Opposition to Evolution is Making a Difference

One evening, while driving home from officiating a basketball game, I was listening to the radio program of physicist Dr. Michio Kaku. He made a comment that intrigued me, something to the effect that modern medicine wouldn't be what it is today without Darwin's Theory of Evolution. I sent him an e-mail to find out why that might be so, but all I got was a reply apologizing that he cannot respond to as many e-mails as he gets everyday - please feel free to call into the program. Well, I haven't done that yet, but I did come across a chapter of the book Evolutionary Medicine edited by W. R. Trevathan, J. J. McKenna and E. O. Smith (New York, Oxford University Press, 2nd edition). The chapter was written by R. M. Nesse and is titled "The Importance of Evolution for Medicine."

Briefly, Nesse states that, while the Theory of Evolution has made major significant contributions to medicine, there is still much work to do. In quoting Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin's grandfather, regarding his vision of a single theory to unify all of medicine, Nesse makes clear that he believes Evolution to be that unifying theory. He then says the following (pp. 420-1):

Of course, there was no real theory to justify Erasmus Darwin’s vision until his grandson Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace discovered natural selection. In the century and a half since the publication of The Origin of Species (1859), one would think that these ideas would have been applied to medicine in every possible way, but it now appears that we are still just getting started. Why it has taken so long is a good question for historians; the one available history of Darwinian medicine is not yet available in English (Zampieri, 2006).

While we wait for historians to address the issue, some reasons for the delay seem straightforward. One is the slow acceptance of Darwinism in general. Opposition from religious quarters is part of the picture. Some doctors are creationists, and a remarkable number of physicians think intelligent design is a viable alternative to evolution. They are too few to constitute a major obstacle in themselves, but together with community sentiment, they make deans and other leaders wary of public commitments to evolution that may arouse controversy. [emphasis mine]

In other words, the voices of opponents to Evolution have not lost the battle. There are voices out there which see this opposition as an irrational hindrance to the advance of medicine just the same as the Catholic church's opposition to Galileo, and they would lay the blame of lost lives at the feet of Darwin's opponents, but this case is made more subtly at this time mostly because there is no evidence to make so strong a case. They save such vociferous attacks for embryonic stem cell research.

It surprised me to see such an admission. I have heard of cases of researchers being ostracized for opposing Darwinism or even suggesting it may not be true, but thankfully these seem to be isolated cases, at least one would hope so. Then again, Ben Stein's film "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" tries to make the contrary case. Wherever the full truth may lie, it seems supporters of Intelligent Design and Creationism are having some effect.