Neurosurgeons Are Stupid

I say this, not because I went to Harvard and Ben Carson went to Yale, George W. Bush’s alma mater.  I say this because neurosurgeons require excellent hand-eye coordination, not intelligence.  I have just read Ben Carson’s story on New Yorker and you can read it too, thanks to their free-article feature.

Here are some salient features of Ben Carson’s life story.  His mother married at thirteen, to a twenty-eight-year-old man.  He turned out to be a bigamist, and after his exit, she supported herself and her two sons by cleaning houses.  This was during those bygone days of memory when a woman could support herself and two sons by cleaning houses.  She enforced a studies policy on her sons, one that would be impossible today if he wanted to be “in with” his fellow black students. He didn’t discover his vocation until he started playing Foosball at Yale.  Those were the days when a black man could be admitted to Yale through its progressive admissions policies of the time.

I’m not saying that all black men who went to Yale are stupid.  Just Ben Carson.   This is because he is a Seventh Day Adventist and doesn’t believe in evolution.  What did they teach him at Yale?  Not to believe in evolution?  Obviously he missed those biology and organic chemistry classes or just memorized the answers on the test and forgot the material afterward for lack of use.

The other reason he is stupid is that he is a “rock-ribbed” conservative.  He’s obviously stupid.  Not all conservatives are stupid but it sure helps them to be stupid.  See also the famous quote from John Stuart Mill: “Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative.”

Conservatives don’t believe in evolution, welfare, the Preamble to the United States Constitution (which states, “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, …” or the 1938 Constitution of the State of New York (which states, in Article XVII,  “The aid, care and support of the needy are public concerns and shall be provided by the state …” and, in Article XVIII, ” the legislature may provide in such manner, by such means and upon such terms and conditions as it may prescribe for low rent housing and nursing home accommodations for persons of low income …”), nor, most importantly, in global warming or climate change, which he claims is irrelevant.

In searching for “Ben Carson”, I also located an article about the autobiography of Dr. Henry Marsh, a neurosurgeon, who is, unlike Ben Carson, smart enough to write a book.  The book is called, “Do No Harm” and consists mainly of confessions to serious mistakes that he made as a surgeon, in which patients were paralyzed or never woke up after surgery.  This book has inspired me to write a similar piece about the mistakes and disasters I have had.  I have already written about the death of a minister from hepatitis B in “A Death in Hazen.”  The minister’s death wasn’t my fault, nor anybody’s fault except for the person who transmitted hepatitis B to him (and even them he probably didn’t know he was doing it.)

I have a feeling that Dr. Carson has not admitted to himself the mistakes he has made as a neurosurgeon, because Seventh Day Adventists don’t admit to themselves their own mistakes.  Admitting his mistakes has not been easy for Dr. Marsh; it is always painful and sometimes impossible. Most people find admitting mistakes difficult or impossible.  But it is always necessary because you must admit to something before you can change it.

A parallel in evolution is that adaptations that impair survival result in corrections by their nature; adaptations that are neutral don’t cause corrections and those that improve survival to reproduction become universal.  A recent Nature research article describes the beneficial effect that maladaptive changes confer on the survival of the species.  The technical term is “non-adaptive phenotypic plasticity.”  Here Ben Carson showed adaptive plasticity in becoming a neurosurgeon in response to his environment as a child of a house cleaner in 1960’s America but, unfortunately, will show maladaptive plasticity in becoming a Republican candidate for President.  He will be selected out when the Republicans discover that blacks won’t vote for him either.  The only question is whether selecting Donald Trump as a candidate for President will be maladaptive; I certainly hope so.