Ben Carson reportedly thinks evolution is the work of the devil. In a dark yin to John Milton’s celestial patroness of Paradise Lost, you see, Charles Darwin evidently harkened to the words of Lucifer himself—“the adversary” in Carson’s words—to come up with his ideas about natural selection as one explanation for evolution.
Carson also has averred that those who accept the facts of evolution lack ethics. And this man who did groundbreaking work as a professor and a pediatric neurosurgeon at one of the top research facilities in the nation—if not the world—has waved away Big Bang theory as a fairy tale created by people who, presumably like himself and his colleagues, are “high-falutin scientists.”
Carson may struggle to reconcile his profession with his beliefs, but he also happens to be listed as on author on several publications that rely heavily on that devilish construct known as evolution.
Who was whispering in Carson’s ear and guiding his deft surgeon’s hand when he himself used these tenets in his calling as a neurosurgeon? Here are five occasions when that guiding voice must have been engaged in its nefarious work (in reality, very good work that holds promise for people with brain cancer, congenital brain anomalies, and other conditions).
- Cancer-related mutations in a gene associated with brain cancer. The variation in all of life traces directly to this vulnerability and strength of DNA—its susceptibility to change. Mutations can result in harm, like the ones described in this paper Carson co-authored, they can result in nothing outwardly detectable, or they can lead to changes that give organisms a leg up, as it were, in the survival and reproduction Olympics. They form the basis of evolution. Carson also connects mutations and their link to altered traits here.
- Using monkeys to model therapeutic techniques that might later be used on people. Guess why using a monkey is a good choice for modeling surgery instead of, say, a fruit fly? Because they are among our closest living relatives … which means we share a common ancestor, just like you and your first cousins (if you are benefited with such) share a common grandparent and are more related than, say, you and Barack Obama (unless he’s your cousin). For this reason, it’s not surprising that Carson, who focused on developing techniques suitable for human application, published several studies using this close relative to see how well they would work. How can we tell these monkeys are so closely related to us? If you have a full sibling, that person is 50% related to you at the DNA level. That first cousin of yours is 12.5% related to you. Guess which one is your closer relative? This monkey species is a lot more like us at the DNA level than, say, a fruit fly. Guess which one is our closer evolutionary relative?
- Lying between fruit flies and monkeys on our close relatives list is the rat. And yes, some of Carson’s work has involved using rats injected with cells to create brain tumors that then allow testing of different therapeutic approaches to treating those tumors. Carson has published several times on rat models. We can use rodents as a facsimile of us (with caveats) because we are all mammals with similar mammalian anatomy and mammalian responses to things like having tumor cells injected into our brains. These mammalian traits—including fur and milk production—that we share and that other animals don’t have demonstrate our evolutionary closeness and make this kind of testing valid and possible.
- Ditto mice. Also useful for rapid breeding and genetic manipulation, another way we take advantage of what we know about the underpinnings of evolution.
- In his work, Carson has frequently used a drug called carboplatin. This chemotherapy drug directly targets the cellular machinery responsible for repairing our DNA when mutations happen. In cancer, interfering with repair and maybe even DNA synthesis in cancer cells leads to the eventual death of cancer cell populations. In an interesting illustration of how the environment determines the relevance of a mutation, this drug, which is used to treat many cancers, might be effective in breast cancer if the cancer is related to specific gene variants.
Of course, our entire understanding in cancer biology traces to grasping the relevance of mutations—good, bad, indifferent—and the ways we can exploit those mutations by manipulating the environment to target them. In this way, we have harnessed a mechanism of evolution—creating an environment that acts selectively on differences arising from genetic changes—to try to destroy cancer. That seems like ethical work on the side of good to me.
