Denialism.com

Thursday, March 29, 2007

Egnor continues to deny bacterial resistance evolution exists

Apparently, it's a standard trope.

Preventing the emergence of resistant strains of bacteria is important work, but the insight that Darwinism brings to the problem - the unkilled ones eventually outnumber the killed ones - is of no help. We can figure that out ourselves. The tough work on preventing the emergence of resistant bacteria is done by microbiologists, epidemiologists, molecular geneticists, pharmacologists, and physicians who are infectious disease specialists. Darwinism, understood as the view that "chance and necessity" explains all biological complexity, plays no role.

The Darwinist modus operandi for a century and a half has been to slip a philosophical agenda - scientific materialism - in with the science. They hijack other fields of biology - microbiology, population biology, epidemiology, genetics, etc - then they assert that Darwinism is essential to those fields, then they claim that the hypothesis that random variation and natural selection is the origin of all biological complexity is a "fact" supported by overwhelming evidence. When challenged, they prove the "fact" of scientific materialism by doing a Pub-Med search for thousands of tangential articles from the fields they've hijacked.

Ok, so he thinks that all bacteria have all the resistance genes they will ever have? This guy is a doctor! And he still doesn't get it. You wonder how he would explain how bacteria did not have resistance genes 20 years ago, and now they do. I suppose he'll assert, against all reason, evidence etc., that they've always had those genes, it's just some subpopulations have them and others don't. This defies logic because that would mean that antibiotics would never have worked. If there were always subpopulations with the resistance gene present, bacterial resistance would have been instant from the start. Oy, the stupid. It hurts my brain.

Anyway, he gets 1 point for straw man ("chance and necessity" and the description of bacterial evolution as "the unkilled ones eventually outnumber the killed ones"), he gets 1 point for conspiracy (the materialist agenda hijacking science - whatever), he get's one point for impossible expectations because he describes the act of providing him evidence as some kind of deception and he always gets one point for being a false expert. That's 4/5, but without quoting people or data selectively he's never going to get a 5/5. Keep working on it Egnor.

Labels: Evolution denialism, Michael Egnor

6 Comments:

al wallace said...

Mark wrote:

"Ok, so he thinks that all bacteria have all the resistance genes they will ever have?"

al wallace asks:

Mark, I'm a little slow I guess. Where did Egnor say this? Did I miss it? Thanks.

March 30, 2007 12:37 PM,

Mark said...

That's the implication of the argument that all evolution says is that some bacteria will survive.

In other words, if bacterial resistance didn't evolve, then the bacterial resistance genes that are required for these phenotypes would have been there since the beginning of time (unless god is actively inserting resistance genes to this day).

It's the only logical conclusion of the design argument for bacterial resistance, unless they hand wave and say god decided to put the resistance genes in 1998 or whenever the hell MRSA was described.

March 30, 2007 12:50 PM,

al wallace said...

Mark,

I think I see what you're saying. But isn't most resistance due to alterations in things like binding sites on the ribosomes and transport proteins in the cell membrane? In that way, couldn't you say that the genes were indeed present all along and the mutations didn't start to survive until antibiotics were commonly overused (in the 1980s)?

I'm just spitballing here.

March 30, 2007 1:12 PM,

Mark said...

Read about the beta lactams they are a good example.

So penicillin was a natural antibiotic, and the resistance gene to it existed before widespread use of penicillin as an antibiotic. What was interesting is that bacteria that did not have the gene before eventually acquired it, as we changed the antibiotics the gene evolved to challenge the new chemicals, and new ways to attack the chemicals also emerged. Then when we started including clavulinic acid to inhibit the beta-lactamases (a clever strategy) eventually, several strains have figured out ways to adapt to that.

So, yes, the basic gene did exist before we started using the drugs, and the new types of resistance also represent beneficial mutations or duplications of existing genes. The bacteria don't just suddenly end up with 400 bp of new genetic material out of nowhere, they modify, duplicate and adapt existing genes for new functions, not just in this context but many others. But there is little question, especially given our better knowledge of the complete genomes of these bugs from the genome projects, the resistance genes are novel.

March 30, 2007 1:31 PM,

al wallace said...

Mark,

If the antibiotic inhibits protein synthesis, say, and resistance is due to altering a binding site on the ribosome (which also lowers transcription rates), then what is the novel gene? The same is true in the case of membrane proteins.

Where your argument works is when you have resistance mechanisms that actively cleave or otherwise inactivate the antibiotic itself (as in B-lactamase) rather than alter the cellular sub-structure to make it impervious. So there are two fundamentally different types of resistance mechanisms, one that fits what Egnor is saying and one that fits what you are saying.

Does this make sense?

AW

April 2, 2007 11:52 PM,

Mark said...

No one is alleging completely novel genes. Egnore is suggesting microbial evolution does not occur. This would mean that such modifications are not the result of mutation and natural selection, but existed there all along (as part of design).

The novelty isn't in a completely new gene being made, but in terms of novel mutations and amino acid substitutions that allow attack of new antibiotics that the bugs previously had no resistance to.

April 7, 2007 5:58 AM,

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