Friday, December 09, 2011

Teaching evolution in medical school

Steve Jones complains about Moslems walking out on evolution lectures in medical school, and explains the value of such lectures:
A few years ago I had an operation to repair a hernia. In that I shared the experience of about one in four British men of my age, in whom a section of intestine breaks through the body wall to form an unpleasant, and potentially dangerous, bulge in the groin. The job was done quickly and efficiently by a surgeon who had, no doubt, done it hundreds of times before.

But why is that procedure needed so often? The story began long ago, when our ancestors were fish. In those happy days ...

Hernias, then, are the result of the imperfect process of evolution, of the slow accumulation of successful mistakes and of the inevitable pressure of compromise. A surgeon may not need to know that and the first hernia operations were carried out well before The Origin of Species by people who had no idea why the problem arose; and (although I doubt it) perhaps my own doctor was equally ignorant.

Now, though, we have evolution, the grammar of biology. More and more, students do not like it.
This is unconvincing. He seems to be saying that we have hernias because we are descended from fish. But unless there is some argument that we would not have hernias if we had not been descended from fish, then what does evolution has to do with it?

Furthermore, students attend medical school to learn medicine. Do stories of fish evolution somehow make it easier to do hernia surgeries?

Of course when evolutionists give these lectures, they cannot resist offending people by saying that Adam and Eve never existed and other such anti-religion messages.

No comments: