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?
um, well the rest of that didn’t seem to show up.
It is probably not just physicians who have this mix of opinions on evolution. I think the causes are buried in growing insecurity, and the increasing flood of poor quality logic that passes for informed debate in many forums. Like the sophists, many people find that debating tools win debates, not logic, and pretty soon many people believe the warped logic is actually reasoned, and start believing it. Pretty soon they can believe anything they want, and believe it is rational because they can produce a fair seeming argument to support it.
I guess people need to feel secure. As long as they don’t start burning our books and leave us free to keep questioning, then we will be ok.
GrahamC wrote to 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!”
Thank you for taking the time to read my paper.
May you have warm words on a cold evening,
a full moon on a dark night,
and the road downhill all the way to your door.
Mark: You are right… I was planning to discuss this matter with Mr. Horowitz during our semi-weekly conference call. Seriously though, do you not want to respond to my question? If you answer honestly, I promise I will never again post to this forum. Is that enough to entice you?
Zero
Zero – It seems off topic and I’m not really interested in getting into it. Also, we’re not in the business of encouraging serious people not to post here 🙂
I’m not Mark, nor am I on the Cosmic Variance team, nor do I work in a university, but: I would be affected in two ways by the discovery you describe.
1. I would be concerned that her appointment would be used by the ID crowd as some sort of vindication of their ideas. (And that her non-appointment would be used by them as evidence of an Evil Darwinist Conspiracy, of course.)
2. I would regard her support for the ID movement as evidence of poor thinking, to be weighed in the same way as any other evidence of poor thinking outside his field.
The first of these clearly cuts both ways. Also, if (as seems to be an assumption) she’s a genuinely good scientist within his field, somewhere decent is likely to hire her, so the pseudoscientists get their little publicity coup anyway. The second can’t be a very strong consideration; lots of good scientists say dumb things outside their fields.
So, if this candidate were (ignoring her apparent biological blind spot) the best person for the job, sure I’d recommend her. But I’d be a little worried, just as I would if I learned that someone looking for a biology post believed in astrology.
If we change the scenario a bit and say that what I discovered is that she believes that God sometimes plays a role in the evolutionary process, then the discovery would provoke no misgivings whatever.
Sean:
Like you, I believe the theory of evolution is a better theory than intelligent design. But unlike you, I am a MORE believer than you are, in beliving the theory of evolution.
Why, because on the issue of how doctors are educated, you look like an intelligent design believer, in the sense that you believe that once colleges are designed to properly educate future doctors, then the educated doctors will automatically become a believer of evolution. In that sense, you believe in intelligent design in socialogy.
But I believe the evolution theory works in human society just as well. as far as survival of the fittest is concerned, it does not help a doctor with his her career if he/she believes in evolution. Actually on the contrary, if a doctor chooses to believe a little more on the intelligent design side, he is more likely to find some common language with his patients and so that helps his profession as a doctor, who needs to interact with people.
Doctors are just those who survived the natural selection rules. But so are every one who lives in human societies.
Quantoken
Everybody! Please! Will you stop saying “believe in evolution”?!? You can believe in the tooth fairy, but you need to understand evolution. (And, gee, I sure hope my doctor does.)
Well, Sean, the first thought to pop into my head was an uncourteous “Come off it!” But that’s both pointless and rude. Instead, may I ask why it is that, as always, people refuse to believe that other people, even other educated people, may choose to “believe” something other than you do? Just because someone has seen the same things and come to a different conclusion than you does not mean that they are stupid or unthinking. Different axioms may lead to different conclusions.
And picking a doctor based on belief in evolution is just stupid. It ignores how doctors are trained, what they do, and how good at it they are, which are so much more important as to render one’s view of evolution irrelevant. Not to mention that their stance on things like Medicare billing are much more relevant.
What is dangerous about creationism and ID is that it undermines the rationalist philosophy behind science. It’s not just a matter of different conclusions, but of the steps taken to reach it. I.D. assumes:
1. Irrational arguments are reasonable.
2. Appeals to undefined external variables are reasonable.
3. The correct attitude to open questions in science is not deeper investigation but to just leave it as an irreducible, unexplainable entity.
If we accept that, then there is no point doing ANY science at all.
Hi Arun,
I totally agree with you that bedside manner is absolutely critical to being a good doctor, but I don’t think bedside manner and a scientific approach are incompatible. A compassionate doctor still approaches patients as people while acknowledging that, for example, echinacea doesn’t cure colds. In the end, I think it is independent of your approach: it comes down to what a doctor considers a successful treatment. It could be eliminating a set of symptoms or improving quality of life. (Of course the concept of the scientific approach is that effective treatments that eliminate negative symptoms will typically improve a sick patient’s quality of life.)
Andre
Hmmm, you guys all have a really inflated idea of what doctors are. I was raised by a creationist orthopaedic surgeon, and I’m still pretty proud of my dad’s doctoring abilities, but he’s just not remotely scientific. The nearest comparison is a carpenter (and yeah he even gives patients a lovely little leaflet telling them what they’ll go through in surgery and adding something about “another carpenter who lived 2,000 years ago…”). I don’t think it makes him a worse doctor, though it makes scientific discussions with him pretty amusing. Don’t get your politics from artists, and don’t get your science from doctors. Grow up people.
From what I have been reading in the comments here, most are all based upon the results of the questionnaire being accurate. I know from past experience that many queries can be biased in one direction or another by simple changes in phrasing of a sentence.
However, on the other hand, in the face of Death a doctor might face every day, and the lack of, or apparent lack of “how’s and why” of any given death. Religion may be the only anchor a doctor may have to keep his/her sanity.
