The Old Curmudge Speaks His Mind

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	The Old Curmudge Speaks His Mind	[Rainmakers_Title.htm]

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Editor’s Note: The “Creationist Curmudgeon” graces the website of Creation Digest with witty, exquisite one-liners. When CD invited the distinguished physician to participate in an online interview he responded with both the questions and serious answers, laced with classic tongue-in cheek humor. His unique, insightful perspective follows, virtually unedited. And by the way, that self-portrait oil of the ol’ Doc, “ain’t” bad!!! Enjoy!

Creation Digest: "How do you see your yourself and your below-the-belt curmudgeony tweaks of Evo, and your overall contribution to the intellectuality of what, before you shambled into the arena, was an appropriately sober scholastic debate?"

Curmudgeon: My contribution? Nil. Zilch.

CD: Oh come now! Don’t one-line us!

Curmudge: Would small talk, which is what a one-liner is, convince anybody when God, genomes, and Hubble images can’t?

CD: Seriously, isn’t a one-liner bite-sized, digestible wisdom?

Curmudge: Yup, that it is, that it is. Your whole daily brain nutrition in one pill, based on a 2000 calorie diet; read the label for toxic ingredients; megadoses recommended but beware of overdosage. Old doc Curmudge’s pills.

Now here’s one sentence to challenge your digestion: If a dissertation is millions of words hunkered down in WWI trenches, stuck there in the mud under heavy bombardment, unknown soldiers, blossoms born to blush unseen, fading away from typhus and tedium, gaining nary an inch of ground for all the blood sweat and tears, then a one-liner is Morgan’s Raiders sallying forth, rattling nerves all around, but, alas, not accomplishing much either.

CD: So your contribution --?

Curmudge: To the intellectuality of your sober scholastic debate? Well, it’s too sober. Or not sober enough. Evolutionists, maybe Creationists too — they take themselves too seriously. Funny thing, the more seriously things are taken, the funnier they get. What I see in the arena is rather too much prancing and posturing, and oh, the flaming e-mails. Is it an arena or a jungle out there? So I see myself not in the arena among gladiators but as Bob Hope entertaining our troops, not theirs. I see myself as the old cat at ease in the laboratory, while mad scientists rattle your beakers and bones, analyze your rocks, and stare at stained DNA streaks.

CD: But you yourself are a physician, a scientist --

Curmudge: Excuse me for interrupting, lad, but I‘ve got to thank you for saying a physician is a scientist. That’s questioned, you know, by academic laboratory scientists, even those with MDs instead of PhDs. Anyway, I’ve also hung out in the research lab myself, two years as a NIH-funded research fellow in renal physiology, which could qualify me as a scientist of sorts. But I submit, I insist, that medicine gives certain insights opaque to physical scientists, certain unique perspectives.

CD: Like?

Curmudge: Like how great a contribution to medicine, and of medicine to science, to the world, the debunking of the theory of “spontaneous generation” was. Propounded by Aristotle and swallowed whole for well over two thousand years, quashing it was the greatest contribution of medicine of the 19^th century, arguably of any century. That germs don’t arise from nothing or even from simple ingredients like air, gas, or filth, was proved by Pasteur; Virchow showed that cells arise from cells, not from nothing, and won the Nobel prize. One great leap forward for mankind! One proud moment! Alas, the crazy 19^th century also then saw one monster, embarrassing leap backwards!

CD: which was -- ?

Curmudge: It was when Darwin, blind to Pasteur and Virchow, or maybe laughing at them, turned right around and outdid Aristotle. He announced spontaneous generation of life itself! When you think of it, a pretty funny twist.

CD: Which somehow reminds us of Hoyle and Brig Klyce, “Panspermia” and “Cosmic ancestry.”

Curmudge (chuckling): Oh my yes! That’s the conceit that acknowledges Evo couldn’t have happened on this planet, so it happened out there, in space, in the cosmos, somewhere, everywhere. And those spontaneously generated life seeds, maybe naught but quasi-tubules, or less than that, merely programmed ingredients, eternal and immortal, immune even to trillion-degree heat, radiation, and black holes, were delivered to earth fossilized in a meteorite, a cosmic Noah’s ark. Talk about cult myths! Talk about funny. A one-liner gold mine. So much for serious, sober intellectual dialog.

CD: We’ll spare you Lovelock’s Gaia theory.

Curmudge: What’s that?

CD: A model of the earth as a self-regulating organism.

Curmudge (cracking up): No, hadn’t heard that one! That’s a hoot! The earth itself is life, rather as the simple ancients ascribed life to rocks and planets, do I have it right? Pantheism sans theism? Nope, hadn’t heard it. But I don’t try to keep up now. I’m old now. Retired. Just came from the 50^th anniversary reunion of my med school class. Don’t know what I’d do without Creation Digest to keep me informed. And Wired News. I let my Nature subscription lapse. I’ve evolved and now I’m simply the curmudgeony old cat lounging round the lab, meowing ever so often.

CD: Pleasant evolution, we’d say. Well, doctor Curmudge, it was interesting sharing cosmic mirth and revisiting Aristotle, antiquity, and the 19^th century. But what about medicine in your day – before you retired? What have you seen in your long years in medicine? Haven’t you become suspicious--?

Curmudge: Thought you’d never ask. Well, what I’ve not seen in my century, the 20^th, is all that turmoil and craziness that the 19^thsaw. Sure, I’ve seen much change since I was in med school. There’s been a big bang explosion of data. Not a few things I was taught -- theories, concepts, models, paradigms (a term itself unfamiliar to me, certainly the way it is bandied today) ----have been revised and reinterpreted, sometimes to an embarrassing degree. Still, it’s been a pretty orderly evolution. No spontaneous generation, except maybe AIDS, but even there the conceptual approach was pure 19^th century germ theory and “Koch’s postulates.” Classification of lymphoma may be radically different now that B and T cells and so many antigens have taken over, but late 20^th and 21^st century lymphoma is still what Virchow described in the 19^th. Near as I know the Krebs cycle is still spinning, though I’d hate to have to learn it now with so many new particulars in orbit. Hard enough 50 years ago. Twentieth century medicine, and science in general, seems on the right track. Looking back, I’m happy with it. Sorry, nothing to arouse serious suspicion or cynicism.

CD: Now that’s a relief! You, curmudgeon that you are, aren’t all that cynical after all. And that you can still almost speak seriously and professorially—

Curmudge: Alas, even as a professor I never spoke professorially.

CD: Oh? Just do the best you can. To end this, then, may we request that you lay aside your curmudgeony persona and please answer seriously when we ask, as CD always must, your thoughts about Evolution?

Curmudge: I think it’s wonderful!

CD: Wonderful?

Curmudge: Wonderful! Wonderful! As an old doc I can see, even better than a paleontologist, how wonderful, even awesome, it is — only in medicine we call it adaptation, compensation, embryology, immunity. Just look at an x-ray of a fractured bone healing; look in a microscope at infarcted myocardium fibrosing and revascularizing; see how a remaining kidney grows to twice normal size and increases its function when the other is absent. Rejoice when one old eye goes blind from macular degeneration but with the other good one, thanks to modulation from the brain, you see as well as ever. Behold an embryo develop. And now AIDS demonstrates, by the absence of immunity, how the immune system changes the internal milieu to adapt to the external. Evolution, by its right name, is quite possibly the greatest gift of Creation.

CD: Well, we tried.

And so the smug old cat, grinning, shamelessly platitudinous, shambles back into the lab to curl up comfortably among, neither bothering nor bothered by, the beakers, fossils, and DNA chromatograms.

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