AIDS virus 100 years old...
- Thread starter Lordbyron
- Start date
I dont get sick. And even if i did, there is no cure for viruses, correct?
Look, i know youre studying to be a scientist, and kudos to you.
BUt, the fact remains, that we, meaning people that ARENT scientists, only rely on what people like YOU and your buddies tell us. Shit, you could tell us that green is actually purple, becuase you found evidence of it from 10,000 years ago...but how do we know you are right?
Again, didnt everyone think smoking was harmless up until about 1970? Wouldnt a scientist have common knowledge that putting smoke into your lungs...is a BAD thing??? Yet, smoking was not only permitted, but ENCOURAGED throughout the 50' and 60's...even in HOSPITALS.
Look, the bottom line is this....becuase civilians dont know anything or much about science and all that jargon yall speak, we dont have the means to COUNTERACT anything that is "proven" or presented by scientists.
It is my job as a free thinker, to question everything that is told to me, is it not? otherwise, im just a robot. You tell me something, i accept it....sorry, not my steez.
Look, i know youre studying to be a scientist, and kudos to you.
BUt, the fact remains, that we, meaning people that ARENT scientists, only rely on what people like YOU and your buddies tell us. Shit, you could tell us that green is actually purple, becuase you found evidence of it from 10,000 years ago...but how do we know you are right?
Again, didnt everyone think smoking was harmless up until about 1970? Wouldnt a scientist have common knowledge that putting smoke into your lungs...is a BAD thing??? Yet, smoking was not only permitted, but ENCOURAGED throughout the 50' and 60's...even in HOSPITALS.
Look, the bottom line is this....becuase civilians dont know anything or much about science and all that jargon yall speak, we dont have the means to COUNTERACT anything that is "proven" or presented by scientists.
It is my job as a free thinker, to question everything that is told to me, is it not? otherwise, im just a robot. You tell me something, i accept it....sorry, not my steez.
There are several ways I can think of:
1. Accept the fact that honesty is a quality that is specifically enriched among scientists compared to the rest of the population (which is absolutely true) and if there is anybody in the world who you can trust, that's scientists.
2. Try to understand that the vast scientific conspiracy that people that aren't scientists imagine to exist is simply impossible, because there are thousands of scientists all over the world that rarely meet each other (and for most of the existence of science there was no e-mail) and they all come to the same conclusions
3. Try to understand the simple fact that scientists have very little power over decision and policy making in the world we live in, and if anything, they are a marginalized group that struggles to get funding and respect from a strongly antiintellectually society, and it would be very hard for them to do the things you blame them for
4. Put some effort in your learning in school and outside of school so that while not necessarily going deep into the subject, you get a basic understanding of as many scientific areas as possible. I don't see any reason why this would do anything else than good to people.
That has very little to do with science as a whole. I am not familiar with the details of what was encouraged and what not in the 60s and 60s, but I can tell you that from a scientific point of view, it has to be established that smoking does harm, not the opposite. And my guess us that what was encouraged back in the days had a lot more to do with commercial interests than with actual science.
See points 1 and 4 above
Nobody is preventing the general public from acquiring scientific knowledge, actually that's one of the things every scientist dreams of - getting people to understand the science. That communication between the general public and scientists fails is a matter of the general public lacking the motivation to rise to the minimal level required for understanding the science, not the other way round. In other words it is only the civilians fault that they know so little about science and only civilians can change that because, again, scientists simply do not have the power and influence to change the world we live in.
Unfortunately, it is exactly these rampant anti-scientific sentiments among the general public that are currently driving our species to extinction.
You have to question everything and this is one of the essential components of the scientific method. However, if you try to verify everything on your own, you won't get anywhere, because, once again, no single person has the time, knowledge and resources to verify the discoveries of the Human Genome Project or the LHC on his own.
That's why we have peer review, and trust me, there is nothing meaner when it comes to questioning things than peer review because peer review is done by your competition and nobody in this world is more interested in you being proven wrong than your competition. Everybody who has published a paper know what I am talking about.
1. Accept the fact that honesty is a quality that is specifically enriched among scientists compared to the rest of the population (which is absolutely true) and if there is anybody in the world who you can trust, that's scientists.
2. Try to understand that the vast scientific conspiracy that people that aren't scientists imagine to exist is simply impossible, because there are thousands of scientists all over the world that rarely meet each other (and for most of the existence of science there was no e-mail) and they all come to the same conclusions
3. Try to understand the simple fact that scientists have very little power over decision and policy making in the world we live in, and if anything, they are a marginalized group that struggles to get funding and respect from a strongly antiintellectually society, and it would be very hard for them to do the things you blame them for
4. Put some effort in your learning in school and outside of school so that while not necessarily going deep into the subject, you get a basic understanding of as many scientific areas as possible. I don't see any reason why this would do anything else than good to people.
That has very little to do with science as a whole. I am not familiar with the details of what was encouraged and what not in the 60s and 60s, but I can tell you that from a scientific point of view, it has to be established that smoking does harm, not the opposite. And my guess us that what was encouraged back in the days had a lot more to do with commercial interests than with actual science.
See points 1 and 4 above
Nobody is preventing the general public from acquiring scientific knowledge, actually that's one of the things every scientist dreams of - getting people to understand the science. That communication between the general public and scientists fails is a matter of the general public lacking the motivation to rise to the minimal level required for understanding the science, not the other way round. In other words it is only the civilians fault that they know so little about science and only civilians can change that because, again, scientists simply do not have the power and influence to change the world we live in.
Unfortunately, it is exactly these rampant anti-scientific sentiments among the general public that are currently driving our species to extinction.
