More coffee!! Your doctor needs to know what would have worked for someone's hypothetical reconstruction of Stone Age man before she can treat you ef

Apparently, evolutionary biologists/psychologists (if there is any difference, I would be glad to know*) are trying to get jobs adding to the cost burden of medical schools, fronting their speculations to doctors in training, a friend advises. See this story by Daniel Cressey ("Groups say med school training must evolve," Nature Medicine 15, 1338 (2009) doi:10.1038/nm1209-1338a, paywall, of course):

Medical training must adapt to include coursework covering evolutionary biology, according to a group of leading researchers.Momentum for such change seems to be building.

I bet. In an age of skepticism about all the nonsense evolutionary biologists front, they need to attach themselves to a system that people are still willing to fund.

"The case for ensuring that physicians and medical researchers are able to use evolutionary biology just as fully as other basic sciences is compelling," says Randolph Nesse, of the University of Michigan, lead author of the paper. "The constraints that inhibit change are severe, however. Most medical schools do not have a single evolutionary biologist on the faculty."

Nesse's paper cites examples of where evolutionary knowledge can benefit those working in medicine. An awareness of why humans have evolved the fever response, for example, could help doctors understand when it is safe to use drugs to block fever.

Rubbish. Pharmaceutical studies on living patients in real time do that. No one proposes to give the drugs to Old Stone Age Man, but rather to a toddler, an overworked near-retirement executive, or a frail older senior. The latter two would not even have been alive in the Old Stone Age.

As I have written to friends,

... Joe Roofer shows up in the family doctor's office griping about his arthritis.

Who cares if Stone Age man had arthritis? Joe Roofer is paying, one way or another, for what helps him now. He must get back to work and supervise his men ...

Sure, speculations about Old Stone Age Man are interesting.

But "interesting" doesn't cut it in medicine - and I have plenty of relatives in medicine who can tell me so.

What works for Joe Roofer today cuts it. So Joe can hop back on a ladder, supervise his men, please his clients, and meet his payroll Friday.

Medicine is real time. So what use is Darwinism when we are dealing with people over 60 years of age - a lifespan rarely attained in practice in ancient times, and irrelevant to natural selection?

Bioethics is the major concern now because most people who need significant medical care are old.

Oldsters take longer to heal than youngsters but if they stick it out, they often live many more years than expected, under modern conditions. But they are on pension, so ...

This story owes nothing to Darwinism and no Darwinist was abused in making it. But anyone who cannot see where all this is going is half asleep, in my view. Remember eugenics? We are now seeing it at the back end, rather than the front end.

One friend noted in response to my mug-waving, "Two words. Downright ridiculous." Someone she knows is in medical school and is busy enough without learning atheist culture's creation myth.

*Actually, I suspect there isn't really any difference between evolutionary biology and "evolutionary psychology", which is why the evolutionary biologist is forever linked to his idiot siamese twin, the "evolutionary psychologist" (= "Why women love shopping," "Why men are big spenders," etc.)

If evolutionary biologists wanted to denounce the nonsense, they could sever the skin tie, but then they'd be expected to address the nonsense they front themselves. How many months has it been since the "Ida" fossil rolled through pop culture?

Don't tell me science is "self-correcting." Ida shouldn't have got anywhere near the traction it did. In this area, science is about as self-correcting as a driverless car heading off a cliff.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

"Evolutionary biologist?" - how about "Historical biologist"?

Over the years, various people who claim to be "evolutionary biologists" (= "novelist who writes about things that happened more than 50 000 years ago.") have been disgruntled that I refer to them as "Darwinists."

They swallow Darwinian theories hook line and sinker, even when those theories are falling apart under the weight of the evidence. So I call them Darwinists or Darwin fans, or whatever.

The old Brit toff Darwin is their patron saint, Lord knows why, and there is no help for that.

But I asked friends whether it wouldn't be better to call them "historical biologists."

A vigorous discussion ensued, and the majority favoured evolutionary historian.

Well, m friends are probably right. A "historical biologist" could be Linnaeus, for example, or Jean-Henri Fabre. An "evolutionary historian" sounds more like Richard Dawkins's Ancestors' Tale. And that , suely, is the correct note.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Evolutionary psychology vs. evolution as a fact

With the neo-Darwinian synthesis, Darwinism became a simple, elegant theory in science that might - or might not - do what is claimed for it.

Is Darwinism the explanation of finch beak changes in the Galapagos? Maybe. (There are opinions pro and con about that.)

Is it the explanation for certain beneficial mutations in the malaria parasite? Apparently, yes.

