Chapter 23
Why Denying Science is Bad for You
People who deny scientific facts pay a heavy price. So do the people around them. So do people whose governments deny scientific facts. This has caused human tragedy on a major scale.
A good example of this is AIDS in South Africa. South Africa has been very severely affected by AIDS. As of 2006, approximately 18.8 percent of the adult population of South Africa was infected with the HIV virus. The HIV virus causes AIDS. Left untreated, HIV infection leads to death. In 1999, as the epidemic was rising, President Thabo Mbeki announced that HIV was not the cause of AIDS, and refused the donation of anti-AIDS drugs, saying that they were not useful. His minister of health told AIDS sufferers to eat garlic and beetroot instead. This was in spite of international scientific consensus on the subject, and proof that AIDS drugs worked.
The result was predictable. Between the years 2000 to 2005, more than 334,000 South Africans died of AIDS.
The neighboring countries of Namibia and Botswana accepted the free drugs, and their populations did much better.
Among the many people who died in South Africa were babies who were infected with HIV through their mother’s placenta. One single dose of an anti-AIDS drug could have saved each of these babies, but they all got AIDS instead, because Thabo Mbeki believed the folks who deny scientific facts.51
AIDS Denialists Are ID Promoters
Interestingly, a number of enthusiastic HIV/AIDS deniers are also enthusiastic promoters of ID. One is Phillip Johnson, a law professor who became a born-again Christian and went on to become the father of ID, and who is a program advisor at the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. Jonathan Wells, another ID promoter and a senior fellow at the Center for Science and Culture also denies the HIV/AIDS connection. Both Johnson and Wells are enthusiastic public supporters of the leading proponent of denying that HIV causes AIDS, a man named Peter Duesberg.52 They have written public letters and articles in support of his stance. Thabo Mbeki consulted with Duesberg about the cause of AIDS, and then publicly announced that AIDS is not caused by HIV.53 As a result, he turned down the free, lifesaving drugs. So hundreds of thousands of adults died, innocent babies died, and many children were made orphans.
This wholesale slaughter of innocents was encouraged and supported by the same irrational guys who now insist that this country believe them about ID. They want to change our school textbooks, too.
Do we want to trust either our health or our children’s science educations to these irresponsible men?
Even Bigger Killers Than AIDS, and Evolution Predicts Them
Unfortunately, today, there are even bigger killers than AIDS. For instance, MRSA—that’s Methycillin Resistant Staphylococcus aureus. This disease alone kills more people in the United States than AIDS does.
According to the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), more people died in the US from the MRSA infection (18,000 deaths) than from AIDS (16,000) in 2005, and MRSA’s numbers are rising faster than AIDS’ numbers are in the US.54
And how did MRSA arise? It arose from our ignoring evolution. Ordinary Staphylococcus aureus (a Staph infection) is a dangerous infection, but one that can be treated successfully with modern antibiotics. Unfortunately, most people either didn’t understand evolution by natural selection, or chose to ignore it. So people all over the world abused antibiotics, taking them when they didn’t need them, or taking just a few, then leaving the rest in the bottle. Why is the latter a problem? Here’s a hint: when you take antibiotics, you need to take the full prescription, because you need to kill all the disease-causing bacteria in your system, not just the weak ones. Otherwise, the ones that have a little bit of natural antibiotic resistance will be the ones that remain alive to breed. Repeat this by the millions of generations of bacteria that have reproduced themselves since the dawn of modern antibiotics, and in just the few decades since antibiotics have become widespread, there has been more than enough time for dangerously antibiotic-resistant bacteria to breed up into dangerous populations around the world.
Abuse of antibiotics has become so bad that antibiotics have even been put into cattle, pig, and chicken feed, so that animals can gain a few more pounds before being slaughtered. Meanwhile, our onetime wonder drugs have become less and less powerful because of this abuse. Now, if you go into a hospital with a routine problem, you run the risk of getting an antibiotic-resistant Staph infection (MRSA) while at the hospital, and dying.
Evolutionary theory predicted this problem. ID has predicted nothing. If ID is really a scientific theory, I would like its promoters to tell us what new biological features and problems are going to be created by the Designer. That way we can safeguard ourselves against them.
Deadly Diseases We Used to Be Able to Cure, but Now Can’t, Because We Ignored Evolution
In addition to MRSA, there are many other life-threatening microbes that resist antibiotics, including dangerous diseases like tuberculosis, strep throat, pneumonia, meningitis, dysentery, typhoid, cholera, and gonorrhea; and dangerous diseases like malaria and viral hepatitis that resist other modern antimicrobial drugs.
Malaria is the disease that Dr. Behe claims is evidence of “irreducible complexity squared”! Yet, in addition to showing lack of design as discussed in Chapter 20, it also shows clear signs of having evolved its current resistance to modern drugs by way of evolution through natural selection.
