As much as I’ve enjoyed the humorous tangent (including Dale’s classic!), I should take personal responsibility for my sin of derailing the thread and now try to get it back on the tracks. So I will cite @T_aquaticus’ excellent summation of some important history:
Well put.
I am regularly reminded that many people (most people?) assume that their intuitions are infallibly trustworthy. Indeed, we all fall victim to our fallible intuition at least once in a while. I suppose intuition helps with making quick survival decisions, so it apparently has important advantages which natural selection processes cultivated in our species. (??) Tribalism is at least in part a result of intuitive forces. (“They don’t look like us so they must not be part of our community—and so I feel apprehensive about them. We need to be afraid of those who appear to be different from us. That’s my gut feeling.”)
A different way to put it is that for most of history we simply didn’t have the knowledge, databases, or computing power to apply evolution in the field of medicine. That is quickly changing, as @evograd mentions. We only finished a rough draft of the human genome 18 years ago. I remember a lab meeting ca. 2001 where someone held up a CD that contained the first draft of the human genome, and we were a bit in awe. Sequencing a 2-3 million base bacterial genome used to take up an entire graduate or post-doc multi year project, and now it can be done in an afternoon. Times have changed.
That is the kind of “bombshell fact” of modern science that gives me the same kind of “transcendent moment” I experienced when @NLENTS described and posted his Neanderthal genome excerpt. Mind-blowing. An entire bacterial genome sequenced in an afternoon! Incredible technology.
Read it again carefully.
the sum is AHA THATS WHAT CREATIONISTS have always been saying. its an equation.
If present biological processes, and so healing biology, is so difficult to figure out , or understand what your not figuring out, THAT STARE US IN THE FACE , then HOW much more, on a probability curve, would it be to figure out processes that are past and gone . SUrely it would be greatly more difficult. so its unlikely that figuring out biological origins is settled ot accurate. even if it was settled and accurate.
its like what God said to Job. if you can’t understand the things of nature then why the things of heaven.
Wait a minute. In all that has or is done in medicine NO evolutionism is irrelevant. despite its claims to the origin of biological complexity and workings. so the Docs are right!
In the case of germs resistance etc it would only be simple selectionism.
is this example a sample of evolutionisms creation of biology? No! Its just a minor example of selectionism. Has any bacteria that ever resisted drugs become a verified new species with a new name? i doubt it!
Thats only a special case creationists have no problem with.
As for using primates for human research.
Tso using them would he fact is that humans and primates have EXACTLY the same bodyplans. Inside and out. Thats why we must use them.
the conclusion they are related to us by common descent is irrelevnt to the use and its not proven. if we were not from common descent they also would be rightly used.
Its only a interpretation that we are related but unrelated to the fact we have the same body.
If evolutionism was wrong as could be IT also would be that its irrelevant to medicine.
Right or wrong evolutionism is ireelevant to the medical research relative to what it should be if it was true. However evolutionism does not bring intellectual help for healing.