Does it explain why the giraffe has a long neck? Apparently no.

Does it explain why men cheat on their wives? Huh? Who let YOU in here, creepazoid? I SAID we needed someone to keep a watch on the door!

I think that after Behe's Edge of Evolution, the legitimate questions revolve around what Darwinism can be shown to actually do, in the restricted sphere where we can be quite sure it is doing anything at all.

One reason I came to realize that Darwinism’s power had been blown out of all proportion was the relative unwillingness of evolutionary biologists to detach themselves from the florid arguments of evolutionary psychology. Normally, people in their position will be anxious to cut loose from cranks.

With some sensible exceptions such as Larry Moran and Jerry Coyne, they didn’t cut loose, and there was one obvious reason why they didn’t. They don't want the books balanced. They don’t want any accounting of what Darwinism can actually do.

Now that I have read Edge of Evolution I think I pretty much know why.

It's too bad if we have to admit that we really don't have a good theory of how evolution happens, but apparently we really don't.

Where have all the Christians gone ... from science?

(Note: This is my most recent ChristianWeek column, in which I address the reason for the current preponderance of materialist atheists in some fields of science.)

When I first started researching the intelligent design controversy, I often heard from Christian notables in science that there was no conflict between faith and science. I didn't suppose that there was a conflict, actually, but I soon came to realize that there is an inevitable conflict between strong Darwinian evolutionists and Christianity. A recent study of the views of key Darwinian evolutionists confirms my best guess - and raises some interesting questions about the Christian community in North America.

In "Evolution, Religion and Free Will" (American Scientist, Volume 95, 294ff) , Gregory W. Graffin and William B. Provine found that, of 149 eminent evolutionists polled, 78% were pure naturalists (no God) and only two were clearly theists (traditional idea of God). Some were in between these poles. The authors describe most of them as deists (some sort of divinity might have got things rolling but it is not God in any sense that Christians understand).

The authors note that the level of advocacy of any degree of theism among evolutionary biologists is the lowest measured so far in any poll of biologists' beliefs. They described the vast majority of their respondents as "metaphysical naturalists", "materialists", and "monists". In other words, these are people who are serious about their materialism and atheism.

These evolutionary biologists generally view religion as a product or byproduct of human evolution so that "... evolution is the means to understanding religion, whereas religion as a 'way of knowing' has nothing to teach us about evolution." The authors make quite clear that "Seeing religion as a sociobiological feature of human evolution, while a plausible hypothesis, denies all worth to religious truths."

So these are the people who are in charge of interpreting biology to your children. Mainstream media, covering the intelligent design (ID) controversy, warn you that most ID advocates are Christians or other theists. But how many have told you what I just did - that most of the people who strongly promote a no-design universe and no-design life forms are atheists? This has been true, by the way, for the better part of a century, ever since James Leuba started his surveys in 1914.

If the design advocates' views are coloured by theism, how is it that the no-design views of the atheists are not coloured by atheism? In adopting this perspective, mainstream media tacitly assume that atheism is the correct view, however one arrives at it. And your tax dollars are commanded in support of that view, as propounded at universities and, increasingly, in public high schools.

It seems to me that there are only two realistic ways to see this: Either atheism is correct, and therefore the reasonable point of view for scientists to have. Or there is some other reason that atheism predominates among biologists.

Here is one reason things have got to this pass: What do non-religious people suggest that their talented children should do? Go into business or science. What do religious people suggest that their talented children should do? Go into the clergy, ministry, or missionary work.
The result? Over time, the upper echelons of science have been dominated by atheists and agnostics. They increasingly dominate public policy too, while Christians praise Jesus irrelevantly in comfy tabernacles where no one but Jesus hears us.

Yet atheism is not evidence derived from science; it is merely a presumption by which many scientists interpret what they see. And the presumption is certainly not shared by all who have experience of the wonders of the natural world. While I was at Write! Canada 2007, I ran into a hand surgeon (now professor emeritus) who told me that he had checked out of believing in a non-design explanation for the human hand as a result of his own best efforts at mending broken hands.

I went away from the conversation with him reflecting on the fact that I may well be the only journalist in Canada who is simultaneously a member of The Word Guild, a confessional Christian writers' association, and the Canadian Science Writers' Association. I will be glad when the day comes that I am merely one of hundreds.

(Note for the record: "Evolutionists" here means scientists who believe that gradual Darwinian processes completely account for every aspect of life and that no design whatever is required. It does not mean scientists who merely accept that evolution occurs or that Earth is billions of years old.)

Evolutionary biology: Better off without Darwin?

