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Starman
SFN Regular
Sweden
1613 Posts |
 Posted - 10/03/2005 : 23:53:49
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From the Loom : A Prize Bug
Nice article on how the evolution of Helicobacter pylori maps to the migrations of humans over the past 50,000 years.
"Imagine worshiping a God so weak and incompetent that the Kansas School Board must defend this God from science and new learning. "
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Dude
SFN Die Hard
USA
6891 Posts |
 Posted - 10/04/2005 : 00:04:17 [Permalink]
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Nice reading, thanks!
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Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson
"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin
Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth |
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Starman
SFN Regular
Sweden
1613 Posts |
Posted - 10/04/2005 : 01:00:35 [Permalink]
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Also on this Nobel price and how science works:
Well Deserved, by Derek Lowequote:
Crazy ideas won't necessarily get you tossed out of the club. Crazy ideas with nothing to back them up will. But just come back with the evidence, and they won't be crazy any more. Show me the religion that takes its heretics and makes them bishops, won't you?
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"Any religion that makes a form of torture into an icon that they worship seems to me a pretty sick sort of religion quite honestly"
-- Terry Jones |
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markie
Skeptic Friend
Canada
356 Posts |
Posted - 10/05/2005 : 12:00:39 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by Starman
Also on this Nobel price and how science works:
Well Deserved, by Derek Lowequote:
Crazy ideas won't necessarily get you tossed out of the club. Crazy ideas with nothing to back them up will. But just come back with the evidence, and they won't be crazy any more. Show me the religion that takes its heretics and makes them bishops, won't you?
Hey, even *religion* can be self correcting as well, albeit at a far slower pace than science. Take early Jewish religion. It is clear that the priests and scribes of Judaism conspired and succeeded in killing many of the "prophets" of the Jewish nation. Those visionaries were seen to be too radical and dangerous to the religious and national establishment. Yet now of course those same prophets are honoured in the Jewish and Christian scriptures.
Here's another article regarding the fitting Nobel prize to Marshall and Warren:
quote:
A 'Preposterous' Nobel
The Wall Street Journal
October 4, 2005; Page A26
Time was when our best medical minds thought peptic ulcers were a "lifestyle disease," the result of too much stress, too much spicy food, or some combination thereof. For treatment, doctorly prescriptions included time off work, chewing your food thoroughly, popping antacids and drinking quantities of milk. In severe cases, patients went under the knife to have their stomach linings removed.
So it is not altogether surprising that when Australian physician Barry Marshall suggested, at a Brussels conference in 1983, that peptic ulcers might have a bacterial cause, his findings were dismissed by colleagues as "the most preposterous thing ever heard," according to his entry in the Current Biography Yearbook.
Far from being deterred, however, Dr. Marshall pursued his line of inquiry into a bacterium named Helicobacter pylori, which had been discovered by his Australian collaborator Robin Warren and which seemed to be closely associated with gastric inflammation. Dr. Marshall even went so far as to make himself a research guinea pig by drinking a microbial stew, which caused him to become ill but which further confirmed the validity of their hypothesis.
Today, the milk-and-rest cure is a thing of the past, surgeries are rare, and a disease that affects some four million Americans annually can usually be treated successfully within a few weeks with an antibiotic cocktail. For their findings, yesterday Drs. Marshall and Warren shared this year's Nobel Prize in Medicine and its $1.3 million prize. It's an inspired choice -- and a useful reminder that just because there's a scientific "consensus," that doesn't mean it's true.
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BigPapaSmurf
SFN Die Hard
3192 Posts |
Posted - 10/05/2005 : 12:14:21 [Permalink]
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| Medicine has always been lite on the scientic data to back up well known assumptions. Medicine is obsessed with the hippocratic oath not the empirical one. |
"...things I have neither seen nor experienced nor heard tell of from anybody else; things, what is more, that do not in fact exist and could not ever exist at all. So my readers must not believe a word I say." -Lucian on his book True History
"...They accept such things on faith alone, without any evidence. So if a fraudulent and cunning person who knows how to take advantage of a situation comes among them, he can make himself rich in a short time." -Lucian critical of early Christians c.166 AD From his book, De Morte Peregrini |
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