is intolerable. So they engage in all sorts of solipcistic blathering. It's like the scientific method suddenly becomes invalid in certain areas of thought and inquiry.

Then you have the fact that things like AIDS and HIV are not simple matters. Different strains, different immune responses, false negatives and false positives, varying responses to treatment. All this make can make it hard to keep track of the situation. Same thing with evolution, the Holocaust, and any number of other controversial subjects. So much contradictory data, so much contradictory opining. Makes recognizing the wheat among the chaff a bitch. All you can do is persever and hope you're making progress in getting it all sorted out and set to rights.

Just remember, science is not about being fair, science is about getting it right, regardless of where it leads. Science is not about what should be, science is about what is.

"Since when does medicine kill you?"

When it has potentially fatal side effects, or is toxic in and of itself. CF chemotherapy.

Hank, it's you who need to stay focused. This post is primarily about ID, not about treatment for HIV+ individuals.

Tara,

Nice use of the word "primarily":)

Hank

Much as it surprises me, I agree with Hank about ID and the fact that belief in ID is unlikely to affect medical treatment or in most cases even medical research. Whether you believe the similarites and differences between humans and other species are due to evolution and natural selection or because God made them that way shouldn't interfere with using knowledge of those similarities and differences to develop medical treatments.

Abstraction: A few doctors (17) believe in ID. Does this make them bad doctors? Does this mean their patients will suffer? Nobody knows. Who cares

Concrete: The CDC urges doctors to test everybody 13-64 for HIV. That means, YOU, Tara and most of the jokesters on this blog.

Why are you dodging this concrete issue, Tara? It seems to me this is a critical policy debate our country needs to address. You're always popping off on these phony issues, Why not tackle one that matters?

HankB

"Abstraction: A few doctors (17) believe in ID. Does this make them bad doctors? Does this mean their patients will suffer? Nobody knows. Who cares"

It depends what the doctors' specialties are, Hank. Eg. if you have a surgeon who believes in ID/creationism and he does a heart transplant on one of his patients using a baboon heart instead of a chimpanzee's heart, killing the patient, then you could actually say that he is bad doctor. Especially if the doctor's beliefs made him bereft of the knowledge that chimpanzees are closer genetic relatives to humans than baboons. It would mean that the doctor is imcompetent, and the he allowed his religious beliefs to cloud his judgement.

If the patient was my loved one, I'd have his license and his money.

So you could say that I care because I refuse to trust my soul to a doctor who doesn't have a grasp of the biological sciences. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that he shouldn't be a doctor in the first place.

GE

Hank,
"I'm not and IDer, nor an HIV "dissenter" -- whatever that means -- so I don't care about the comparison, but still, one huge, enormous distinction is this. ID is a philosophical belief."

ID is a religiously motivated pseodoscience that is constructed to attack real science. So is HIV denial or many anti-abortion sentiments.

"A few doctors (17) believe in ID. Does this make them bad doctors? Does this mean their patients will suffer? Nobody knows."

HIV denial and antiabortion/anticonceptive agenda is seen to directly lead to increased death rates and severe suffering by easy access statistics. If anyone acts so knowingly, it is truly despicable.

ID is more circumspect. But also ID has medical implications, for example difficulty to understand medicin facts or development. Witness the surgeon who thought a baboon heart was as fit as any heart to implant in a human.

"where grade 4 adverse events from the drugs (meaning severe or life-threatening), outnumber medical complications from the disease."

This is an ID type selected commentary, where you directly grant Tara her point. The report you link to finishes with "In summary, morbidity and mortality for patients with HIV infection have been substantially reduced with HAART."

Guitar Eddie and others - I'm as fervent a believer in and defender of evolutionary theory as anyone but I do not see any evidence that Dr. Bailey's beliefs negatively affected his treatment of Baby Fae. In the first place, he didn't just go out and perform this surgery; he had to get approval from a hospital review board first. There must have been sound scientific/medical basis for their approval. Secondly, he is not the only surgeon to have performed baboon or chimp to human transplants. There have been several baboon to human liver transplants as well as several chimp to human heart transplants. All of the recipients have lived from several weeks to several months. It isn't clear that those with chimp donors did any better than those with baboon donors. Thirdly, a quick look at the literature shows that most of the focus on xenotransplantation research nowadays is on pigs. Clearly evolutionary relatedness is not the primary consideration when it comes to xenotransplantation.

So does anyone have another example where they believe that a doctor's failure to believe in evolution would negatively affect their ability to treat a patient?

Dale, my friend, you have smacked that one outta the park! Well done.

