In “Muslim medical students boycotting lectures on evolution… because it ‘clashes with the Koran’” (Daily Mail, November 27, 2011), we learn,
Muslim students, including trainee doctors on one of Britain’s leading medical courses, are walking out of lectures on evolution claiming it conflicts with creationist ideas established in the Koran.
Steve Jones emeritus professor of human genetics at university college London has questioned why such students would want to study biology at all when it obviously conflicts with their beliefs.
Hey, wait a minute: Why is Darwinism on the med school course anyway?
Maybe those students’ beliefs coincide with being good doctors, or maybe they don’t. But the attempt to waste medical students time on Darwinism – in a world where real knowledge of the human body is exploding – should be regarded as a scandal.
And those students should not be judged on their acceptance of Darwinism but on their ability to cope with and effectively use the tsunami of new information about how the human body works.
Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor provides a useful way of understanding the matter: Medicine deals in proximate causes. For example, the patient, 59, complains of pain and swelling in her wrist, for several days since she fell on the ice. The doctor thinks: collis fracture. Common in older women who fall. X-ray will tell.
What well-intentioned person would wish to waste the doctor’s time with a discussion of monkeys and apes who fall out of trees and fracture bones, and the learned professors who expatiate thereon? Actually, most American doctors agree with Egnor, and if you are really sick, you are as well off in a teaching hospital the United States as anywhere.
Incidentally, the story was bylined, “Daily Mail Reporter.” Weird.