Darwinian Medicine: A Prescription for Failure

Although the field of medicine experienced major advances in the 20th century, it also embraced mistakes and outright atrocities caused by the introduction of evolutionary thinking. Setbacks to the profession are bad, but thousands of patients "treated" with Darwinian medical principles suffered needlessly, experiencing confusion, painful surgery, and even death...

“...dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.... that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom....”

—Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, 1863.

“But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?”

—Charles Darwin, Letter to William Graham, 1881. Died 1882.

Well, the worst effect Darwin has had on medicine is in the field of Eugenics. When you abort a baby because it MIGHT have Down syndrome or some other “handicap,” it was the Darwinists who were the chief proponents of such a view.

When Hitler started getting rid of “useless eaters,” he began with eugenics and Nazi doctors, before moving on to Jews and Gypsies.

And it’s with us still, with all those screaming elitist liberals who thought that Sarah Palin should have aborted her baby.

Darwin Medalist Karl Pearson said outright that Darwinism is incompatible with medicine:

Let me, even at the risk of talking about the familiar, sketch for you the broad outlines of Darwin's theory of evolutionary progress. The individual better fitted to its environment lived longer than its fellows, had more offspring, and these, inheriting its better fitness, raised the type of the race. The environment against which the individual had to struggle here was not only formed by the other members of its species, not only by its physical surroundings, but by the germs of disease of all types. According to Darwin -- and some of us still believe him to be right -- the ascent of man, physical and mental, was brought about by this survival of the fitter. Now, if you are going lo take Darwinism as your theory of life and apply it to human problems, you must not only believe it to be true, but you must set to, and demonstrate that it actually applies.
Darwin's theory means this, that if individuals are reared under a constant environment, and a larger percentage of them are killed off in the first year of life, then a smaller percentage of those remaining will die in the later years of life, because more of the weaklings have been killed off... Now if there be -- and I, for one, think that two independent lines of inquiry demonstrate that there is -- a fairly stringent selection of the weaker individuals by the mortality of infancy and childhood, what will happen, if by increased medical skill and by increased state support and private charity, we enable the weaklings to survive and to propagate their kind? Why, undoubtedly we shall have a weaker race... Surely here is an antinomy -- a fundamental opposition between medical progress and the science of national eugenics, of race efficiency. Gentlemen, I venture to think it is an antinomy, and will remain one until the nation at large recognises as a fundamental doctrine the principle that everyone, being born, has the right to live, but the right to live does not in itself convey the right to everyone to reproduce their kind... Our social instincts, our common humanity enforce upon us the conception that each person born has the right to live, yet this right essentially connotes a suspension of the full intensity of natural selection. Darwinism and medical progress are opposed forces, and we shall gain nothing by screening that fact, or, in opposition to ample evidence, asserting that Darwinism has no application to civilised man... I say that only a very thorough eugenic policy can possibly save our race from the evils which must flow from the antagonism between natural selection and medical progress.

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