Egnor just doesn't know when to quit

Egnor: "Darwinism" has nothing to offer to medicine;

It wasn't too long ago that some bloggers were worried about medical journals using words other than "evolution" to describe evolutionary changes. I've tended to think that it's not a grave problem, as surely most peole know that "change" or "adapt" used in a medical paper refers to the same processes that "evolve" does. Yet it may be that Egnor is the counterexample to my lackadaisical response.

He may have some literalistic affliction, whether through nature or nurture I wouldn't know. Apparently if you say "adapt" or "change", he thinks that these are different from "evolve". And of course, like most IDiots, he seems unable to realize that "evolution" itself, hence phylogenies, leads to no predictable patterns or consequences unless it is constrained by solid, evidenced, mechanisms. No doubt he'd agree with Tara's points about phylogenetic studies, he'd just not connect it with natural selection, or even if he did in these particular cases, he'd not be able to generalize HIV phylogenies and ape/human phylogenies, despite there being no qualitative differences between the two.

I think that Egnor's unacknowledged point is that you can learn medicine piecemeal, without learning how to synthesize or to generalize. He reads "adapt", and doesn't connect it to "evolve". He presumably recognizes that phylogenies can be useful in medicine and in determining human breeding patterns, but he simply can't move beyond their specific truth to the recognition that the same patterns exist throughout life.

He never was able to think synthetically and generally like a scientist does (at least I see no evidence that he can or could), and yet he probably is quite a good surgeon. Thus he does not recognize that he'd probably be a (marginally) better surgeon and teacher if he did know how to connect the piecemeal knowledge that he can spit out so well, nor does he recognize how much more important it is for medical researchers to do what he cannot, which is to think theoretically and universally.

Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/35s39o

the insight that Darwinism brings to the problem --- the unkilled ones eventually outnumber the killed ones --- is of no help. We can figure that out ourselves.

Re "(spouted following a paragraph wherein he claims that the evolution of antibiotic resistance is just a tautology),"

Besides, a tautology is something that's always true. So trying to argue against something by calling it a tautology, doesn't make sense. Or is that just me?

Henry

Besides, a tautology is something that's always true. So trying to argue against something by calling it a tautology, doesn't make sense.

the insight that Darwinism brings to the problem --- the unkilled ones eventually outnumber the killed ones --- is of no help. We can figure that out ourselves.

Just yesterday there was an article in the NYTimes that patently demonstrate the utility of ToE principles in microbiology, epidemiology and molecular genetics. Below is a badly produced job of cut-and-paste with some relevants sentences. All mistakes and errors are mine.

Dr. Finberg's experiments show that virus traps have some promise, but they do not reveal exactly why they failed to eradicate the virus. "What is the threshold for these traps so that they will force the viruses into extinction?" asks Paul E. Turner, an evolutionary biologist at Yale. Dr. Turner and his colleagues are trying to find the answer, but instead of studying mice, they are studying bacteria. Dr. Turner and his colleagues created a mathematical model to predict how phi-6 (virus) would fair if they mixed viral traps into a colony of normal Pseudomonas hosts. They predicted that the more virus traps the scientists added, the more the virus population would shrink. Above a threshold of traps, the viruses would not be able replace their lost numbers, and they would disappear completely. Now Dr. Turner and his colleagues are using what they have learned with bacteria to study HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

Just yesterday there was an article in the NYTimes that patently demonstrate the utility of ToE principles in microbiology, epidemiology and molecular genetics. Below is a badly produced job of cut-and-paste with some relevants sentences. All mistakes and errors are mine.

Dr. Finberg's experiments show that virus traps have some promise, but they do not reveal exactly why they failed to eradicate the virus. "What is the threshold for these traps so that they will force the viruses into extinction?" asks Paul E. Turner, an evolutionary biologist at Yale. Dr. Turner and his colleagues are trying to find the answer, but instead of studying mice, they are studying bacteria. Dr. Turner and his colleagues created a mathematical model to predict how phi-6 (virus) would fair if they mixed viral traps into a colony of normal Pseudomonas hosts. They predicted that the more virus traps the scientists added, the more the virus population would shrink. Above a threshold of traps, the viruses would not be able replace their lost numbers, and they would disappear completely. Now Dr. Turner and his colleagues are using what they have learned with bacteria to study HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

I guess the gist of Egnor's thesis is that doctors, and med-schools, don't use evolution directly, biologists use evolution, and doctors use what the biologists find using evolution, without having to undrstand how the biologists came up with all that useful stuff.

Sort of like me posting to this blog without understanding how the software that makes it possible works. I don't have to understand it, as long as someone else understands it for me.

