Monday, June 6, 2016

Challenge to the Discovery Institute

I was doing some minor editing to a previous post ("Klingy thinks Medical Doctors' Opinions are Important, on non-medical topics, Is it?") and something occurred to me.  If it's true, that medical doctors support Intelligent Design (ID) more than they do Evolution, I would like klingy, or any of the other talking heads from the Discovery Institute, to explain to me just:

What parts of Intelligent Design theory are medical doctors using in their medical practice?
I'm serious.  In the original post from little davey 'klingy' klinghoffer, he stated that medical doctors:
"have a special perspective on intelligent design"
He tried to 'explain' that's because they focus on 'function', so evolution is useless to them.  Of course the concept of 'function' has nothing to do with ID at all.  'Function' is like a snapshot in time.  The heart does this, the liver does this . . . we understand many of these things because of the doctors and researchers that have studied these things for years.  Where is ID 'theory' in all this?

If evolution is useless to doctors, and they have a 'special' perspective on ID, just what part of ID are they using in their medical practice? I mean if ID is supposed to be a replacement evolutionary theory, then shouldn't it address the same questions? Particularly questions evolution addressed decades ago?

Here is a link to a website from Berkeley, we've mentioned this site before, "Understanding Evolution".  It's basically a free, on-line Evolution 101 course from UC Berkeley.  If you haven't taken a look, I highly recommend it.  This specific link is for relevance of evolution in medicine.  They go into a number of cases, including infectious diseases . . . like the flu and immunizations, antibiotic resistance, HIV--SIV--FIV's evolutionary history, genetic diseases, and more.

Let's add a bit to my challenge, here should be an easy one:
How does ID explain antibiotic resistance?   
If you can't handle this one, how about picking any of the other case studies from the Berkeley site and try and explain the ID perspective on it.  Be specific, vague references and unsupported conclusions won't cut it.

One last thing from Berkeley, the closing quote from this section [underlining added by me for emphasis]:
"Understanding evolution helps us solve biological problems that impact our lives. There are excellent examples of this in the field of medicine. To stay one step ahead of pathogenic diseases, researchers must understand the evolutionary patterns of disease-causing organisms. To control hereditary diseases in people, researchers study the evolutionary histories of the disease-causing genes. In these ways, a knowledge of evolution can improve the quality of human life." (Berkeley:  Evolution Relevance)
Individual medical doctors may not need a thorough understanding of Evolution to do their job, but any that deny Evolution's relevance to modern medicine and medical treatments is either ignorant or deliberately misleading you, in either case, you might want to find a new doctor!

So there is my challenge.  I want to know what impact ID has had on modern medicine!  In all honesty, I don't expect an answer from the DI.  But in equal honesty, I think anyone whose doctor disagrees with evolution should be able to answer my challenge.

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