All the deadly diseases in my list are things we could cure until recently, but now we can’t always. All this is due to the fact that evolution by natural selection was ignored.
Unfortunately, this is a case in which it is not enough to be sensible all by yourself. If other people abuse antibiotics, you can die as a result.
Polio Among the Amish and Other problems: Trying to Live Without Science for Religious or personal Reasons Can Kill You, and kill others
The Amish, those hard-working, deeply religious people who live in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and elsewhere, do not believe in vaccinating their children against polio (poliomyelitis). Unfortunately, wild polio viruses can live naturally in our environment, and every now and then one can come into contact with an unvaccinated person. That person can get polio. When that person lives in a population of unvaccinated people, an epidemic can get started in that population.
In the early twentieth century, polio crippled thousands of children every year, even in industrialized countries. Then, in the late 1950s, the first effective polio vaccine, inactivated poliovirus vaccine, was introduced. In the early 1960s, another vaccine, oral polio vaccine, was introduced. After that, polio was largely eliminated from industrialized countries.
Except among people who don’t believe in vaccination. In 1979, there was a polio outbreak in Amish communities in Iowa, Wisconsin, Missouri, and Pennsylvania. Ten people were left paralyzed by the disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In the Netherlands, between 1992 to 1993, fifty-nine non-vaccinated people were paralyzed by polio and two more died. All but one belonged to religious groups that refused vaccination.
In more recent years, vaccination campaigns have wiped out polio in most developed countries. Unfortunately, vaccination efforts in the remaining areas are often hampered by unscientific opposition. For example, in both Nigeria and Pakistan, polio-eradication workers have been attacked after political and religious leaders have said that the vaccinations caused sterility, or are against God’s will.55
This has lead to upsurges in polio in these regions. If polio is not wiped out there, then it can re-spread to elsewhere in the world. So, living as though scientific research doesn’t matter can literally kill you, kill your neighbors, and kill your children.
In developed countries, people sometimes choose to not get vaccines. Unfortunately, in 2003, an unvaccinated man from the US died from diphtheria after travelling to Haiti.56 This is a vaccine-preventable disease. In June 2015, an unvaccinated child in Spain died of diphtheria.57 When their son got sick, his parents said that they felt “tricked” by anti-vaccination groups that they had previously admired. The family said that they had not been properly informed by these anti-vaccination groups.58
On July 2, 2015, a woman in Washington state died of the measles.59 She had been vaccinated, but had to take immune system-suppressing drugs due to other health conditions. She was most likely exposed to the measles at a local health facility by an unvaccinated person. The immune-suppressing drugs made it harder for her body to fight the measles infection, so she died. If those around her had been vaccinated, she would not have caught the disease from them, and wouldn’t have died.
Again, living as though scientific research doesn’t matter can kill you. Even worse, it can also kill other, innocent people.
51. Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, 49, 4 (December 1, 2008),http://aids.harvard.edu/Lost_Benefits.pdf.
522. See Charles A. Thomas, Jr., Kary B. Mullis, and Phillip Johnson, “What Causes AIDS? It’s an Open Question,” http://www.duesberg.com/articles/kmreason.html; Eleen Baumann et al., “AIDS Proposal,” AAAS Science, February 17, 1995, 945–46; P. Duesberg et al., “Rethinking AIDS Letter,” http://rethinkingaids.com/quotes/rethinkers.php; and “AIDS ‘Denialism’ Gathers Strange Bedfellows,” the Vancouver Sun, http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/columinsts/story.html?id=bocb194b-51d3-4140-88f7-e4099445c554.
53. See Sarah Boseley, “Mbeki AIDS Policy ‘Led to 330,000 Deaths,’” http://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/nov/27/south-africa-aids-mbeki.
54. On AIDS deaths, see Sarah Boslaugh, ed., Encyclopedia of Epidemiology (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2008). For MRSA death numbers, see R. Monica Klevens et al., “Invasive Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus Infections in the United States,” Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 298, no. 15 (October 17, 2007), 1763–71.
55. Warraich H. J., “Religious opposition to polio vaccination” [letter], Emerging Infectious Diseases 15, 6 (June 2009).
56. Centers for Disease Control, “Fatal Respiratory Diphtheria in a U.S. Traveler to Haiti—Pennsylvania, 2003” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, January 9, 2004, 52(53), 1285–1286.
57. Jessica Mouzo Quintáns, “Six-year-old boy who contracted diphtheria dies in hospital,” El Pais, June 29, 2015
58. Jessica Mouzo Quintáns, “Parents of diphtheria-stricken boy feel ‘tricked’ by anti-vaccination groups,” El Pais, June 5, 2015.
59. Tara Haelle, “First Confirmed U.S. Measles Death In More Than A Decade,” Forbes, July 2, 2015.