Whenever the opportunity arises to personally profit from evolutionary biology, whether through investments or employment in health care, biotechnology, agricultural or pharmaceutical companies, or through offering services to these companies, e.g. by constructing their offices and labs and providing them with all necessary equipment, from pencils to blackboards to needles to chemicals to glassware to instruments to food service, or through offering services to their employees, e.g. constructing their houses, selling them furniture, or through the taking of effective medication for an ailment (medication conceived, designed, and tested solely using evolutionary biology as the modeling process), such people are curiously silent and very eager to take the potential profit.
Such behavior reminds me of a passage in Ayn Rand's novel "Atlas Shrugged", in which Dagny Taggert takes a leave of absence from Taggert Transcontinental (where she is VP of Operations) to start the John Galt Line, primarily to prove that a railroad network would be far more reliable using the innovative Reardon Metal rather than steel. Dagny Taggert is continually abused, derided, and ridiculed by those who support the "theory of altruism" and virulently oppose the "theory of rational self-interest". However, as Dagny Taggert builds the John Galt Line and it becomes clear that the "theory of rational self-interest", unlike the "theory of altruism", produces tangible, _productive_ results, the promoters of "altruism", while continuing to publicly and vociferously denounce the "theory of rational self-interest", quietly begin to buy up large blocks of stock in the John Galt Line, fully expecting Dagny Taggert and the "theory of rational self-interest" to provide them with a most handsome profit. And they are not disappointed.
I await with eager expectation the forthcoming public announcement that the Institute for Creation Research supports the placement of the following warning label on all medication approved by the FDA:
| "WARNING: This product has been conceived, designed, and tested using the theory of evolution as its scientific model. Use of this product constitutes acceptance of the validity of the theory of evolution before both God and man. Anyone using this product does so at their own spiritual risk." |
Arthur Johnson
johnson@whitewater.chem.wisc.edu