Re: [asa] Medicine and Evolution

On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 7:36 AM, David Opderbeck <dopderbeck@gmail.com>
wrote:

> C'mon Rich. You know that when someone like Stein says "evolution" they
> don't mean viral resistance to drugs. There's a huge definitional problem
> here with the term "evolution," but let's not fall for the schtick that ID
> advocates don't care about poor people with AIDS. It's as lame as the
> schtick that evolutionary biologists are all cousins of Hitler.
>

I'm not interested in Ben Stein's views because the interviews of him show
him to be an amazingly unreflective and sloppy thinker. He just parrots what
others tell him. Egnor's views, on the other hand, are what I care about.
Here's what Egnor said about drug resistance.

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.

But the paper put it this way

HIV-1 transmission in humans results most commonly from virus exposure at
> mucosal surfaces (1). For practical reasons, it has been impossible to
> identify and characterize by direct analytical methods HIV-1 at or near the
> moment of transmission, yet it is this virus that antibody or cell-based
> vaccines must interdict. An important step in achieving a molecular
> understanding of HIV-1 transmission and potentially in the development of an
> effective HIV/AIDS vaccine is an accurate and precise description of the
> transmitted or early founder virus (or viruses) and sequences evolving from
> them during the critical period leading to productive clinical infection.

> The objective of the present study was to develop and implement an
> experimental strategy that would enable us to identify unambiguously the
> transmitted or early founder env genes of viruses responsible for
> establishing productive HIV-1 infection, to track their evolution in the
> critical period between transmission, peak viremia and seroconversion, and
> to evaluate their phenotypic properties. Essential to this strategy were two
> findings. First was the demonstration by Leigh Brown and coworkers (15),
> Mullins and coworkers (19), Coffin and coworkers (16), and Hahn and
> coworkers (17) that single genome amplification (SGA) of HIV-1 plasma vRNA
> followed by direct sequencing of uncloned amplicon DNA precludes Taq-induced
> nucleotide misincorporation and recombination in finished sequences. Second
> were the observations by Ho and coworkers (21, 22) and Shaw and coworkers
> (23, 24) that, because of the extremely short in vivo lifespan of plasma
> virus and of productively infected cells (t1/2 < 1 day), analysis of plasma
> vRNA could provide a uniquely informative view of HIV-1 replication dynamics
> and evolution. Thus, we hypothesized that an SGA-based analysis of plasma
> vRNA obtained from acutely infected individuals in the earliest stages of
> infection, and evaluated within the context of a model of random viral
> evolution, would allow us to infer the nucleotide sequences of env genes of
> viruses responsible for establishing productive clinical infection weeks
> earlier.
>

So, if you take evolution off the table like Egnor does, you don't make
progress on an HIV/AIDS vaccine. Furthermore, encouraging the next
generation of doctors to the same is unconscionable. I have no doubts that
Egnor has compassion for the victims of AIDS but for Ben Stein to imply that
our motivation is also not marked by compassion simply adds insult to
injuryl. Note that nowhere did I impute motives like Ben Stein did of mine.
Rather, my own view is -- to borrow a legal concept -- Egnor is incredibly
negligent and completely clueless. Egnor stuck his nose into an essay
contest for the next generation of doctors and biologists and in effect will
be presenting future studies like above. This is why the innocently sounding
phrase "teach the controversy" is not so innocent.

Rich Blinne
Member ASA

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Received on Fri May 30 11:02:13 2008