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Tenured pundits: Modern medicine needs Darwinism

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The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent DesignOn the other hand,

… modern medicine owes nothing to Darwinism. For one thing, mortality from infectious diseases in the West began declining before 1859, due in large part to public health measures such as the provision of sewage disposal systems and safe water supplies.10 It also included personal hygiene, as the story of Hungarian obstetrician Ignác Semmelweis illustrates.While working in an Austrian hospital in 1847, Semmelweis noticed that the death rate of mothers from puerperal fever was much higher in wards run by medical students than in wards run by midwives. He also noticed that the medical students would go directly from the morgue tothe obstetric ward without washing their hands. By simply requiring the medical students to wash their hands in a chlorine solution, Semmelweis reduced mortality from 30 percent to less than 2 percent.

The modern practice of immunization also originated without any help from Darwinism. Before 1800, smallpox was a serious and often fatal disease. In the 1790s, English physician Edward Jenner found that by vaccinating people with cowpox, a much milder disease, he could immunizethem against smallpox. The worldwide elimination of smallpox in the twentieth century has been one of the most spectacular success stories in modern medicine. Yet Darwinism had nothing to do with it.

Darwinists claim that their theory is needed to deal with viruses such as influenza that “evolve” from year to year. But the preparation of flu vaccines depends on techniques from the fields of virology, immunology, and biochemistry—not evolutionary biology.

– Jonathan Wells, Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design (Regnery, 2006), p. 74.

Could modern medicine be described as a revolt against Darwinism?

Comments
Bornagain77 @5 I do not understand the nature of your question and in what way it has anything to do with the question I asked concerning the use of ID in the context medical research. I feel my question is very straight forward, so I am not sure why you would digress from it. Could you elaborate please and/or address my question? Thank you.Doveton
April 20, 2011
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Nah, it’s not a protest against Darwinism. It just doesn’t need it. Modern medicine is for grown-ups who are willing to engage in the messiness of real life in order to bring health to others. Darwinism is for perpetual adolescents in the academy, clinging to their utopias and the boogeymen of Christianity and Capitalism. Nary the twain shall meet.allanius
April 20, 2011
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Doveton, and by Darwinism declaring, at one time, that 180 organs in the body were vestigial, and by Darwinists, until very recently, declaring most of the DNA was junk, , with still some die-hards Darwinists declaring the majority of DNA is junk, though 'Junk DNA' regions are now known to be 'regulatory', and thus important for the study of genetic diseases, Doveton could you please tell me how Darwinism has been anything but a hinderance to medicine, and please don't hand me any tripe about antibiotics since antibiotics are developed to accord to the known 'limits' of degenerative micro-evolutionbornagain77
April 20, 2011
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Well, for one, accrding to Richard Dawkins we would be looking at a totally different type of biology- meaning it would be a whole new ballgame.Joseph
April 20, 2011
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I was thinking a bit about this:
… modern medicine owes nothing to Darwinism.
Given this, is there any concept within Intelligent Design that would suggest a relationship between certain animals - say rabbits or mice and humans - that would lead researchers to predict that such animals would be good test models to indicate whether given treatments would work on (or have adverse effects on) human beings? I'm just curious as to what extent ID would be (or has been) useful to medicine.Doveton
April 20, 2011
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OT: Safeguarding genome integrity through extraordinary DNA repair Excerpt: Far more accurate but more complex is homologous recombination, a mechanism involving many steps where something could go wrong. Upon detecting a double-strand break in DNA, several proteins rush to the damaged area. The protein machinery trims back the ends of the broken strands (called ‘resection’)to produce single-strand regions recognized by other proteins, including one called ATRIP. Another protein, Rad51, is recruited to form filaments on the single-stranded DNA. Rad51 and its associated proteins search for a complementary sequence of DNA in a neighboring chromatid or homologous chromosome. They invade and open that DNA to form a “D-loop” – like untwisting a rope to open and expose its individual strands. Using the exposed complementary sequence as a template, proteins rebuild the broken DNA into a copy of the sequence that was originally damaged; in this way the broken double strand is remade with its damaged section accurately reproduced. It’s an ideal method for repairing breaks in gene-rich euchromatin,,, Homologous recombination is a complex mechanism with multiple steps, but also with many points of regulation to insure accurate recombination at every stage,,, http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-04-safeguarding-genome-extraordinary-dna.html ,,,Of course after describing such a elegant repair process, they threw the obligatory nod to Darwinism for having such 'foresight' to evolve (favor) such a elegant repair mechanism.,,, Perhaps they should actually 'evolve' something, anything, before they place such blind faith???bornagain77
April 19, 2011
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Science Owes Nothing To Darwinian Evolution - Jonathan Wells - video http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4028096/ "Certainly, my own research with antibiotics during World War II received no guidance from insights provided by Darwinian evolution. Nor did Alexander Fleming's discovery of bacterial inhibition by penicillin. I recently asked more than 70 eminent researchers if they would have done their work differently if they had thought Darwin's theory was wrong. The responses were all the same: No. I also examined the outstanding biodiscoveries of the past century: the discovery of the double helix; the characterization of the ribosome; the mapping of genomes; research on medications and drug reactions; improvements in food production and sanitation; the development of new surgeries; and others. I even queried biologists working in areas where one would expect the Darwinian paradigm to have most benefited research, such as the emergence of resistance to antibiotics and pesticides. Here, as elsewhere, I found that Darwin's theory had provided no discernible guidance, but was brought in, after the breakthroughs, as an interesting narrative gloss.",,, When an explanation is so supple that it can explain any behavior, it is difficult to test it experimentally, much less use it as a catalyst for scientific discovery." Philip S. Skell is Emeritus Evan Pugh Professor at Pennsylvania State University, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=2816bornagain77
April 19, 2011
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