The problem is that rabid ID haters -- which is what most people here are -- are so zealous that they turn on people who don't hate ID enough!!

It's like a bizarre loyalty oath to see who can oppose ID more than the next guy. Who gives a @%@!?

Myself, I don't think ID is a big deal. It's philosophical, abstract, esoteric -- has no practical application whatsoever for medicine. I don't worry about it.

Dale, whaddya think about the CDC plan to test EVERYBODY for HIV. Good idea or not?

Barnes

Hank,

I have addressed "important" issues on here, including HIV/AIDS--and you continue to dodge, misrepresent, and repeat assertions that I and others on here have shown to be absolutely false. I may indeed post a discussion on the universal HIV testing recommendation, but if I do, it'll be a separate post.

Dale,

I just finished an interview with a reporter doing a story on evolution and medicine, and I still have a piece on evolution of virulence in the queue that I need to finish at some point, both of which discuss why it's important for physicians to understand (and use) evolution to treat patients. In the meantime, you might want to read about Orac's YEC med student if you haven't already (and how her evolution denial is a big deal--see also Mike's writings linked in the post). Orac also mentions evolution denial as a potential "gateway drug," so to speak, into other quack ideas here.

Tara wrote:

"I have addressed "important" issues on here, including HIV/AIDS--and you continue to dodge, misrepresent, and repeat assertions that I and others on here have shown to be absolutely false."

Oh, please -- 90% of what you post here is People Magazine quality kibbitzing. Bashing ID? polar/grizzly bear connubial unions? Yeah, real important.

As for dodge and misrepresent, remember that YOU asserted that Padian did not evaluate the seroconversion RATES.

"Like the Padian paper, this study was meant to determine risk factors for transmission of the virus, rate. In the case of the Padian paper, it was risk factors among couples; in the MMR paper, it's risk factors within a prison population."

Yet, Padian states pretty clearly:

"To examine RATES of and risk factors for heterosexual transmission of HIV, the authors conducted a prospective study of infected individuals and their heterosexual partners whao have been recruited since 1985."

So, there's YOUR misrepresentation.

Then, I asked you DIRECTLY:

1. Do you claim that HIV is transmitted by sex in the U.S.?

2. If so, what epidemiological studies support your claim?

And, you responded defensively with:

"I'm not going to waste my time getting into this again with you or others. Why do you keep trying to shift the focus from the current study?

So, there's YOUR dodge.

But, that's just Kabuki Theatre -- we await your new thread about the change in CDC guidelines that encourage HIV testing in EVERYBODY, and whether that's a good idea.

Hank Barnes

Anyone can to to the discussion of the Padian paper and read the discussion--and the paper--for themselves, Hank. I've already said I'm done discussing it with you. And if everything I write on here is so mediocre and unimportant, no one's asking you to keep returning to read it. Door, ass, etc.

Well, you're the one reading my little old blog and making feeble attempts to debunk it:) See here.

Also, like I said, 10% of your stuff is pretty good!

Hank B.

Hank Barnes says:

I'm not and IDer, nor an HIV "dissenter" -- whatever that means.

Heh.

"Not an HIV 'dissenter'"? Then may I assume that you've finally had a revelation and now accept the overwhelming evidence showing that HIV causes AIDS?

Heh.

Then may I assume that you've finally had a revelation and now accept the overwhelming evidence showing that HIV causes AIDS?

I don't need overwhelming evidence or revelation, Dumbass. Just show me ONE good paper falsifying the hypothesis that HIV kills T4-cells in AIDS patients, and I'd accept it.

Oh, Orac, this should be in the peer-reviewed literature, too, not that anonymous, gov't website you often cite, thanks.

HB

Oh, so Hank is a troll - and a dangerous and despicable HIV-denier.

Dale,
"the focus on xenotransplantation research nowadays is on pigs". Apparently pigs organs are most like humans in many respects. Those tranpslants are from pigs genemodified to be more compatible with humans - native baboons are not.

Torbjorn, Yes these pigs are genetically modified (for whole organ transplants although not for heart valves) and native baboons are not. Nor are native chimpanzees and while chimpanzees may be more closely related evolutionarily to humans than baboons are, neither chimp nor baboon transplants have been successful so, like I said, I don't believe this is a good example of a doctor's lack of belief in evolution harming a patient.

It's not that pig organs are more like human than chimp organs but compared to pigs, chimps are an endangered species, hard to breed and very expensive to keep. They aren't a practical source of organs. Xenotransplantation may or may not ever really be feasible but if it is it will likely be because new more effective immunosuppressive drugs are developed, not because pigs are modified to be genetically more like humans.

