Even in a heightened state of cynicism, this isn’t something I would have guessed. In comments to the Santorum post, Becky Stanek points out that most medical doctors believe that evolution should be taught in schools. That brought me up short — “most”? Shouldn’t it be “essentially all”?
Actually, no. The poll results are, from my perspective, horrifying. Some lowlights:
- 37% of physicians do not agree that the theory of evolution is more correct than intelligent design.
- More than half of Protestant physicians (54%) agree more with intelligent design than with evolution.
- 35% of those Protestants believe that God created humans in their present form.
- Half of all doctors believe that schools should be allowed to teach intelligent design.
- When asked whether intelligent design has legitimacy as science, an overwhelming majority of Jewish doctors (83%) and half of Catholic doctors (51%) believe that intelligent design is simply “a religiously inspired pseudo- science rather than a legitimate scientific speculation,” while more than half of Protestant doctors (63%) believe that intelligent design is a “legitimate scientific speculation.”
Don’t doctors have to, you know, go to college? I could imagine noise at the 10% level, but this kind of widespread superstition among purportedly educated people is appalling. What is going on?
Wow. Then I take back the last sentence of the comment I just made on the preious thread!
I was just going to comment on this. Becky was presenting this in an optomistic light, but ugh. This survey is really shocking. You mentioned most of the statistics above, but there’s also this: while “half of Catholic doctors (51%) believe that intelligent design is simply ‘a religiously inspired pseudo- science rather than a legitimate scientific speculation,’ they also find that “more than half of Catholic doctors (62%) feel that schools should be allowed (not required) to teach intelligent design”. So that means that at least 11% of Catholic doctors know it’s crap, but still want to teach it to children.
I agree, Sean, I’m going to start asking my doctors whether they believe in evolution.
Sean wrote:
“What is going on?”
Simple. The notion that anyone with a brain in their head and a decent education will automatically choose darwinism is clearly misguided.
Apparently there are large numbers of highly intelligent people with rigourous scientific training who think darwinism is a bunch of horsepookey.
Read “A Scientific Case for Intelligent Design” here:
http://www.charliewagner.com/casefor.htm
While these findings are surely surprising, I’m not sure if belief in intelligent design as opposed to evolution should be a major consideration in choosing a doctor. Doctors are in the business of healing sick people, and in my opinion they can be just as good at it irrespective of which side they are on in some philosophical/paleontological debate.
Choosing your doctor according to his irrelevant belief in evolution is just not rational.
It’s coming for the astronomers, too! In a new bible-studies cirriculum being taught in public schools around the country (312 districts so far):
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/01/education/01bible.html?
I can’t actually bring myself to type out the story that’s being presented as fact, but you can find it here:
http://snopes.com/religion/lostday.htm
What is personally acceptable to someone as an explanation varies widely it seems, and may be culturally determined. E.g. if “God created us as we are” is an acceptable explanation in a culture, perhaps people of that culture won’t pursue certain areas of biology with the intensity that people of some other culture. Perhaps that helps determine who will dedicate themselves to a career in science, and perhaps that helps explain the 26% of the Nobel Prizes in physics and the 29% in Medicine whose winners are Jewish.
It may be very similar to the answer to the question – why do liberal predominate in the university science departments?
My mother was having some heart issues, which fortunately turned out to be quite benign. The back-up beat regulator (or something like that) was sometimes firing when it shouldn’t. Her doctor told her that it just shows how well God designed the heart, that it has built-in backups which don’t work against each other. When she told me this story, I pointed out the strangeness of his attitude, though apparently it is to be expected.
I do agree though, that doctors should be picked based on how good they are at diagnosing and treating health issues, not on their religious beliefs.
Back in my days as an undergraduate physics major tutoring students in introductory physics courses, there was nothing more frustrating than trying to get some pre-med students to actually think independently. For one reason or another, there was always a sub-population who were very good at memorizing and regurgitating information, without ever apparently thinking, in any way whatsoever, about what it meant. Repeatedly, I would work with students who could not identify from a word problem what variables were given to them and which they were solving for, merely because they would not stop for a second and think about it.
I am not sure myself if this would even hinder them seriously in medicine, since I can imagine there is a place for people who can deal mechanically with a great deal of information. I can even see how the approach might be useful for dealing with the vast range of topics covered by the MCAT. But it does cause a great doubt as to whether one can really consider all doctors as having “rigourous scientific training”. Some do, yes, but some treat the sciences like places and dates in a history book, to be catalogued rather than understood, and I think this is a mainfestation of that,
Part of the problem is with the (doubtless deliberate) ambiguity of the phrase “intelligent design”. On the face of it, all it means is that some features of life are the way they are because God wanted them that way. That’s pretty much implied by any remotely traditional form of theism, it’s perfectly consistent with acceptance of evolution, and any number of good scientists could honestly sign up to it. But what the Discovery Institute loons mean by “intelligent design” adds to that the claim that there’s a scientific theory of intelligent design, and good evidence for features of life that couldn’t have arisen without divine intervention, and so on. Which is a different matter entirely.
(I’ve said “God” and “divine intervention” even though the party line of the ID folks is that the designer could be, um, aliens or something. Who do they think they’re kidding?)
Some of those poll results are pretty scary even with the most charitable interpretation I can come up with, though.
A few reasons:
i) Doctors dont really get any training in evolution.
ii) Much more important: on a daily basis doctors come face to face with the incredible complexity of the human body. Many simply “cant believe” that this is all a result of chance. Also, they face on a daily basis our vast ignorance of the actual working of the body. A vast amount of medicine is simply guesswork.
