Medicine requires knowing the latter, not the former.Understanding requires knowing as much of the entire picture as possible.
Sure, a chemist could get by and make concoctions using valence tables and memorizing tables and such, but he'll do a much better job if he learns something about quantum mechanics and thus know why chemical atoms behave as they do.
Engineers could certainly build airplanes from empirical tests. They build better ones when they have a solid grounding in aerodynamic and structural theory.
Doctors have a better understanding of the machine they're studying if they recognize that the vagus nerve is located where it is because it started out in a similar place in fish a long long time ago.
Knowledge without doubt about evolution isn't necessary in a medical doctor. Understanding a basic principle of science is.
>>Doctors have a better understanding of the machine they're studying if they recognize that the vagus nerve is located where it is because it started out in a similar place in fish a long long time ago.<<
This is an example of the problem in this debate. Give a couple of reasonable and non controversial examples and then put in a ringer. Believing that the vagus nerve started out in a fish, millions of years ago, neither helps determine who should be a physician, or even who should be a vet.
If you restated this example in the reasonable fashion of your others, you would have a statement like:
Doctors have a better understanding of the machine they're studying if they recognize that the vagus nerve is located where it is located in a similar place in fish.
Adding your other criteria is only applicable if the doctor is going to examine another species, similar to man and fish.
Is the neurochemistry more important? Probably. Is the actual structure more important? Probably. Are past experiments on that structure more important? Probably. Are they likely to evolve in a patient? I'll leave that to you.
The more important questions were available to Dr. Dini and he chose to ignore them. Draw your own conclusions.
DK