Dirty Stinking Government HealthcareFollow

No, my background is in critical thinking. Apparently they are unrelated fields (semi-joking). But seriously I'm not interested in comparing egos and exchanging insults. If you are seriously interested in my background, I work in IT, and have a professional certification in this area, but my BA is in Philosophy with a focus on Epistemology (Summa *** Laude 2005.)



I'm not saying thats definitively the case, but I am suggesting it as a possibility. What I'm saying is that there is no controlled variable for this big experiment that we are doing so, while it makes perfect sense for us to use this medicine for our everyday needs, because it seems to work from our limited perspective, the actual scientific data is incomplete and we are left with circumstantial evidence.



Great point....BUT, do we know what the initial cause for an evolutionary change is and how, when, and under what conditions it occurs? Another words, the evolutionary process may take a while, but could the precursor or agent that caused the evolution occur spontaneously and go unnoticed in the original, un-evolved, subject?

Is it possible that by injecting ourselves with this vaccine we are enabling the flu to become stronger by urging it to mutate more quickly and generate more variances which are more difficult to inoculate against, and might it also have some unknown, unforeseen effect on future generations of people through some process that we don't understand and/or cannot predict.

I'm not saying that this is the case, just that it it possible. We don't know much about evolution especially the evolution of our immune system in adapting to new threats.

http://library.thinkquest.org/C004367/be7.shtml

Just because the flu mutates does NOT make it more virulent. The 1918 flu was one of the most virulent diseases we've ever seen. By your rational us stomping the 1918 flu should have led to a mutated more virulent strain. If it did, we haven't seen it in nearly 100 years.

cool. I'm not a biologist either. But I have taken a couple courses that touch on it, and I can say that I have encountered no evidence that a vaccine weakens your immune system. Sure our understanding is not perfect, but it is good enough to have a fairly strong degree of confidence that the outcome is indeed the opposite.

I would say to you that to ask intelligent questions you have to be informed about the subject. In any other circumstance you will simple be flailing mindlessly. If someone came to you and asked you a bunch of questions about your field that clearly showed they didn't have a grasp of the fundamentals would you take them seriously? An obvious example would be the idea of 52000 bit encryption schemes as a valid solution. No matter how fast you can do this, no one cares, because it is irrelevant. This is what your "questions" are doing. You need to ask questions from an informed perspective at the very least or they are meaningless.

Yes, they're transmitted through advertising.

your second version flows much better pensive.

And you spelled my name right. Everyone seems to miss the s after the X

Edited, Oct 24th 2009 3:28am by Xsarus

I'll admit, I have had a very mild runny nose for the last two days. It's mostly clearing up now, and it was no worse than the change of season congestion I experienced earlier this month.

Much better than being knocked out in bed for a week, kthnx.

Yes it does.


I still have a chance to learn how/develop the ability to teleport.

You embarrass me. I'm not sure I've before seen someone explicitly study epistemology and so completely miss the point of how inductive reasoning works. You are severely unlikely to instigate a paradigm shift in science. Could you offer something amazingly awesome to a field of which you are a complete neophyte? Sure. Are you going to? Well, the very induction that you are using to examine remote possibilities tells us "no, probably not."



Abductive reasoning: another thing you should already be intimately acquainted with. You should be so intimately acquainted with this in fact that you can just whisper, "hi" in the ear of parsimony and make it ******. You go with what works at the current time due to practical constraints on human knowledge, as well as the imperative to let scientists actually do things as opposed to endless pontification.



And deduction? You want to desecrate that too!?, Jesus christ. Here, you postulate conditionals as a means of preserving truth, not of finding it. You don't use hypothetical conditionals, ever, not in the history of proper logic, to assert truth; you use them to make sure that your hypothetical truth is coherent, and does not contradict itself. That way, when the scientists actually get around to the paradigm shift of the month, you can already have a proper logical framework in place with which to advise it.

Einstein didn't dream up the Theory of Relativity in a vacuum. Most people who revolutionized the scientific community with groundbreaking new ideas and theories did not do so by throwing out all the existing science that had been accepted in that field and striking out in a brand new direction from the start. They trained themselves in it thoroughly, and built on facts that had been proven many times, until they found a place where the facts no longer held sway. THEN they started challenging assumptions and such.

You have to know the rules before you can break them.

Okay, it's possible that EVERYTHING we know about viral vectors and germ theory is completely wrong. But most scientists who are testing new hypothesis in pathology, epidemiology, virology, and bacteriology start with the same basic assumptions we've had since BC 36 when Marcus Terentius Varro warned people not to build houses near swamps because tiny creatures too small to be seen would make you sick.

Edited, Oct 24th 2009 2:54pm by catwho

In exchange, I offer you some comparably relevant information.



Of course ******* not. People are disagreeing with the relevance of anything that you are saying to any topic of value, either related to the thread itself, or scientific knowledge in general.

You seem to have lost the purpose of your own argument. There is no compulsion here to care about the skeptical worries or concerns about some random dude who is expressing knowledge related concerns that are already built into the (properly executed, of course) system and method of science. It's like going into an ethics talk and asking "hmm, what if there really isn't any foundation for these things?" or a psychology conference and going "hmm, I wonder how the brain and mind interact; how do we know if they are different or the same?" Saying, "hmm I wonder if viruses evolve differently in relation to the human immune system" as if no one had ever thought of the question before is well... insipid.

It's funny how you completely ignored my post. Again, your ignorance does not invalidate existing knowledge.

Viruses evolve through mutations in their genetic sequence.

This is scientific fact and "definitely how it works". It really doesn't get any simpler. To the question of how the immune system evolves to combat the threat, the answer is much more complicated, but not entirely unknown. Here's an online immunology text book that should explain most of the basics.

That no vaccine is 100% effective and we have yet to find effective vaccines for some viruses does not imply or even corroborate the rather ignorant assertion that we don't know how things work. The funny thing about living organisms is that although they follow general biological rules, nothing is set in stone, and unexpected evolutionary reactions can, do and will continue to occur in the wild.

Edited, Oct 24th 2009 3:49pm by BrownDuck