Otto West: Apes don’t read philosophy.
Wanda: Yes they do, Otto. They just don’t understand it.
Michael Egnor read my post on how medical publications avoid using the word “evolution”. He just didn’t understand it.
Darwinists use “evolution” because it’s their creation myth and because its regular invocation is required by their thought police. Doctors and medical researchers don’t use “evolution” because it’s irrelevant to medical research. Fairy tales about survival of survivors contribute nothing to medical research, or to any other research.
No, the point of the article was that medical researchers were avoiding the use of the word “evolution” to describe processes that were clearly evolutionary. They were using euphemisms to get around using the term, not that they weren’t applying evolutionary principles in their work.
He could have tried reading the cited article, which has a conclusion exactly the opposite of what Egnor claims.
Nowadays, medical researchers are increasingly realizing that evolutionary processes are involved in immediate threats associated with not only antibiotic resistance but also emerging diseases. The evolution of antimicrobial resistance has resulted in 2- to 3-fold increases in mortality of hospitalized patients, has increased the length of hospital stays, and has dramatically increased the costs of treatment. It is doubtful that the theory of gravity (a force that can neither be seen nor touched, and for which physicists have no agreed upon explanation) would be so readily accepted by the public were it not for the fact that ignoring it can have lethal results. This brief survey shows that by explicitly using evolutionary terminology, biomedical researchers could greatly help convey to the layperson that evolution is not a topic to be innocuously relegated to the armchair confines of political or religious debate. Like gravity, evolution is an everyday process that directly impacts our health and well-being, and promoting rather than obscuring this fact should be an essential activity of all researchers.
Somehow, when dealing with Egnor, I’m always thinking of Otto, that classic character from A Fish Called Wanda who thinks himself very clever but who keeps demonstrating his stupidity.
Otto: Don’t call me stupid.
Wendy: Why on earth not?
Otto: “Don’t call me stupid!”
Wanda: “How could I? To call you stupid would be an insult to stupid people!”
“Aristotle was not Belgian. The central message of Buddhism is not ‘every man for himself’. And the London Underground is not a political movement.”
I love that movie. John cleese with his pants on his face, reciting Russian poetry naked? Perfect.
Come on, lay off the guy. He was an atheist, don’t you know. But he really, really, wanted to believe in “GOD”, so, “GOD”.
You obviously do not know anything about science, PJ. It’s an X-K-Red 27 technique.
PZ…curse my morning brain
Isn’t “survival of survivors” a tautology? Is Egnor trying to say survivors don’t survive or what?
Tangentially related, but an interesting idea for developing new antibiotics: http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/02/25/2016239/the-peculiar-economics-of-developing-new-antibiotics
“What if the United States government — maybe in cooperation with the European Union and Japan — offered a $2 billion prize to the first five companies or academic centers that develop and get regulatory approval for a new class of antibiotics?”
I’m still of the opinion that there is nothing notable in that article in the first place; the medical research is simply not concerned with the evolutionary aspect of the changes they observe but rather the clinical ramifications it may have.
Read it again, Holmes. The writers are clearly talking about evolutionary processes as they relate to their research, but are bending over backwards to avoid the “E” word.
Every time they get into their tired rhetoric about “thought police”, I think of teenaged Bender from that one Futurama episode. “Yeeeah, do what everybody else is doing!”
Uhm….yeah, yeah it does actually, you moron.
Artor@9
Unless your Viking helmet gives you some kind of mind reading powers, you cannot say that they are bending over backwards to avoid using evolution.
As I said in the last post, this could just come out of the usages of different words to mean the same thing. I gave my lecture on microbial genetics this week and did not use evolution every time I was talking about something that was clearly an evolutionary process.
The salient point of this article is this
I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment. I left out the “This brief survey shows that by” because they present no evidence of what happens when biomedical researchers use evolution more often and if this leads to any change in the laypersons perception of the word.
Because I agree with the sentiment, I will certainly be more cognizant to let my students know explicitly that I am talking about evolutionary processes.
I should also include PZ in my comment above and not single out Artor. The paper does not discuss why biomedical researchers are not using evolution, so you have no way of knowing if they are actually “avoiding” the terms.
The results do suggest that biomedical researchers should be asked “why is the term evolution not used more in your biomedical research?” and others like “do you believe in the theory of evolutionary?” in a follow-up study.
Unfortunately this study, which is useful, allows people like Egnor a talking point to promote his own beliefs which are completely incorrect. He doesn’t even know what evolutionary theory can and cannot be used for.
Evolution say’s nothing about how life started, but how life evolved once it began. It does give us an idea about what the first life would have looked like/needed in the begin.