Michael Egnor

Michael Egnor is a pediatric neurosurgeon and intelligent design supporter who writes for the Discovery Institute blog. He is a professor at the Department of Neurological Surgery at Stony Brook University, a position held since 1991.

Education

Egnor completed medical school at Columbia University.

Intelligent design

Egnor rejected evolutionary theory after reading Michael Denton's book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis and said "claims of evolutionary biologists go wildly beyond the evidence." In 2007 he joined the Discovery Institute's Evolution News & Views blog.

Biologist Jerry Coyne responded to Egnor's article by criticising Egnor's lack of scientific credentials and claiming Egnor accepted widely discredited claims (claims recanted by Denton himself in a later book) and "Egnor is decades out of date and shows no sign of knowing anything at all about evolutionary biology in the 21st century." Egnor is a signatory to the Discovery Institute intelligent design campaign A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism and Physicians and Surgeons who Dissent from Darwinism.

In March 2007, when the Alliance for Science sponsored an essay contest for high school students on the topic "Why I would want my doctor to have studied evolution," Egnor responded by posting an essay on the Discovery Institute's intelligent design blog claiming that evolution was irrelevant to medicine. Dr. Burt Humburg criticized him on the blog Panda's Thumb citing the benefits of evolution to medicine and, contrary to Egnor's claim, that doctors do study evolution.

Egnor appeared in Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. In the film, Ben Stein describes this as "Darwinists were quick to try and exterminate this new threat," and Egnor says he was shocked by the "viciousness" and "baseness" of the response. The website Expelled Exposed, created by the NCSE, responded by saying that Egnor must never have been to the Internet before.

Medical work

In 2005 Egnor operated on a young boy whose head was crushed by his father's SUV. The case was reported in Newsday, Good Morning America and New York Magazine.

Personal life

Egnor has four children and resides in Stony Brook, New York with his wife. Egnor is a Catholic.