There he goes again.

Darwinists claim that comparative medicine and biology, which is the study of the similarities between non-human organisms and humans, arose from Darwin's theory. That's nonsense. Comparative biology has been the been the basis for biological science for thousands of years, and many of the greatest medical advances, such as Galen's and Vesalius' studies of anatomy and Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood, were the fruit of comparative biological research that antedated Darwin by centuries. The father of modern comparative biology was Carolus Linnaeus, who worked a century before Darwin was born.

Hear that? If the science existed in any form before the theory, than that must mean that new theory isn't useful to it. Aside from the straw man that "Darwinists" say that comparative medicine originates from evolutionary theory (such a historical inaccuracy really is a joke), this argument simply doesn't hold water. And when are they going to give up on this "Darwinist" label? Maybe we should take PZ's example and start calling them "Paleyists"

Take physics for an example. Mechanics existed long before Einstein came up with relativistic mechanics. How can you say relativity is indispensible to understanding modern physics? Newton came up with mechanics over a hundred years before Einstein was born!

The answer is simple. The kind of comparative medicine that was done two hundred years ago was helpful, I'm sure, but far less sophisticated than what we do now. As we discussed before the difference between comparative anatomy and the kind of genetic/molecular/physiologic science we do today is, well, huge.

Once again, no data, just bad analogies, bad straw men arguments, and the false statement of natural selection as a tautology. Egnor consistently has proven himself to be the perfect example of a denialist. All I need from him is a nice quote-mining episode or other evidence of selectivity and he's got the 5/5 score.

Now, let's hope for some other denialist examples to emerge, I'm getting bored with the creationists.

Labels: Evolution denialism, Michael Egnor