Religion & Law

Dangerous Fool

By John Pieret

Mark Chu-Carroll has an excellent must-read post on why Dr. Michel Egnor's blather about evolution being useless in medical practice because natural selection is supposedly a tautology ("what survives, survives") is not only wrong, it would be, even if true, only trivially so and why Egnor's misrepresentations, on the other hand, are not themselves trivial and must be constantly and forcefully opposed.

Egnor is wrong because he leaves out the crucial and well supported observation that offspring aren't exactly the same as their parents, and those changes can be inherited by their offspring. That means that populations are not merely shifting between preexisting traits but that new traits are arising that have immense import for medical practice.

But even if we ignore this fundamental error of Egnor's, all science can have crucial bits reduced to apparent tautologies because logically valid syllogisms, on which inferences can be based, have to be tautological in order to be valid.

Finally, Mark demonstrates from personal experience why Egnor's misrepresentation can lead to tragic results:

My father died a year and a half ago. What finally killed him was pneumonia. But what caused his death was the stupidity and ignorance of an asshole doctor. My father died of an antibiotic resistant infection. His doctor was, unfortunately, a fundamentalist christian, but for some reason, my dad trusted him. This doctor watched as a series of infections ravaged my father's body, and at pretty much every step, he did the wrong damned thing. The reasoning behind his errors relates directly to the kind of argument Egnor makes: antibiotic resistance isn't the production of new traits; it's merely the selection of existing traits in a population. So he prescribed antibiotics in a way that anyone with a damned clue about how bacteria evolve would have predicted would increase the antibiotic resistance of the bacteria.

Egnor is not just a ludicrous shill for religious denial of science, he is a dangerous one.
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Full post as published by Thoughts in a Haystack on December 15, 2008 (boomark / email).