I did give you an example of how understanding the evolution of the motivation to overeat is useful in talking to patients. I’ll repeat it again, Dr. Drew is an addiction specialist who is still using pop psychology to explain overeating and basing medical recommendations on that pop psychology. Understanding the evolutionary drive to overeat due to environmental mismatch leads to drastically different treatment recommendations, someone who explains most chronic overeating via pop psychology might try to help people boost their self-esteem or send them to non-scientifically verified forms of talk therapy, while someone who understands environmental mismatch is going to be able to explain why they are having problems and help patients understand why lifestyle and environmental changes are so important. I never said you’d necessarily worry the patient with details of evolution, the whole debate is about whether understanding evolution is useful for doctors. Please take a look at the references I mentioned, I think you’ll change your mind about how important understanding the foundational principle of biology is to being a good doctor.

It’s not the understanding of motivations that I have issues with – its the idea that understanding the evolution of those motivations will someone alter them that I have a problem with.

Can you give me a theoretical case where an obese patient comes in and you are able to reduce his weight by conferring an understanding of the evolutionary causes of his excessive weight? Seems kinda silly to me. Personally I would just criticize their behavior and not worry them about evolution.

I think understanding motivations of patients has value much beyond just memorizing basic facts like irreversible enzymes. I’d encourage you to read some articles or books on evolutionary medicine to see why it is valuable to physicians. If you can get Oxford’s Principles of Evolutionary Medicine from your library that would be a good place to start, also I pointed to some other resources in reply to the comment at Why Evolution is True which is linked in my question in Dr. Novella’s post.

“Understanding about the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness and why we have such a strong desire for sweet and fatty foods that isn’t optimal in our culture of plentiful junk food could help a physician understand poor diet habits better than relying on Freud and pop psychology”

But understanding why one has a desire, especially if you say it evolved, has little practical value. It’s just a means to memorize facts of biology and not a very efficient one since initialisms like “PPFG – Pathway Produces Fresh Glucose” for the irreversible enzymes in gluconeogensis can accomplish basically the same thing in much shorter amount of time.

My main point from my post a few days ago was that we skeptics seem to over emphasize the value of understanding certain scientific topics like evolution when from a practical – input vs output – Turing type of way – it’s superfluous for the goal at hand (e.g. diagnosis, treatment)

Your restatement of Steven Novella’s paragraph is a straw man.

Parapsychology, by it’s very nature, should have practical application if it were true. There is no evidence, for example, that ESP works, therefore this brings parapsycology into question.
Dark Matter, by it’s very nature, does not have practical application. However, it would, if it existed, explain why galaxies hold together given their angular momentum, something which does not seem to have any other explanation. Therefore it is worth studying.

I think we do have a different defintion for sceptic and denier.
Whilst not denying the evidence no matter howm convincing, I have a sceptical outlook on everything.

> There does not need to be an immediate practical application of dark matter, for example, in order to consider the evidence for dark matter compelling. A claim, however, that has an obvious practical application, like ESP, does raise skepticism when it cannot be used for the purpose to which it is so obviously suited (if it existed). <

This is just another example where you want to have it both ways: "There does not need to be an immediate practical application for some discipline in order to make it a legitimate science, unless, of course it is parapsychology.”

There’s experimental evidence for psi phenomena. And parapsychology is recognized as a legitimate science (whether you approve of it or not) by the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science).

You should always have a sceptical attitude towards everything.
Did you mean evolution denier?
(ie climate change sceptics are actually climate change deniers)