Replies

And I am *still* struggling to discover your point in all of this.

Let me try to help you one last time. The original article contains the following paragraph:

Alas, for Kansas's educational reputation, the damage may be done. "We've heard anecdotally that our students are getting much more scrutiny at places like medical schools.

To which I replied,

I don't believe this for a moment. When making admission decisions, medical schools look at MCAT scores, college courses, college GPA, and so on; they generally do not consider high school work.

So far, so good. But I added the following question, which I intended to be rhetorical:

Besides, what does a evolution have to do with one's suitability to practice medicine? (Emphasis added.)

Note that I did not say that evolution is irrelevant to medicine. Nor did I say that doctors (or anyone else) should reject evolution. I merely questioned whether the theory of evolution has anything to do with a student's suitability to practice medicine. Since medical schools devote no time in their curriculum to the study of evolutionary theory, they must not consider it important to the practice of medicine.

In answer to my rhetorical question, orionblamblam wrote (Post 18),

Same thing a rejection of the "astrology" and "humours" theories of disease do. A doctor who rejects science.... not a good doctor.

Of course, I never said that anyone—doctor or otherwise—should reject evolution, much less science. I was merely saying that however important the theory of evolution might be to some fields, it does not have much to with the practice of medicine. So I replied (Post 43),

First of all, medicine is as much art as science. Very little of what a practicing physician does is affected one way or the other by the theory of evolution. Surgeons, for instance, learn their specialty by doing surgery, not by studying evolutionary biology.

I was also bothered by the suggestion that evolution is a kind of litmus test, and that a lack of belief in evolution is a rejection of science. So I continued:

Second, I am not convinced that a belief in Intelligent Design is necessarily a rejection of science. (Young-earth creationism is another matter—it is both bad science and bad theology.) Neither evolution nor ID are relevant to the physical sciences: a person could accept ID and still do excellent work in astronomy, chemistry, physics, or geology. Even in some biological fields, evolution is not a big issue.

In other words, a person can be an excellent chemist or physicist or astronomer and find ID to be plausible. That is not necessarily a rejection of science; more likely, it is the inevitable result of specialization in the sciences. No one can know it all.

Perhaps I did not express myself well, because several others took issue with the idea that evolutionary theory was irrelevant to the practice of medicine. Then you can along (Post 160) with what I thought was an excellent analogy:

So you tell me: How does an understanding of QED affect what a practicing electrician does?

Aha! I thought. Here at last is someone who gets what I am trying to say. So I replied (Post 161):

An excellent example. Quantum electrodynamics (QED) won Richard Feynman and his colleagues a Nobel Prize, but it is of little use to the electrician wiring your house.

Clearly, QED is important enough to award the Nobel Prize to its discoverers; but QED is not used by the practicing electricians in their work. (I confirmed that with an electrician today.)

Alas, you took my post to mean that QED is not important all all. That led to still more posts, including some about medicine and driving.

I hope that helps.

Clearly, QED is important enough to award the Nobel Prize to its discoverers; but QED is not used by the practicing electricians in their work.

I don't necessarily like this analogy, but I'll continue with this anyway. Consider the different types of work done by a technologist, an engineer, and a scientist. Let's take the example of an electrician who installs and repairs circuits in a commercial building. An electrician is considered to be somewhat of a trade skill. As a technology worker, perhaps an electrician doesn't need to understand quantum mechanics. He is working on problems that are relatively well-understood. By contrast, however, engineers try to solve new problems and design new electrical circuits for new applications, and scientists investigate the physical principles for the purpose of better understanding how electricity works. Engineers and scientists had better know something about quantum physics.

Going back to medicine and biology. A doctor is generally considered more highly educated than an electrician, who may have attended a trade school or vocational college. Does a general practitioner necessarily need to agree with evolution? Perhaps not, strictly speaking. I would personally feel better going to a doctor who does, but may someone practice medicine while believing in the six-day creation and the young earth? The answer is 'yes.' Despite all the accusations of "Darwin idolatry" I don't know of anyone here that claims a general practitioner who does not believe in the theory of natural selection should be disqualified from having a license. Does a doctor who is investigating the effects of the over prescription of antibiotics need to understand evolution? Absolutely. I don't like how you're trying to separate evolutionary theory from modern medicine. Our modern biology and modern medicine rest firmly on the synthesis theory of evolution, comprised of Darwin's theory of natural selection, Mendel's theory of inheritance, and the theories of molecular biology that have come about since the discovery and description of the DNA molecule by Watson, Crick, Wilkins, and others. Your rhetorical question is hand-waving, in my opinion. "Oh, it's not really all that important after all." You claim you're not trying to reduce it's importance, but I'm not convinced. Evolutionary theory is a fundamental part of our understanding of biology, just as quantum theory is a fundamental part of our understanding of physics. I think an appreciation of evolution will only become more important to medicine in the future.