The big difference between me and Egnor, of course, is that I admit my ignorance, and don't go around bloviating about the "relevance" of something I use but don't understand.

the insight that Darwinism brings to the problem --- the unkilled ones eventually outnumber the killed ones --- is of no help. We can figure that out ourselves.

I think that Egnor's unacknowledged point is that you can learn medicine piecemeal, without learning how to synthesize or to generalize.

Egnor is guilty of gross hypocrisy when it comes to antibiotic resistance.

As I pointed out in another thread, he admits that it is the result of genetic variation and natural selection. It's patently obvious that first of all, this is evolution, and second of all, understanding that this is the mechanism is crucial to dealing with antibiotic resistance.

I've also pointed out the only possible reason for his behavior in this matter. Right wing politics.

I don't say that to promote or criticize any single political ideology. In the interest of full disclosure, I do not support right wing politics, but that is not my point here.

I am merely making the factual observation that ID was invented by the right wing to "court-proof" creationism, in order to pander to "fundamentalists". It has no sincere religious meaning; what kind of a clown would hang his spirituality on convoluted arguments about the existence of an uncharacterizable "designer"? It was and is an (extremely unsuccessful) piece of politically motivated would-be legal chicanery.

When I point this out, I get no protests from IDiots, and rare apologetic protests from people who consider themselves "right wing" but are too honest to lie about science. No-one has the nerve to deny that ID is a tool of the "conservative movement", and indeed, denying that would cost it the DI a lot of money!

Egnor lies about evolution, and the only major reason I've observed for lying about evolution is a misguided belief that doing so either promotes the success of, or at least signals one's support for, right wing politics.

Few health care professionals actually working in relevant fields seem to either agree with this guy or have a problem with evolution.

I put the keywords evolution drug resistance into the search box at the National Library of Medicine, pubmed.gov. A list of 3,125 papers came up. These, for the most part, are not Darwinists making a point. They are researchers dealing with common serious problems that determine whether people live or die. Other combinations of relevant keywords would probably show the same type of results.

It seems people are up in arms about Egnor not just because he is preposterously wrong but also because his axe grinding would be dangerous if anyone took it seriously.

It would be in cancer therapy. Malignant cells microevolve resistance to therapies; radiation, chemo, biologicals. So you just work down the list until all options stop working. The patient dies. That's why it is important to keep developing new treatments. Basic knowledge any oncologist knows.

Raven -

Cancer and infectious disease are extremely clear examples of evolutionary processes, representing the results of genetic variation (including somatic cell mutations in the case of cancer) and natural selection. In the case of cancer, malignant cells can transiently gain a reproductive advantage over normal cells. This can lead to the malignant cell population ultimately going extinct when they destroy their own environment (the multicelluar organism itself).

Likewise, many genetic diseases are straightforward examples of evolutionary processes. In some cases, there's even an interaction between positive selection for heterozygotes and devastating disease for homozygotes.

Not every disease is understood, and even the ones above are complex in the extreme. But the fact the humans evolved, and share the most common traits with other placental mammals, especially primates, is always important.

The relationship between biology and medicine has always been and will always be symbiotic, and much of what is known about modern biology came from medical questions.

Dr Egnor does both medicine and biology a disservice by allowing his political biases to drive him to embrace pseudoscience.

Here is a real medical perspective on the importance of evolutionary thought in medicine. Egnor is way out of step with with current medical thought. He would be dangerous if anyone took him seriously but I'm sure those in the field(s) where evolutionary thought is important will just egnore him. It is really a matter of life and death.

PLoS Biol. 2007 February; 5(2): e30.
Published online 2007 February 13. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0050030.
Copyright : © 2007 Antonovics et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Evolution by Any Other Name: Antibiotic Resistance and Avoidance of the E-Word
Janis Antonovics,* Jessica L Abbate, Christi Howell Baker, Douglas Daley, Michael E Hood, Christina E Jenkins, Louise J Johnson, James J Murray, Vijay Panjeti, Volker H. W Rudolf, Dan Sloan, and Joanna Vondrasek

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: ja8n@virginia.edu

Top
Supporting Information
References
The increase in resistance of human pathogens to antimicrobial agents is one of the best-documented examples of evolution in action at the present time, and because it has direct life-and-death consequences, it provides the strongest rationale for teaching evolutionary biology as a rigorous science in high school biology curricula, universities, and medical schools. In spite of the importance of antimicrobial resistance, we show that the actual word "evolution" is rarely used in the papers describing this research. Instead, antimicrobial resistance is said to "emerge," "arise," or "spread" rather than "evolve." Moreover, we show that the failure to use the word "evolution" by the scientific community may have a direct impact on the public perception of the importance of evolutionary biology in our everyday lives.

