Germ theory denialism

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Ok, this may surprise some people, but germ theory denialism DOES exist.

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2010/ ... nt_acc.php

The issue is what this means, and how we should regard this denialism with all of the other human absurdities. What inference about human cognition should we draw?

There are people who believe the earth is flat and others who believe the earth is hollow and that we live on the inside.

And there is the Fundy crowd who believe the Earth (indeed, the entire Cosmos) is six thousand years old or thereabouts.

ruveyn

To most of those that believe that the world is flat, it is more a joke. A reason for a party here and there. After all Newfoundland is one of the corners of the world, and who loves a party more than a Newfie?

This issue isn't about believing stupid crazy and idiotic things, it isn't about the issues discussed. What it is about, is humankind's ability to disregard reality, and believe blindly in what they are told to do. This exists as a genetic predisposition, because of issues like: The kid who listens to his mother not to go swimming in the river doesn't get eaten by crocodiles. The child that listens to his father about not jumping off a cliff doesn't go smush. And they don't have to work by trial and error for this to emerge. This is what is called memetic driving of the gene pool.

The problem is, that we have gone to the point where we will believe ANYTHING, literally ANYTHING we are told, if it is told to us by a person in high enough authority, in the right way.

As time has gone by, more and more of humanity has left this idiocy behind, science has shown beliefs like flat earth, intelligent design, special creation to be what they are, ignorance and intellectual laziness.
But the problem isn't so much solved by just waiting until people go away, as soon as they do, some other issue that has been replaced by science will take it's place.

These people actually, in a way, serve a purpose to science (the concept of science, not the establishment we call science though) The force rational thinkers to constantly examine the issues, which in turn causes them to get better understandings of the reality of the issue. They in effect drive science further, to more concise theories. If no one questioned evolution, would there have been as many anthropological and archeological digs in Ethiopia? No.

These crack pots keep us with a constant reminder that we ourselves must not fall victim to that which they have done themselves. We cannot let science become a religion, whereby the "accepted idea of the time" is biblical.

Apparentely, they still believe the earth is the center of the universe.

Last edited by greenblue on 11 Aug 2010, 5:24 pm, edited 2 times in total.

I've read that there are some pretty amusing cures for diseases written in the Bible. I wish these germ theory deniers would use those cures instead of this innocent "healthy living" bullcrap.

I want more people to cut off a dove's head to cure leaprosy or something like that.

Germs? Nonsense! I have never seen one.

If you get sick it is because god is punishing you or some witch has put the evil eye on you.

So, what of Louis Pasteur? Did he disavow germ theory?

The author seems to be making inflated claims about germ theory denial ists and their impact. He even makes the ridiculous claim that chiropractors and naturopathic practitioners deny germ theory.

Do you look properly? To see something who diameter is less than the resolving power of the human retina you need an instrument. For something the size of a bacterium a high powered microscope will do nicely.

ruveyn

Seeing them isn't even necessary to know that they exist. We cannot see electrons or protons or neutrons, but by their effects we know they exist.

Without being able to see the critters, what is the differential experiment that separates the hypotheses:

hyp-1: Diseases are cause by microscopic pathogens.
hyp-2: Diseases are inflicted by God as punishment for sins.

The reason why people accepted the existence of small invisible or nearly invisible pathogens is that they have the instruments to detect them.

ruveyn

Ahh, ruveyn, can't you tell by now when I am being sarcastic?

This is a forum for Auties and Aspies. I take everything literally until I find out I shouldn't.

ruveyn

And what of Ignaz Semmelweis? Who basically had the doctors of his hospital wash their hands prior to permitting them to assist patients, such as women giving birth? The death rates of women via puerperal fever were significantly reduced in his ward while in others where doctors were not required to wash their hands maintained the same nasty death rates.

Semmelweis did not believe disease was a punishment from God. He did make a brilliant empirical guess that the agents causing the disease were carried from patient to patient by the doctors who touched or handled the patients. Without direct evidence of the pathogens he could not convince his fellow physicians his hypothesis was true. It was only after Pasteur and the availibility of good microscopes that the medical community was convinced that microscopic critters were the pathogens that caused the diseases. The rest is history.

Another example of empirical leaps: Medele'ev formulated a periodic table of elements based on the macroscopic property of known elements. Dr. M had no idea of the existence of electrons but he intuitively guessed that other elements must exist to fill in the repeated (or periodic) repetitions of macroscopically observable properties. Another instance: Charles Darwin did not have the least notion of how characteristics are transmitted from generation to generation but he was able to guess that whatever the mechanism is varied over time and the best adaptations were selected by Nature to survive (Natural Selection). By an odd coincidence Mendel published his first finding of the statistical distribution of characteristics from generation to generation and postulated a mechanism (later called the gene) for transmitting the characteristics. He published in a very obscure Czeck journal and his work went unrecognized for forty years until re-discovered by DeVrees around 1900. In any case Darwin did not have a clue and he knew nothing of genes. Darwin (and Wallace) both made the same brilliant empirical leap, but it was just a guess or a hypothesis. They did not have any direct knowledge of genes or even detailed inferential knowledge. No one knew what a gene was until the work of Watson and Crick in the 1950s near a hundred years after Darwin.

The point is that very brilliant people have made good guesses based on macroscopically observable phenomena or effects but the underlying mechanism remains hypothetical for a long time. Atoms were not directly observed (with the aid of instruments) until about forty years ago with advances in x-ray diffraction.

ruveyn

No crap, of course he didn't. But neither did he need to use microscopes to infer the presence of microorganisms.