This Panda’s Thumb entry makes me wonder if I was wasting my time with all those rebuttals of Dr. Michael Egnor’s astoundingly ignorant attacks on “Darwinism.” Could it be that Dr. Egnor really was just pulling our legs all along?
I have to admit that it seems plausible. After all, how could a man like Dr. Egnor make it through an undergraduate biochemistry degree program, then medical school, then the often brutal and–dare I say it?–Darwinian culling process of a neurosurgery residency program, only to go on to become a respected Professor of Neurosurgery at SUNY Stony Brook, and, with all seriousness, still actually believe that evolution explains nothing about how bacterial resistance to antibiotics occurs? After reading his misstatements and misinformation about evolution and suffering through a couple of his podcasts, in which Casey Luskin keeps is nose inserted firmly in Dr. Egnor’s behind, as he breathlessly asks him about how he became a “Darwin skeptic,” I have to admit that, as a fellow surgeon, I was beginning to have a hard time believing that Dr. Egnor was for real, given the way he ignored all evidence and rebuttals, explanations of his misinformation, and soldiered humorlessly ahead claiming that Darwin was responsible for eugenics, that evolution has nothing to do with understanding bacterial resistance to antibiotics, that, because scientists studied comparative anatomy before Darwin, evolution tells us nothing about comparative anatomy, and that evolution contributes nothing to our understanding of genetics, all claims that I’ve rebutted multiple times now. How could someone intelligent enough and driven enough to become a highly respected academic neurosurgeon believe such easily refuted nonsense?
It turns out that maybe Dr. Egnor had a sense of humor after all, and all we “Darwinists” have been suckered. All I can do is tip my hat to the Discovery Institute for a ripping good April Fool’s Day prank. I should have trusted my instincts that no fellow surgeon could be as willfully ignorant and obtuse as Dr. Egnor’s parody of an “intelligent design” creationist has been over the last couple of months!