To establish whether the word "evolution" is used with different frequency by evolutionary biologists versus researchers in the medical fields, we searched scientific journals published since 2000 for research papers and reviews dealing with antimicrobial resistance. To find these papers, we used standard search engines and databases to identify papers with "antimicrobial resistance" or "antibiotic resistance" (or with names of specific antibiotics) in the titles or abstract. We deliberately did not include the word "evolution" in the searches, so as not to bias our findings in favor of articles with this word. However, we chose for further analysis only those articles that were obviously describing the evolution of antimicrobial resistance, and excluded those that described, for example, the biochemical basis of resistance or the pharmacology of antimicrobial agents. The articles were chosen in an unbiased manner by several readers who each independently read the first papers they found that met these criteria. We compared 15 articles that were primarily published in evolutionary journals (such as Evolution, Genetics, and Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series B) with 15 articles that were published in primarily medical journals (such as The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, and The Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy). (A list of the papers and articles that are the basis of the results reported here is available in Text S1.)

Each reader then read the articles in their entirety. In each paper we explicitly noted and counted the words or phrases (see below) that were used to describe the evolutionary process, in order to obtain the proportion of times that the actual word "evolution" (or its lexemes such as "evolutionary" or "evolving") was used when reference was being made to the evolutionary process. Although we deliberately read equal numbers of articles in the two types of journals, we actually found that by far the majority of publications on the evolution of antibiotic resistance are in the medical field, and not in academic evolutionary biology or genetics journals. The evolution of antibiotic resistance, while critically important from a medical viewpoint, is no longer in and of itself a novel finding in evolutionary biology.

The results of our survey showed a huge disparity in word use between the evolutionary biology and biomedical research literature (Figure 1). In research reports in journals with primarily evolutionary or genetic content, the word "evolution" was used 65.8% of the time to describe evolutionary processes (range 10%---94%, mode 50%---60%, from a total of 632 phrases referring to evolution). However, in research reports in the biomedical literature, the word "evolution" was used only 2.7% of the time (range 0%---75%, mode 0%---10%, from a total of 292 phrases referring to evolution), a highly significant difference (chi-square, p < 0.001). Indeed, whereas all the articles in the evolutionary genetics journals used the word "evolution," ten out of 15 of the articles in the biomedical literature failed to do so completely. Instead, 60.0% of the time antimicrobial resistance was described as "emerging," "spreading," or "increasing" (range 0%---86%, mode 30%---40%); in contrast, these words were used only 7.5% of the time in the evolutionary literature (range 0%---25%, mode 0%---10%). Other nontechnical words describing the evolutionary process included "develop," "acquire," "appear," "trend," "become common," "improve," and "arise." Inclusion of technical words relating to evolution (e.g., "selection," "differential fitness," "genetic change," or "adaptation") did not substantially alter the picture: in evolutionary journals, evolution-related words were used 79.1% of the time that there was an opportunity to use them (range 26%---98%, mode 50%---60%), whereas in biomedical journals they were used only 17.8% of the time (range 0%---92%, mode 0%---10%).

In spite of the disparity in word use, we found that the papers in the medical literature generally included professional and competent descriptions of evolutionary processes. At times words such as "develop" or "acquire" did creep in, but egregiously misleading phrases were relatively rare. For example, once we found the wording "bacteria had learned to resist antibiotics" and at another time "the activity of antimicrobial agents had decreased" (which, if read literally, implies that the antimicrobials themselves were changing rather than that the pathogens were evolving). But these were exceptions.

In reading these papers, we found no evidence that deliberate efforts were being made by medical researchers to deny that evolutionary processes were involved in the increase of antibiotic resistance. The frequent use of the term "emergence" rather than "evolution" seemed more to be the result of a simplified phraseology that has "emerged and spread" out of habit and repeated usage. It may also be that many nonprofessional evolutionary biologists consider "evolution" to be a rather nonspecific word meaning "gradual change," and that "emergence" more explicitly incorporates the component aspects of the evolutionary process, namely, mutation, recombination, and/or horizontal transfer of resistance. The word "spread" may, similarly, appear to incorporate the component processes of transmission, horizontal transfer, and increase in allele frequency. While these processes are recognized by professional evolutionary biologists as important aspects of evolutionary change, biomedical researchers may have the sense that the word "evolution" is itself too imprecise. Indeed, evolutionary biologists are sometimes accused of focusing too much attention on "change in gene frequency" rather than on the origin of variants by mutation and recombination, or on the consequences of changes in allele frequency for numerical abundance and distribution.

There is also the possibility that the failure to use the word "evolution" may reflect the mistaken sense that evolution implies processes that are long past, slow, and imperceptible. This is more worrying, as it fails to acknowledge the importance of evolution as a powerful force in present-day populations of all organisms, and not only microbes.