Dale, belief in intelligent design may not impact the 'technician' side of being a doctor. "you have an ear infection, here's some antiiotics."

It may not even affect the engineering side of being a doctor:
"I have a very atypical and hard to manage case of fibromyalgia. Help me doctor." But it could have some impact; diet management for instance is begging to have evolutionary research incorporated into it.

But it will definitely impact a doctor's ability to both research and apply that research to disease.

IndianCowboy, as far as i'm aware, most doctors don't do research. I remain unconvinced that doctors who don't believe in evolution will necessarily be worse clinicians than those who do.

Torbjorn, neither chimp transplant recipients nor baboon transplant recipients have lived more than a few weeks to a few months. There is no evidence that Dr. Bailey's views on evolution had any effect on Baby Fae's outcome.

Indian Cowboy,
I agree that a doctor's lack of belief in evolution might impact on his ability to perform medical research but as the vast majority of M.D.s don't perform medical research it wouldn't seem like that would be particularly harmful. I don't believe doctors can get by with no scientific background (I wouldn't want one who didn't believe in germ theory for example) but I'm still not convinced that not believing in evolution is any more harmful to a doctor than an auto mechanic or a poet.

"I agree that a doctor's lack of belief in evolution might impact on his ability to perform medical research but as the vast majority of M.D.s don't perform medical research it wouldn't seem like that would be particularly harmful. I don't believe doctors can get by with no scientific background (I wouldn't want one who didn't believe in germ theory for example) but I'm still not convinced that not believing in evolution is any more harmful to a doctor than an auto mechanic or a poet."

I don't buy that, Dale.

For one thing, auto mechanics and poets don't deal with things that live and breath and self-replicate. They don't deal with an actual life.

Secondly, germ theory includes evolution. Afterall germs mutate and natural selection promulgates the process of the germs' speciation. A doctor who doesn't understand this process or who rejects this could end up giving his patients antibiotics that the microbes develope an immunity to. The patients could end up with a more serious illness than they started with because the antibiotic doesn't do anything but hasten the evolution of the pathogen.

Once again, you'd have a situation where a doctor puts his personal (religious) beliefs ahead of his oath to do no harm. In other words, this one of many examples why I consider fundamentalist religion to be a social pathology. Peole get hurt, Dale. And that cannot be tolerated.

GE

Guitar Eddie,
We will have to agree to disagree about this because I remain unconvinced that biological theory plays that much of a role in the practice of medicine. Medical research perhaps, medical practice no. A doctor doesn't have to understand evolution to follow protocols for treating infectious diseases. In my experience as a patient, you describe your symptoms and if it "sounds like" something bacteriological, the doctor prescribes an all purpose antibiotic; generally something one of his or her pharmaceutical reps has recommended. Either your symptoms improve or they don't. If they don't the doctor will prescribe an antibiotic of a different class (because that's what their reference manuals will tell them to do). At some point if your symptoms persist they may order cultures and based on those results they'll prescribe something different yet again. Medicine is results oriented and far more based on trial and error than I think a lot of doctors or patients like to acknowledge.

"Medical research perhaps, medical practice no. A doctor doesn't have to understand evolution to follow protocols for treating infectious diseases."

I disagree. Medical protocols are generally considered guidelines that doctors follow contingent upon their appropriateness to the medical situation. Doctor's need to know what antibiotics will work with what kind of illness. Part of that is having an understanding whether a pathogen has immunity to the particular antibiotic. And eventhough you could argue that most of that is trial and error, the doctor could end up not doing the patient any good with a lack at least a basic knowledge of biology and evolution.

GE

Any of you consider that this is pretty much the status quo when it comes to the removal of a failing theory? Unfortunately evolution is far more than just a theory. It's implications are far reaching and it is an important too in the fight, for some, against religion. Keep it up. It really matters not because the evidence will eventually come forth and smack you over. Way too many people are brainwashed into believing This theory even before any evidence is given and they can't even give any actual evidence for why they thing it is true. The guy who mentioned a story about baboons and humans, the information about DNA similarity does not require you to believe evolution or not. It's simply data that even a dissenter would use. The fact is that it supports nothing that evolutionists wish it to. A rat is almost right there with a chimp for petes sake.

On the topic of whether biology theories play a role in medicine, evolution in particular (you know what definition I am using) plays no role in anything but certainly not in medicine. In med school I didn't hear the word evolution or the ideas you might normally hear. The thing is that, to put evolution in the curriculum, you must have an agenda in favour of it. It is simply not needed