Friday, December 19, 2008

 

Hard on Pants


Who said this?

[Darwinists] state that "medicine has already suffered from a widespread lack of appreciation of evolutionary principles" and imply that the overuse of antibiotics was due to ignorance of those principles. This is simply nonsense. The vast majority of scientists and physicians involved, indoctrinated in evolutionary theory, were well aware of these principles and would have proceeded in exactly the same manner with or without the theory. The simple fact is that in any population of bacteria there is considerable genetic variability. Long before these bacteria were exposed to antibiotics, some of these individuals possessed enzymes able to destroy certain antibiotics-an ability purely coincidental to their normal function in the metabolic activities of these bacteria. When in the course of time man exposed these bacteria to antibiotics, a few individuals in each population that possessed those enzymes had the ability to destroy the antibiotic and survive. They flourished and in some cases have replaced the original susceptible populations. Evolutionary theory had nothing to do with the discovery and utilization of this knowledge ....
You would certainly be justified in guessing it was Dr. Michael Egnor, the Discovery Institute's highly skilled meat cutter. After all, he has been pushing this bogus line of argument hard of late.

But, no, it wasn't Egnor, though it was certainly a fellow traveler ... Duane Gish.

I don't know if one is copying the other. They may have come up with this argument independently. That wouldn't be any surprise ... after all, they have so much in common.
.

Comments:
About the headline: was the double entendre intentional?
 
I notice the magazine that published Gish's crap said they did so to "air the other view" without noting that the "other view" is devoid of any scientific validity and the two views were not equally valid.
 
Eamon ... Eamon ... do you think I'd speak lightly of anyone who deserves the label "hard on"?

I agree, Mark. You'd think Mother Earth News would be a bit more forceful in its disclaimers, especially since Gish is attacking St. Ehrlich. (Did I say that?)
 
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