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:

Does the study of evolution have practical benefits for science or medicine?

Here's a podcast by Casey Luskin, one of the evil Discos, on whether the study of evolution has any practical benefits for science:

Does evolution have any practical benefits for science? In this episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin reveals that the answer, surprisingly, is no. Listen as Luskin discusses past biological discoveries, reviews recent surveys of biologists, and quotes several scientists, including noted Professor of Biology and intelligent design critic Jerry Coyne. All three sources agree: the theory of evolution has yielded few practical benefits for scientific discovery.

Actually, that's not really very surprising.

The study of evolution is the study of - to use the vernacular - what used to was and ain't no more. It is necessarily heavy on speculation and interpretation. That's okay, as long as it doesn't become a cult.

Fast forward to Darwinism, which - unfortunately - has become a cult, big time.

Plus, I have been meaning to post this for months - Catriona J MacCallum (PLOS Biology, April 2007 Volume 5 Issue 4 e112) argues for the alleged importance of evolution in medicine. She complains,

One reason that evolution doesn’t figure prominently in the medical community is that although it makes sense to have evolution taught as part of medicine, that doesn’t make it essential. ... , medicine is primarily focused on problem-solving and proximate causation, and ultimate explanations can seem irrelevant to clinical practice. Crudely put, does a mechanic need to understand the origins, history, and technological advances that have gone into the modern motor vehicle in order to fix it?

Crudely put, medicine is about saving lives and limbs today in the real world.

MacCallum thinks that evolution can help us understand epidemics, and this may be so if we mean the evolution of bacteria in a test tube. Not that bacteria evolve much, if you go by Edge of Evolution, except that they tend to junk intricate machinery under stress.

Apart from that, consider the example of heart attacks: What if the lemur-like creature from which humans are said to descend never had heart attacks? What if it usually did, under stress? How does such information help the medical interne whose patient presents with cardiac arrest? Whatever the interne decides to do must work in half a minute, not half a billion years.

Yes, evolution is very interesting - like any other type of ancient history - but no, it is not essential. I think it should definitely be studied, along with the cave paintings, ancient Egypt and theories about the origin of life and the universe and all that. But the burden of pretending that evolution is useful in a concrete way is tiresome and surely avoidable.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy: