On 24-12-2011 5:08, Patrick Elliott wrote:
> On 12/23/2011 4:17 PM, andrel wrote:
>>
>>> Last night we watched the 2009 "Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless
>>> People" - very good. I particularly liked the bit where Robin Ince was
>>> talking about how, if you reject the Theory of Evolution, you really are
>>> rejecting the scientific method, and as such, shouldn't really be
>>> 'believing' in anything like medicine because those use the same method
>>> to be validated.
>>
>> I think that logically they should also try top get rid of all animal
>> testing of drugs. It hampers companies in making money and it is useless
>> anyway as man is not in any way related to e.g. mice.
>> Then again, it is hard for me to understand their logic, if it exist at
>> all.
>>
> The logic is two fold:
>
> 1. Just because they are not human does not mean that the specific
> organ(s) being examined do not react to drugs in the same way as with
> humans. A kidney is a kidney, or at least fairly close.
[snip]
I am not sure you got the irony either. I start doubting my ability to 
get any message across :( .
Anyway the point is that there are good reasons to test drugs in animals 
before you use them on humans. Only, these reasons only make sense if 
you think the two species are related.

In fact it was meant to just second Jim's opinion. I find it hard to 
think of any treatment or modern equipment that not somewhere along the 
line made use of a technique that implicitly used the relationship 
between all living things.
In the lab we routinely add markers like GFP (green fluorescent protein, 
a jellyfish gene) to a gene to see when that other gene is switched on. 
The result is checked by PCR, another technique that uses a protein from 
a bacterium to replicate DNA from another species. If you look at any 
drug developed in the last decades they all are contaminated by 
evolution. Either in the development, the research that was done to 
understand the mechanism of the disease, or in production. The same 
holds for many non-pharmacological treatments as well. One of my 
research subjects is inherited cardiac arrhythmia, diagnosis uses the 
sort of evolutionary contaminated methods mentioned above. On top of 
that 'inherited diseases' as a concept is hard to grasp in a creationist 
universe. (which, unfortunately, does not make them less likely to pass 
on such a disease)

The, small, other point was that I am surprised that tea party-like 
persons in the US do not seem to use creationism as a way to pass 
legislation that makes it easier and more profitable to create new 
drugs. While there must be a fair amount of people believe the one and 
advocate the other. Either because of the reasoning above, or I simply 
missed it because it was not reported in the papers here.


-- 
tip: do not run in an unknown place when it is too dark to see the floor.

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