Thus a natural tendency to attribute the complexity and unknown to “God”.
Its worth pointing out that the most commited evolutionists tend to be zoologists – on a daily basis they constantly see the deep similarities between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom, which makes evolution so apparent.
as i stated in a previous post, i believe sean’s confusion comes from the assumption that physicians are scientists. no, i don’t believe they are. their training is rote and intended to shape their diagnostic abilities. again, just like a mechanic. i believe it’s a stretch to claim medical school trains them as scientists. this isn’t intended to be disparaging since a good medical practice is certainly rational.
A quite interesting — and in some ways horrifying — story. Actually, the theory of “intelligent design” sounds as scientific as astrology, remote healing or the like. But it is even worse — this “theory” can never be tested in any emperical way, i.e. falsified, and obviously violate Occam’s Razor. It is as good an idea as the idea that the universe is way it is, since it is way it is. The “theory” also fails on another account — it does not seem to be any form of intelligent design behind the fact, that a great deal of people think that they originate from some kind of intelligent design 😉
However, the problem that quite a few doctors believe in this idea should not be underestimated: if they can believe in this kind of stuff, then how can they judge if some theory in medicine is based on good scientific research — or just junk-science?
I would like to ask the bloggers about a hypothetical scenario: Let’s say you are sitting on a faculty search committee in your astrophysics group. You come across someone who has several dozen ApJ papers, and their research is generally well cited and well respected. In other words, they have excellent qualifications. Yet, you somehow discover that this same person is dubious about evolution, or maybe even writes articles which defend the teaching of ID in schools. Would this affect your decision whether or not to hire this person as a tenure-track astrophysics professor?
Zero
As someone who teaches a lot of undergraduates who aspire to be doctors, this is not at all surprising. The motivation to become a doctor is almost never to understand how life works, but to help people (admirable) or make money (not quite so admirable). Pre-meds can be quite disciplined and good at rote memorization, but asking them to think about the information or develop hypotheses to relate different pieces of information is often an uphill battle.
Hmmm… Zero. If I were a suspicious individual, I’d be tempted to think that you were trying to set us up for an attack from the ridiculous David Horowitz. Surely that can’t be true can it?
The thing is that people can apply different standards of scientific rigor when confronted with different problems. Doctors can accurately diagnose an illness using the scientific method, and then completely screw-up their own brains when asked to apply the same method to distinguish the virtues of Intelligent Design or evolution
The best hospital in my hometown Penang is the Seventh Day Adventist Hospital, which has many Adventist doctors who will fix you up in a jiffy while professing a belief in Adam and Eve. (I’ve met many of them…since my fiancee is an Adventist herself who used to work there as an RN. )
And engineers aren’t, typically, interested in learning how the universe works either. I wonder how many engineers don’t believe in the Big Bang, but I doubt, however many they are, that it affects their ability as engineers.
But not believing in evolution, while in itself only tenuously related to the practice of medicine, probably correlates with other beliefs that may affect the care you receive. Gene therapies, stem cell-based treatments, … are all things that your creationist physician might have reservations about.
For that matter, I gotta wonder whether a physician, who doesn’t believe in evolution, takes seriously the issue of acquired antibiotic-resistance in bacteria. Do you want someone, who believes that some bacteria were “designed” for penicillin-resistance, prescribing your meds?
If you’ve ever taught one of those physics for premeds courses, you shouldn’t be so surprised.
Actually, more important than the doctor’s belief or lack of belief in evolution, is their philosophy on the value of human life.
E.g., “Your mother is old. These complaints and this pain simply has to be endured. You’re wasting my time asking for anything else”.
versus
“Your mother is old, but we can certainly do some things to improve her health. We will try a number of different therapies to see what works for her”.
In my experience, it is the second kind of doctor who has made a real difference. It seems to me that to one type of doctor, the patient is merely a collection of decaying parts, and to the other, the patient is a person. Secondly, the human body is too complex for medicine to be entirely scientific. A patient is interested in what works for him or her, whether it be scientific or not. The good doctor therefore may step beyond the boundaries of what is scientifically known.
I think it would be interesting to see the breakdown of what specialties the IDers were in. I would hazard a guess that general practioners are more likely to believe in intelligent design than surgeons and specialists, but the results of that survey above have me a little off guard, so who knows? Maybe they should add something like a physical anthropology section to the MCAT so the premeds are confronted with human evolution head on.
My optimism was because the percentage of doctors who accept evolution/want evolution taught in schools is much higher than that of the general population. (I realize I’m grasping at very sad straws when it comes to science education in this country.) It’s the split by religion that’s interesting, and I’d also like to see a breakdown of numbers based on medical practice.
Do you want someone, who believes that some bacteria were “designed” for penicillin-resistance, prescribing your meds?
Exactly. Maybe doctors are more likely to overprescribe antibiotics because of drug advertising, rather than their personal doubts about evolution, but it’s certainly an unnerving thought.
I tend to think that all these surveys really show is that people by and large do not think about large issues. This seems crazy to those of us who study something like cosmology, but I think that to most people the world consists of what we see and feel and the rest doesn’t hold our interest. How many creationists actually know much about the theology of creationism? I’m sure you could start cross examining these people and their answers would start to break down in
Charlie Wagner
I read your case for. Please make sure that any science you produce is thoroughly checked by independent third parties, particularly if it is medical science likely to affect people’s health!