A critical question is whether avoidance of the word "evolution" has had an impact on the public perception of science. To investigate this, we examined whether the use of the term "evolution" in the scientific literature affects the use of this word in the popular press, i.e., whether there is evidence for "cultural inheritance" of word use. We searched articles on antimicrobial resistance in national media outlets, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Fox News, and the BBC (Text S1). Our results showed that the proportion of times the word "evolution" was used in a popular article was highly correlated with how often it was used in the original scientific paper to which the popular article referred (Figure 2). This clearly shows that the public is more likely to be exposed to the idea of evolution and its real-world consequences if the word "evolution" is also being used in the technical literature.

We wondered whether these patterns were changing, so we carried out a survey of the use of the word "evolution" from 1991 to 2005 in the titles and abstracts of papers published in 14 scientific journals, as well as in the titles of proposals funded by both the US National Science Foundation (Division of Environmental Biology) and the US National Institutes of Health (National Institute of General Medical Sciences). The results showed that the use of the word "evolution" was actually increasing in all fields of biology, with the greatest relative increases in the areas of general science and medicine (Figure 3). This reflects the growing importance of evolutionary concepts in the biomedical field, and highlights even more the strange rarity with which the word "evolution" is used in the biomedical literature dealing with antimicrobial resistance. It has been repeatedly rumored (and reiterated by one of the reviewers of this article) that both the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation have in the past actively discouraged the use of the word "evolution" in titles or abstracts of proposals so as to avoid controversy. Indeed, we were told by one researcher that in the title of one proposal, the authors were urged to change the phrase "the evolution of sex" to the more arcanely eloquent wording "the advantage of bi-parental genomic recombination."

Nowadays, medical researchers are increasingly realizing that evolutionary processes are involved in immediate threats associated with not only antibiotic resistance but also emerging diseases [1,2]. 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 [3,4]. 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.

Harold, Everyone here agrees that Egnor is wrong and would be a menace to human health and progress if anyone actually took him seriously.

It won't happen at least in the scientific and medical communities. One can easily find hundreds or thousands of concrete examples where evolutionary concepts were used in health care related research and treatment.

He might not need to know it to saw someone's skull open and poke around with a scalpel. There is a lot more to medicine and medical research than neurosurgery.

Did Dr. Egnor take the hypocritic oath?

:-)

Besides, a tautology is something that's always true. So trying to argue against something by calling it a tautology, doesn't make sense. Or is that just me?

No, Dr. Egnor. You do not understand tautologies. You do not understand science. And you are a disgrace to your profession, and a danger to your patients.

One thing you can say for the DI/Creationist folks, at least they know how to recycle the same old tired drivel over and over again.

But, I guess this kind of recycling won't win you any I'm green awards (unless you're the real scientist trying to hold back the bile in the back of your throat).

Whether Darwinism has anything to offer medicine has nothing to do with whether it is correct or not.

Whether Darwinism has anything to offer medicine has nothing to do with whether it is correct or not.

If the argument is that evolution is wrong or did not occur because the theory is not used in modern medicine, then the argument is fallacious. Raven is correct and whether or not the theory is used in any given field is irrelavant to its validity. The Law of Segregation is not used to make ice cream, that doesn't mean that it is incorrect.

If the argument is that the theory of evolution is not used because it is wrong then the argument is based on faulty assumptions. First, as has been amply illustrated by Andrea and others, it is used all the time in modern medicine. Second, the theory of evolution has never been disproven, (except in the minds of those who refuse to believe). So to claim that it is not used because it is wrong is just begging the question.

I don't know what Egnor hopes to gain by claiming that his ignorance is evidence of anything. I guess if that's all you've got you've got to run with it until you collapse.

I don't know what Egnor hopes to gain by claiming that his ignorance is evidence of anything.

A correct theory might or might not have a practical application. (Though having such does reinforce confidence in that theory, since it supplies lots of testing of predictions.)

An incorrect one had better not, or its application might crash. (Unless the part of the theory used in that application happens to be a close enough approximation to work anyway, such as using Newton's laws at low speeds in reasonably flat space.)

Henry

Poppers Ghost earlier thread said: ...Egnor has actually said. Egnor in fact questions even microevolution, specifically microevolution of resistance to antibiotics: [quoting Egnor] "It's one thing to propose that animals might get longer fur if the weather turns colder because of natural selection. You know, it's a perfectly reasonable inference. You might infer that bacteria that had mutations that in some accidental way prevented them from being killed by antibiotics might have evolved resistance to antibiotics. Those are all plausible. I'm not so sure they're so well proven, but they're plausible."