Too long...

This has probably been the toughest week I've ever had, academically speaking. That said, posting is back on, and I've got some articles for you:

Did you think Vioxx was bad? Think again (via KevinMD):

That brings us up to penicillin, a drug with a clean reputation if ever there was one. But at the same time, everyone has heard of the occasional bad allergic reaction to it and related antibiotics. Even with the availability of skin tests for sensitivity, these antibiotics cause about one fatality per 50 to 100,000 patient courses of treatment. Other severe reactions are twenty times as common. Those are interesting figures to put into today's legal context: over 9 million prescriptions were written for Vioxx, for example. Any modern drug that directly caused that number of patient deaths and injuries would bury its company in a hailstorm of lawsuits, because (unlike the Vioxx cases) there would be little room to argue about other risk factors. Anaphylactic shock is hard to mistake for anything else.

And, today a Jesuit scientist came out against ID in school:

"Intelligent design isn't science even though it pretends to be," the ANSA news agency quoted Coyne as saying on the sidelines of a conference in Florence. "If you want to teach it in schools, intelligent design should be taught when religion or cultural history is taught, not science."

Too bad they won't get Benedict to agree.

My rant begins......now:
They may or may not have the archeological evidence to support evolution - I don't know. That's not really my field, and I've never really looked into it. But, I can make a case for it biologically. For instance: correlations in brain structure and function in mammals? Similar if not exact biochemical pathways between species or even separate classes of animals? How about the fact that we need a new flu vaccine every year?