Just an old country doctor
by digby
Gail Collins humorously surveyed the GOP field today and made this observation about Ben Carson:
Ben Carson has been surging! It’s easy to understand his popularity. He has a compelling life story about raising himself up from poverty to become a brain surgeon, and he was the least needy-looking candidate in the first Republican debate. On the other side, it is kind of unnerving that he doesn’t believe in evolution. Most Republican candidates try to fudge that one, by changing the subject or saying something like “I am not a scientist.” But Carson really doesn’t believe in evolution. And he is, you know, a scientist.
Here’s what Carson says about evolution:
In an interview for the Discovery Institute, “ID the Future” host David Boze asked Carson, “What things come to mind when people ask you, why do you question the theory of materialist evolution?”
“Well, the first thing is, how does something come out of nothing?” said Carson, who has written mroe than 100 neurosurgical publications. “And the second thing is, how does life evolve from non-life? Which, if you want to talk about fairy tales, those are incredible fairy tales.”
Boze also asked Carson how work on the human brain has influenced his thoughts on the issue of intelligent design.
Carson, who was the first surgeon to successfully separate twins conjoined at the head, said, “Well, just knowing how incredibly complex our brains are – billions of neurons, hundreds of billions of interconnections, the ability to process more than 2 million bits of information in one second. That is an amazingly complex organism.”
“And to say that that just came about sort of randomly by various mutations over the course of time, when as I just said mutations tend to lead to degeneration rather than improvement, just doesn’t make any sense,” said Dr. Carson. “So, the very things that they claim are evidence for evolution are the very things that damn the theory.”
“And the other thing is there are no intermediate species,” said Dr. Carson. “Where are they? It shouldn’t just evolve up to a certain point and then leap to the next species. There should be something in between at all given points of time, and there aren’t, and no one’s ever found them.”
A little earlier in the interview, which took place in February 2013, host David Boze asked, “What about the diversity of life here. How has your examination of life here influenced your view on the theory of evolution and whether or not there’s an intelligent designer?”
Carson, who was the director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital and co-director of the Johns Hopkins Craniofacial Center, said, “Well, the evolutionists look at the similarities that you see in the various life forms and they say, because this creature and this creature share the same type of digestive system or the same type of structures in their head, that clearly one evolved from the other.”
“I don’t know how clear that is,” he said. “Because if you have an intelligent designer, why wouldn’t he use a basic structure that works on multiple different creatures? Just like an automobile manufacturer. General Motors, same basic chassis as Chevrolet, a Buick, a Pontiac, or a Cadillac. And yet, they’re all different. And one did not evolve from the other.”
“And why would you have to go and completely change the motor, the chassis, and all the other infrastructure because you’re creating a different model?” said Carson. “That doesn’t make any sense to me. I think one of the most damning pieces of evidence against evolution is the human genome.”
Continuing with his point about the human genome, Dr. Carson said, “You can see that you have a very complex, sophisticated coding mechanism for different amino acids and various sequences that give you millions of different genetic instruction – very much like computer programming, which uses a series of zeros and ones and different sequences, it gives you very specific information about what that computer is to do.”
“Well this [human genome] is at least twice that complex,” he said. “Instead of just 2 digits, we’ve got 4 digits, repeating in different sequences but always resulting in the same thing unless there is a mutation. And if there is a mutation, it tends to be toward degeneration rather than improvement.”
Just like an automobile manufacturer. General Motors, same basic chassis as Chevrolet, a Buick, a Pontiac, or a Cadillac. And yet, they’re all different. And one did not evolve from the other.
What. The. Hell.