Chemically-minded/blinded scientists (and during WWII that included almost all scientists) hate, hate, hate penicillium mold.
To them , it is like an unbroken , un-house-trained mustang bronco .
A petulant two year old pooping penicillin all over the floor and then mutating like crazy so it now refuses to eat right, go to bed on cue or produce more penicillin on demand.
And natural penicillin itself - it also sometimes mysteriously lost its potency in mere days or even hours.
"For Darwin's Sake, give me man-made penicillin every time !" was their universal cry.
"It will be stable in shelf life and with all its predictable characteristics both known in advance and consistently stable."
But if we have learned anything since Big Science's apogee in 1945, it is that merely because a substance is man-made does not mean we can predict all its characteristics in advance.
Witnesses in my defence ?
Freon Gas, Leaded Gasoline, DDT and Thalidomide just for starters.
As the offspring of a philosophy prof who taught intro logic for decades , I am tempted - very tempted - to say that all scientists need to pass a tough course in logical fallacies.
For these sort of fallacies tend to show up ,time and again, not in scientists' overt research data, but in their unspoken and unquestioned silent assumptions....
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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