Posted: Jun 15, 2010 4:51 pm
Shrunk wrote:GenesForLife wrote:The people who come and spout crap about heterogeneity are often the ones who have no idea about the near-identical pathways of disease progression involved in particular diseases, this is why "rationalist" medicine fucking works.
I also wonder why they set medical science aside as a special case where "rationalism" can be disregarded. If someone were building them a house, and said he had abandoned all empirical principles of structural engineering and simply nailed up a bunch of beams based on the "peculiar" circumstances of this particular house, would then even dare set foot in it?
Part of the reason is, I believe, the way Biology is taught to our kids. I mean, post-1953, Biology is no longer the Stamp-collecting science anymore. It is as concrete and accurate as other so-called more 'fundamental' sciences' But when it comes to teaching children, we still go with the soft options as Zoology, Ascent of Sap etc. I'm not saying that these are useless, but they kinda send the wrong signal and make people think that Biology is an obscure science unlike Physics/Chemistry and is fuzzy like Meteorology. So we are left with people who make arbitrary predictions about the diseases which often seem to work. Had we been more rigorous in teaching Biology to our students, I think, the society would have been much more resistant to these quacks.