I'm rather amused when I read some posts with outrageous nonsense claims about science ...
Ah, well, if entheogenic mushrooms can inspire creativity with random hallucinations, I suppose I should look at absurdities as potential creativity boosters. I'll try to think of Roony as our hookah-mushroom-smoking caterpillar dude.
I like your posts, Phil, or Jessica's as well as William's and others when they sincerely question what "science" tells us but avoid the sterile but highly attractive pittfall or tendency to reject science as a whole .
Thanks! I enjoy your posts very much also.
As far as I know science remains yet the only method of investigation that clearly works in our attempt to better understand nature and the world we live in.
Or at least the best one we currently have. I try as an amateur to use a basic version of the scientist's toolkit. I like it because to a certain extent it works, not because it's perfect (which it isn't).
Biology is certainly the less mature science because it deals with the most complex systems,
Correct, the more complex and chaotic and less discrete the system, the more difficult it is to do good science and the easier it is too fall prey to the temptations of seeking the answers you want, making the results fit your hypothesis, cherry picking the data, seeing what you want to see, fooling people with false results, etc.
we know of. Most biologists now know that the central molecular biology dogma or genetic reductionism is wrong but this does not mean that we haven't meanwhile learned a tremendous amount of things in this framework and that a non reductionist or emergentist and more appropriate theory is not available.
Yes, mapping the genome of several species doesn't seem to have produced the sort of rapid and numerous breakthroughs that some people expected, but I wasn't surprised. Having all the details helps some, but it still doesn't give you the totality of the complex big picture.
To take just an example of what positive effect modern science such as quantum mechanics or statistical thermodynamics has brought about with respect to raw paleo let's consider the raw versus cooked issue. The adverse effects of cooking can only be understood theoretically in terms of molecules and their behaviour upon heating and this is precisely the subject of quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics, i.e. achievements of the 20th century. No way to find out why cooking might well generate toxins with 19th century science.
Yes, cooking introduces new chaotic variables into organic systems. These organic systems (like food and the human body) are too complex for us to understand fully and we cannot know aforehand all the effects that introducing additional chaos into these systems will have--which is very risky. We are literally playing with fire.
I'm thinking that the work of Nassim Taleb (he's working on another book that will be more universal than his statistics-oriented Black Swan--I highly recommend The Black Swan and all of Dr. Taleb's articles and interviews--he's one of the revolutionaries in the world who really gets it), Mandelbrot and others on complex systems, chaos, unintended consequences, etc. may influence the scientists who already believe that cooking has some deleterious effects to question it even more.
As to the paleo concept support let me emphasize once more as in my previous post in this thread that we do not even need a specific theory of evolution or even evolution or the gene concept or whatever, we just need to acknowledge that animals or humans cannot a priori adapt to everything, in particular to any arbitrary diet, irrespective of how long they try to do so. A very reasonable and likely assumption, actually.
Brilliant. Dr. Taleb would like this, I believe. Taleb would say, I think, that all we really need is our own trial-and-error experience to figure out that modern foods have a negative effect on us. I would add that the Paleolithic nutrition/metabolism model saves us some time by giving us some clues as to what we should try. Nassim grudgingly acknowledged that theories do have some value, so I don't think he would mind.
