Physicians are not biologists (especially in church)

Alba, The GFP Bunny (www.ekac.org)
Photo: Chrystelle Fontaine

Happy Easter. I’m flying coast-to-coast all day today. When I finally decided to book my tickets a few days ago, I was astonished at the availability of last-minute flights. It took me a full day to realize it’s probably because today is Easter. Duh.

Honestly, Easter has never been big in my family. Most of my friends don’t celebrate religious holidays either; if they do, they secularize them. In fact, I find the safest assumption about new friends/acquaintances of my generation is that they’re agnostic or atheist. Obviously most Americans, even most Americans our age, are not atheists. But most of my friends are overeducated, dragging around those pesky MAs and PhDs. Does overeducation explain the lack of faith? And if so, can you blame this lack on atheist professors?

This Michigan Daily article notes that 1 in 5 faculty members are atheists (as opposed to 7% of the general population). Note – that’s still a minority. But the article contrasts faculty with health care professionals, who are also highly educated, but much more likely to be religious, and suggests an intriguing hypothesis:

The authors of the UCLA survey also analyzed religiosity by subject area. Not surprisingly, biological sciences had the highest incidence of atheism, while the humanities had one of the lowest. However, the profession with the very fewest atheists turned out to be health care.

Technically, medicine and biology are similar fields. However, in terms of a day job, they’re completely different. Could the academe factor in the impersonal of the biologist sitting behind a microscope account for the lack of religiosity? Is there more of that subtle, incomprehensible “real life” factor in treating and caring for people in the health professions and hence greater religiosity?

In my limited experience, this correlation is true – doctors and nurses tend to be religious, while biologists aren’t. Yet as a former professor of anatomy and physiology who taught both pre-meds and nursing students, I’ve wondered which comes first: the chicken (faith) or the egg (a medical career). For that matter, I have no idea if faith is the chicken or the egg, but enough about my poorly chosen, Easter-themed metaphor. I don’t agree with what the article suggests: that biology and medicine are very similar in the first place.

Although they appear superficially similar, medicine and biology are different beasts. The fields should not be lumped together as this article implies, primarily because medicine is entirely anthropocentric. That was a huge adjustment for me as a professor. I found myself teaching human anatomy and physiology, not comparative; most of the students weren’t even slightly interested in comparing human anatomy to other species. When I started talking about duck feet as a way to understand countercurrent exchange, their eyes glazed, or they started asking clinical questions about blood pressure and Viagra. They endured the basic biology, but tried to push me through it as fast as possible so I’d get to human physiology. It’s not natural for a biologist to think (or teach) like that. We (if I can briefly speak for biologists in general) see humans as a tiny little twig on a vast cladogram. Humans are animals to us.

This anthropocentric viewpoint was most obvious in lab. Students who could dissect cats without any problem became sick upon seeing a human cadaver, even with the face covered, in a preserved state barely resembling a living person. They simply couldn’t adjust to treating a human body as meat, like they did with the cats. This attitude may be a strength in health care – you should never think of your patients as meat; if you do, you should never admit it – but it’s a big problem in biology. Most insights into human physiological processes are made because we’re confident that our cells work like other mammals’ cells, and our bodies work like other mammals’ bodies, and thus discoveries made in other systems can be extrapolated to humans.

I don’t think we can be effective as biologists if we see humans as somehow privileged, as carrying something (a soul, or a divine mandate) that sets us irrevocably apart from our fellow organisms. Yet that’s what Christianity teaches: that humans hold dominion over nature. Biologists don’t acknowledge that difference. We’re parts of nature, built with the same toolkit as salamanders, lobsters and wallabies. And if you become a biologist, with the requisite scientific training in developmental mechanisms and cellular processes and above all genetics, that reality will eventually slap you in the face. Hard. At which point you probably reject science, or adjust your anthropocentric worldview. But medicine doesn’t force you to make that choice, because you are dealing with humans, and nothing but humans, day in and day out.

I’d also like to point out that just because biologists don’t treat patients doesn’t mean we’re cold, or uninterested in the human condition. (We may lack social skills sometimes, but physicists are worse; so there). I didn’t choose to go into medicine, but I’m extremely empathetic. Teaching is an empathetic profession – anyone who suggests otherwise doesn’t know how what it is to be a teacher or a (primarily teaching) professor. When my empathy started to dwindle, I knew I had to quit, though everything else about my job performance was fine. I couldn’t teach if I wasn’t emotionally available to my students. So I doubt that as a biology professor I’m “impersonal” or out of touch with real life, as the article hypothesizes. Is that what students of faith perceive, though, and thus choose medicine over biology? Possibly.

I think the spiritual differences between professors of biology and doctors are not a result of their eventual professional responsibilities, or even their training, as much as the outcome of the worldview they espouse even before they enter their fields. Biologists are scientists, they think like scientists; most doctors aren’t, and don’t. This extends to the language they use to frame research. In February, Respectful Insolence discussed a PLOS study that found biologists much more likely than physicians to use the term “evolution” to describe bacterial acquisition of antibiotic resistance. Are physicians actively avoiding the term because they’re creationists? Or are they simply less interested in parsing the mechanism that leads to resistance, than treating the patients affected?

Coming back to the Michigan Weekly article, I think this quote sums it up pretty well:

Faced with a choice between eternal peril and everlasting pleasure, any thinking person would pick the latter and go to church. But for many the choice isn’t that simple. And besides the different incentive schedules, it’s possible that professors just think differently.

“Academics tend to think about everything too much,” said Law School Prof. Douglas Laycock, an expert on religious liberty. “So it’s not surprising that they come to a different set of answers.”

Note: over at Pharyngula, PZ Myers has asked doctors and engineers who are not creationists to declare themselves. When I last checked, the comments were almost all from engineers (many biomedical engineers included), but PZ probably has an unusual readership demographic. Don’t know if the balance of comments will change.

More reading: Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan recently had a marathon blogalogue on the topic of religion, science and all possible related subjects over at belief.net. Warning: this is long.