From Mike the Mad Biologist:
When I heard that Republican Senator and presidential candidate John McCain spoke at the [anti-Darwin] Discovery Institute, I was disappointed but not surprised. In March, there’s going to be a report released about antibiotic resistance in bacteria. A major finding of the report: roughly 40,000 people die every year from hospital-acquired antibiotic resistant bacterial infections.
The problem of antibiotic resistance is, fundamentally, a problem of evolutionary biology. Species of bacteria which had very few resistant strains (or none at all) now contain high frequencies of resistance strains (e.g., methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus, commonly known as MRSA). In other words, populations of bacteria have undergone genetic change — evolution — which has led to thousands of unnecessary deaths. How can one expect any administration which has to pander to creationists to take this evolutionary problem seriously? Could you imagine if flat-earthers ran NASA? I fear we would have, at best, another four years of government inaction regarding antibiotic resistance.
The interesting thing about reality is that it always wins. Every single time.
Pig-headed ignorance kills. We’ve had enough of that. Time for a change.
Pam | 08-Mar-07 at 6:06 pm | Permalink
I imagine the voice of those who argue evolution, “It is so wrong to argue that antibiotic resistance is an example of biologic evolution. Any one who believes in [my] God certainly knows that those who succumb to bacterial infections must deserve God’s wrath — gays, non-Christians, Democrats, gays, women, intellectuals, gays… If God meant for them to be healed, he would have created a new and all powerful drug through the works of one of his followers.”