More On Intelligent Design And Medicine

I have often advised people, when listening to creationists promote their worldview, that the first thing to consider is what they are NOT telling you. Uncommon Descent contributor Sal Cordovas's fraudulent assessment of Catriona MacCallum's editorial "Does Medicine Without Evolution Make Sense?" serves as a prime example of the lack of information quality and integrity being dished out by intelligent design creationists every day. (No wonder they lost in Dover!).

Ed Brayton provides more on what Sal Cordova is NOT telling us in his assessment; Respectful Insolence provides an additional assessment of Cordova's "rank dishonesty"; and Evolution Blog adds more evidence to the only interpretation one can draw from intelligent design activists: they prefer to feed propaganda to the masses rather than conduct actually science in the laboratory. Read these posts for the full assessment of what is being said and not said, but briefly here's the point.

An intelligent design proponent reads MacCallum's article and draws this assessment:

Darwinists claim how important Darwinism is to science, but MacCallum's editorial makes an embarrassing admission of Darwinism's irrelevance to medicine.

Darwinists (whoever they are...) and those with intellectual capacity and curiosity, knowing that when a creationist says the sun is shining the most appropriate response to take is to look out the window, bother to read the article and point out the conclusions actually being made by the author are clearly opposite what Sal and other IDists would have a general audience believe:

The most obvious examples of evolutionary biology's importance to medical understanding are related to infectious disease...

But evolution can also tell us that the origin of HIV was precipitated by a jump across the primate species barrier [10] and enables us to predict the imminent arrival of avian flu and the mutations most likely to be responsible for that evolutionary leap from birds to humans...

The relevance of evolution to medicine is, however, much broader....

The time has clearly come for medicine to explicitly integrate evolutionary biology into its theoretical and practical underpinnings The medical students of Charles Darwin's day did not have the advantage of such a powerful framework to inform their thinking; we shouldn't deprive today's budding medical talent of the potential insights to be gained at the intersection of these two great disciplines.

It is clear that preservation of a religious ideology is the primary factor driving the IDist and creationist contentions that modern medicine has no ties to evolutionary theory. So if your doctor does not "believe" in evolutionary theory because it contradicts his or her religious ideology, you have to ask yourself the following question:

Has my doctor chosen to follow the path of providing the best medical care possible, based on the best science available, and regardless of its potential impact on personal religious views?...or...Has my doctor chosen to follow the path of providing the best medical care possible only so long as it doesn't collide with religious beliefs?