My concern with regards these results is not that this would interfere with these doctors doing their jobs. Rather, it’s something of an indictment of the US scientific educational system that people who have seen the highest quality of education available fail apparently to understand the basics of what science and the scientific method is about.
Yes, I’m with Fzplus on that. We do try extremely hard to get across not just the facts of science, but also the methodology. Still, we’re clearly not succeeding as we might wish.
Anybody wonder why the differences are so great between the religions? Why are Jewish doctors so less likely to believe in ID?
Is anyone worried that this seems to be an internet poll? I can’t find any explicit methodology, but the same people did a “End of Life” study (http://www.jtsa.edu/research/finkelstein/surveys/schiavo.shtml) where they say what they do. It appears that the method is as follows: they have a file of 500 000 doctors that they invite to participate in their survey; for that survey they got 851 responses (for the one discussed here the number is 1472).
I’m no polling expert, but I’m not convinced that the 0.3% of the people that responded were totally representative of doctors everywhere.
well as has already been adverted to, medical doctors are in general not scientists. I recall an essay by Peter Medawar saying that the scientific method in medicine, in the sense of double-blind clinical trials, was first used in the 1950s. Certainly in my experience, the medical students in my statistics and physics classes were interested mostly in passing the class, not in understanding the material.
Was it Mario Puzo who said that if you want to eat well, stick with the Italians, but if you want medical care, go to the Jews, because they don’t believe in God the way the Italians do, and they’ll keep on fighting even after a good Catholic doctor would have called for a priest?
Actually, relatively few doctors are good scientists or engineers. Because of the law of large numbers, the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to follow the bell curve. This means that learning a probably correct treatment for each set of symptoms is good enough. Until very recently it has been standard practice to dispense anti-bacterial drugs for viral infections.
If you look around, most medicine, as practiced does not require verified diagnoses and verified treatments. Now and then one finds a doctor who is willing to think logically about the symptoms and develop a treatment and test plan, but this is surprisingly rare and always has been.
Why should doctors accept evolution and the big bang when so many of them cannot handle simple causality or Bayesian statistics?
This is a really good point Gil. Looks a little sketchy. Hadn’t noticed this.
Gil Holder brings a very strong point to light.
But I’d like to comment on Michael Kircher’s question: Why are Jewish doctors so less likely to believe in ID?
It could be that Judaism (with the exception of extreme sections) is built on the idea of asking questions. There are tomes written on arguments between great Jewish teachers. These books are used for study and not taken as unquestionable fact (two Jews, three opinions). This is not present in many of the religions that were polled.
Don’t forget, to be Jewish only requires that your mother is Jewish (or you convert, which entails the person to question why they are converting not once but three times. Jews are not missionaries) therefore it is possible to be an atheist and Jew at the same time.
Where else can you find that kind of juxtaposition?
Thanks Ivy for the thoughtful response. Christians have been trying desperately to find an answer to Darwin’s theory for over a hundred years; first utter denial and threats, then creationism science, and along the way the idea that god’s days are actually millions of years each–you know, six days equals a couple hundred million years!(?), then of course Intelligent Design! Why can’t they be content to accept that their practice of their religion is not bothered by scientific discoveries…unless, of course, they feel the need to convert every last soul on…OH! I get it! (In Emily Latella’s voice) Nevermind.
Michael, I think that everyone is desperately trying to find the answer to Darwin’s theory…it is flawed.
Which maybe the reason that so many intelligent people fall for ID. Einstein once said, “No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.”
When someone comes up with a flaw in a theory all of a sudden it is announced that the theory is wrong. What they don’t understand is that this does not negate the facts that supported this theory. The whole throwing out the baby with the bathwater syndrome comes into play.
I’ve found myself having to explain (sometimes prove) what a theory is before I can go on with the conversation (or argument).
I think that the more complicated science becomes the more people will turn to an answer that makes sense to them, even if it is illogical. People like neat and tidy and science tends to be a ball of questions that, when answered unlock more questions.
You guys crack me up. The average doctor is a little better than a good nurse, IF the doctor makes rounds each day and takes calls while they’re on vacation.
In about 1995, Frontline reported that about 70% of the medical techniques being used had never been proved to be of value. If you worked in the field for a few decades, you could verify this by comparing what you do now with what you did then.
The medical field is loaded with mumbo-jumbo and deep bows to the swami doctor. Don’t be surprised if a lot of them are faith healers.
Actually when you read something like this, you really need a psych major to parse the answers, and really, there should have been some follow up questions to define the parameters. Were the MD’s specifically thinking of ID as expressed by the official organizations? Or were they thinking of the concepts of Chaos vs. Cosmos?
Without that piece of knowledge you don’t know if they were commenting on an ultimate source of existence, or just saying that they believed in thunder gods.
And philosophically, isn’t that distinction relevant? I have, over the last few months met a number of pro-evolution people who assert (a number of them biologists with doctorates) that evolution proves the random (chaotic) nature of the universe, to which I replied….”run away, run away…”
Well anyway, I worked at a big Pharma co. for three years in R&D. Frankly, the actual knowledge of the MD’s worried me…they had none, no thinking skills, no ability to reason…zip. I think it had to do with the severe indoctrination into authority driven social systems that they experienced in med school. To demonstrate I used to ask MD’s if the student could ever be smarter than the teacher. Without reservation they almost all answered no…at which point I asked them where they kept the leeches.
Personally, I only see NP’s for day to day medical needs. They focus on accurate research, rather than a false hubris attempt at memorizing everything.