You'd have to pay for this Chronicle of Higher Education article that addresses the question of whether ditching Darwinism would help evolutionary biologists deal with the unwashed hordes:

In his controversial book, The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins insisted that scientists should work to dispel the idea that God exists. Without religion, Mr. Dawkins has said, the conflict between scientists' beliefs about evolution and the fundamentalist religious belief that a supernatural intelligence created all life would vanish. Now an evolutionary biologist has proposed a different tack. In a meeting last weekend in San Francisco, he suggested scientists might win the argument by ditching Darwin.

But

Mr. Kutschera, a professor of plant physiology and evolutionary biology at the University of Kassel in Germany, said scientists should emphasize that evolution is a fully formed field of biological study "built up by generations of non-dogmatic scientists." Terms like
Darwinism can make evolutionary biology seem like an ideology, rather than a focus of empirical work, he said.

Basically, the controversy was never about Darwin's theory as such, of course, but about the use of Darwin's theory to preach a materialist origin of life and the mind. It is one thing to say that Dawin'sc oncept of natural selection explains which squirrels will survive the winter - another to say that it completely explains life, the universe, and all that.

Materialists, faced with growing dissent worldwide, now want to spin materialism through some sort of "God-talk" that addresses, in the words of one participant, the "dethronement of humans" (read: the dethronement of intelligence) and makes it all seem quite normal and true. The scary part is that they will undoubtedly get a taxpayer-funded budget for that. It won't work, of course, but it will cost you.

I am woman? I am invincible?: I am having a hard time keeping a straight face, actually

Regular readers with the time to spare for this space may recall that we had a little ID conference at the University of Toronto a couple of weekends ago, and there I ran into an interesting biochem textbook author named Larry Moran, an evolutionary biologist who does not seem to be a Darwinist or a Darwinian evolutionist. (See below.)

He wants to be called an evolutionary biologist , which is fair enough to describe what he does for a living, but virtually every colleague who is a fanatical Darwinist on the issues under discussion will want the same thing.

Larry thinks (see the Comments box) that I somehow benefit from the busload of cranks prophesying in Darwin's name because I want to impugn "real scientists":

With all due respect, I think you're getting a lot of mileage out of lumping the kooks in with real scientists and covering them all with the "Darwinist" label. It allows you to attack and make fun of the kooky non-science in "The Universal Darwinism" while impugning real scientists by implication.

Well, of course, blowing off silliness about the infidelity genes or the God meme is certainly easier than slogging through actual news but - call me unlucky, I've always preferred the news beat. I send up the folly in my spare time, of course, but there would still be plenty of folly if the Darwin cranks packed themselves off to Quaoar for a very long vacation, and I'd still have to make a living on the side.

Larry, who apparently believes that all things work together for good for me, has sent me a link to one of his essays "Evolution by Accident", and I have now read it. He seems to be far more of a Gouldian than a Dawkins-ite.

He writes, in part,

Excellent arguments have been advanced to prove that most of evolution is due to random genetic drift and that's the position I take. Thus, in a discussion about the role of chance and accident in evolution I would say that most of evolution is accidental because of the frequency of drift vs. selection. Note that this says nothing about the perceived importance of these mechanisms. That's a value judgement. Some evolutionists think that adaptation, or evolution by natural selection, is the only interesting part of evolution. These evolutionists don't deny that random genetic drift occurs; instead, they simply relegate it to the category of uninteresting phenomena. Others, like me, think that random genetic drift is far more interesting than natural selection because drift is responsible for junk DNA, molecular phylogenies, molecular clocks, and DNA fingerprinting.

On Darwinism, he writes,

Technically, Darwinism can be construed to mean only evolution by natural selection so this is an acceptable way of avoiding the topic of drift. However, if you read closely, you'll see that these writers are often very sloppy about using ""Darwinism" to describe their interests. The term often fills in for all of evolution in a sort of rhetorical sleight of hand. Thus, this group of chance-deniers tends to eliminate chance from evolution by re-defining evolution so that it only applies to natural selection. As you might expect, those who choose to eliminate chance by redefinition are usually the same people that are only interested in natural selection (see above).

All of which reminds me of the huge uproar last year when Stu Pivar, a friend of the late Steve Gould, told me that Gould was rather an indifferent Darwinist, and Darwinists charged in to protect Gould's reputation from the imputation of heresy.

I wonder if some evo bios can only allow themselves the luxury of questioning a given dogma as long as they all close ranks when attacked. A sort of angry religion without God or good music or Jesus kitsch? Sounds like Hull to me.