This is .... strange. Apparently there are individuals out there that deny the germ theory of disease. Tara encountered this in one of her comment threads:
[F]orget the germ theory nonsense and become a real scientist. ... Evidence is all around and you have as much evidence as I do. The sole difference between you and me is that you are still blindfolded by a century of dogmatic thinking and are not able to see the evidence.
You can do what you want with your special laboratory mice, but whan it comes to it nobody has ever proven that germs cause disease and a century of war on microbes has had no results and, to cite a professor of the Villejuif hospital "up to today medicine doesn't know the cause of any disease".
As Tara herself points out, there is a spooky parallelism in rhetoric to anti-evolutionism here. Strange.
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As I have pointed out, Crichton seems to fall into this camp - in Timeline he asserts that 'Even the most established concepts - like the idea that germs cause disease - [are] not as thoroughly proven as people believe.'
I think that commenter is a very good parody.
Moi? No parody, that is a verbatim Crichton quote. I can probably find a page reference if you insist, though I would prefer to leave the volume mouldering where it belongs.
Admittedly, Crighton himself may be a parody.
Or travesty. One or the other, anyway...
No, outeast, I meant the commenter from Tara's thread quoted above in the post.
"The sole difference between you and me is that you are still blindfolded by a century of dogmatic thinking..."
sounds like a perfect ripoff of the
"century of Darwinian science and no proof"
arguments made by creationists.
Your Michael Crichton quote sounds a little like Scott Adams' drivel. But what I don't get about Crichton is that he writes medical drama. Do you think he was just making the point that scientific theories are never "proven"? Or is he a stealth woo woo?
Crighton isn't a stealth woo-woo... he's a about waist-deep in the stuff. He's evolved from an amusing science fiction writer into a fiction-writing version of Graham Hancock. Thinks he knows a lot, panders to the "well how do you really KNOW anything?" crowd, and generally mucks up his science by playing up that angle. He's become a pseudoscience-fiction writer, but has drank so much of his own Kool-Aid that he's convinced himself he knows what he's talking about. It was one thing when he was writing fiction books denying the reality of global warming; it's another thing entirely now that he's joined the lecture circuit and testified at a congressional hearing about climate change.