Michaelwh,
Thanks for the further delineation on the subject. I've read a few books on the subject. Candice Pert "The Molecules of Emotion" and "The Human Genome Project".
Thanks for the book recommendations. I read a few reviews of Candice Pert's book, and plan to buy it. Who are the authors of "The Human Genome Project"? I found a few different books with that same title.
By the way, an interesting modern book that makes the case for a pleomorphic view of bacteria, is "A New Bacteriology" by Sonea and Panisset. Their main argument is that bacteria have numerous mechanisms for very quickly changing their DNA and responding to the environment, and that they should not be classified as individual species, but instead be thought of as constituents of one earth-wide "super-organism". This super-organism is what James Lovelock would call "Gaia".
I stand by my first conclusion. This man is making a living with molecular biology. If people dis' him and his technology in favour of a simpler way of life, he is out of a job.
This reductionistic information may be fascinating, but unfortunately when he waxes poetic, he forgets to mention that this technology is also used to produce GMO foods. Eventually what he is up to is playing God with the food supply. From what I heard, he was saying he has even grander plans for mobilizing his Frankenstein experiments on the public. Unfortunately this clown and his associates have convinced governments that these foods and other manipulations of human beings be allowed to be sold to the general public who believe that our elected officials are keeping us all safe. We cannot even see a label that says we are buying GMO or irradiated foods in Canada. We are all part of a Frankestein experiment conducted by this man and his ilk, who from the soundtrack on the video believes he is just that little bit more intelligent than the minions that surround him as he walks down the street.
I agree. Unfortunately, many people sincerely believe that GMOs are the solution to world hunger. I worked through a standard first-year undergrad biology textbook. It had a chapter on genetic engineering. It explained how GMOs such as "golden rice" were developed, and how such innovations have the potential to end world hunger, and make us all healthier. At the very end of the chapter, it was very briefly mentioned that GMOs have received opposition. I was horrified. This stuff is taught to first-year undergrads, and most of them will believe this without questioning.
Science and technology is a double-edged sword. Not only in biology. For example, understanding nuclear physics was a wonderful intellectual accomplishment, but unfortunately, it led to horrible weapons of mass destruction.
I like the way you described "obvious quakery" If I read you right you are saying that obvious quakery to one man is the truth to another. Very eloquently said. You posted it as I was about to reply.
Yes, that's what I meant.
I read a book on Pasteur and he was a brilliant man. He made some very important discoveries in a world where religion had a liplock on the truth with "Spontaneous Generation", the nonsense of the Catholic church. Now we have moved on and taken this reductionism too far in the other direction.
Which book was this? As I said in my earlier post, many of Pasteur's discoveries, including the abolishment of spontaneous generation, were partly or fully plagiarized from Bechamp. The book by Marie Nonclercq explains this in detail. If you don't read French, and don't want to spend hours with a dictionary, the following English books also explain this:
Bechamp or Pasteur? A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology
by Ethel Douglas Hume
Pasteur: Plagiarist, Impostor : The Germ Theory Exploded
by R. B. Pearson
(on Amazon, you can get both of these in a single volume)
As for spontaneous generation -- actually, we know from high-energy particle physics that a particle-antiparticle pair CAN in fact be "spontaneously generated". But this is very different from what was meant by "spontaneous generation" in the 19th century.