You have to question everything and this is one of the essential components of the scientific method. However, if you try to verify everything on your own, you won't get anywhere, because, once again, no single person has the time, knowledge and resources to verify the discoveries of the Human Genome Project or the LHC on his own.
That's why we have peer review, and trust me, there is nothing meaner when it comes to questioning things than peer review because peer review is done by your competition and nobody in this world is more interested in you being proven wrong than your competition. Everybody who has published a paper know what I am talking about.
I wasnt there when anything happened, so how can i for sure know that evolution happened or is happening on that scale? Im not saying it DIDNT happen, but i am not necassarily saying it DID or IS happening.
Neither you, nor i, nor ANYONE for that matter, was alive when the Earth came to be...so who REALLY knows what happened? Nobody does and most likely, no one EVER will.
Neither you, nor i, nor ANYONE for that matter, was alive when the Earth came to be...so who REALLY knows what happened? Nobody does and most likely, no one EVER will.
This reminds of something I had to post about HIV to clear up the misunderstanding.
It is predicted that with the expanding human population and the further and further invasion of the human species in remote areas, we are going to see many new diseases appear. The reason is that there are many microorganisms that are potentially pathogenic for us, but normally would never come in contact with the human population. These are not pathogens evolved to invade us and this means that they have the potential to be extremely destructive once they do it, because basic evolutionary theory tells us that with time the host and the parasite evolve mechanisms to contain each other, with the end result being an attenuated form of the disease. This happens for two reasons - first, the host immune system evolves and adapts, and second - a pathogen that kills its host very quickly, does no do anything good to itself either because it also dies and can not spread, that's why more attenuated versions of it are selected for by natural selection. A very good example is syphilis, which used to be a lethal disease which caused terrible destruction of tissues like this:
and much worse (there are no pictures from the 17th century unfortunately), but is now much milder and generally curable.
Indeed, we have seen exactly that pattern of new diseases appearing. Again, a very good example, is Buruli's ulcer:
Buruli's ulcer is caused by Mycobacterium ulcerans, which is a bacteria that lives in stagnant water in the tropics and secrets compounds called mycolactons that cause cells to die and that's why you see the necrotic lesions on the pictures. Now this bacteria very rarely contacted humans, but with the development of irrigation methods in Western Africa and the expansion of agriculture, it became a serious problem.
That's the way it happened with HIV too. The small and isolated human populations in Africa prior to the 20th century would not permit the spread of the infection because it would either not be transmitted to humans to begin with (I don't know how many people were fucking with monkey in the 19th century, apparently some were, but I am ready to bet that if you do some statistics of such an event happening with parameters such as population size, religion (it is common in Muslim societies to fuck animals because you can't afford to buy a bride until you're 40-45), influence from Western society, etc., the chance will increase a lot with each of these factors being present). or it would have been contained in the population, because normally the small tribal populations would not mix and the tribe having AIDS would eventually die
Still, the disease did not spread until the roads, the trucks and the prostitutes conquered the jungle.
Now, compare this model with the alternative hypothesis (that the government designed the virus in order to control population size)
In order for that to be true, they needed to know a lot of things in the 70s that were only discovered in the 80s, 90s, and even just a few years ago (for example the interactions of the virus with the RNAi system of cells and the many others I listed in a previous post). Of course, you can always claim that the military scientists know so much more than regular scientists, but this nothing more than making up things ad hoc, rather than coming up with serious explanations, because here we're talking about enormous advances in our understanding of cell and molecular biology.
And even if you don't agree with these arguments, I've saved the killer one for the end: if you're going to design a virus in order to kill large numbers of people from specific groups and you have all the knowledge and expertise you need, what would you do? Well, the last thing I would do is to make a virus that takes years to decades to even develop a disease, is very difficult to transmit (because a virus that dies within minutes when exposed to open air is not a virus that spreads efficiently) and infects everybody (with few exceptions). Such a virus does not do the job and it hasn't done it in the 25 years since it was discovered
It is predicted that with the expanding human population and the further and further invasion of the human species in remote areas, we are going to see many new diseases appear. The reason is that there are many microorganisms that are potentially pathogenic for us, but normally would never come in contact with the human population. These are not pathogens evolved to invade us and this means that they have the potential to be extremely destructive once they do it, because basic evolutionary theory tells us that with time the host and the parasite evolve mechanisms to contain each other, with the end result being an attenuated form of the disease. This happens for two reasons - first, the host immune system evolves and adapts, and second - a pathogen that kills its host very quickly, does no do anything good to itself either because it also dies and can not spread, that's why more attenuated versions of it are selected for by natural selection. A very good example is syphilis, which used to be a lethal disease which caused terrible destruction of tissues like this:
and much worse (there are no pictures from the 17th century unfortunately), but is now much milder and generally curable.
Indeed, we have seen exactly that pattern of new diseases appearing. Again, a very good example, is Buruli's ulcer:
Buruli's ulcer is caused by Mycobacterium ulcerans, which is a bacteria that lives in stagnant water in the tropics and secrets compounds called mycolactons that cause cells to die and that's why you see the necrotic lesions on the pictures. Now this bacteria very rarely contacted humans, but with the development of irrigation methods in Western Africa and the expansion of agriculture, it became a serious problem.
That's the way it happened with HIV too. The small and isolated human populations in Africa prior to the 20th century would not permit the spread of the infection because it would either not be transmitted to humans to begin with (I don't know how many people were fucking with monkey in the 19th century, apparently some were, but I am ready to bet that if you do some statistics of such an event happening with parameters such as population size, religion (it is common in Muslim societies to fuck animals because you can't afford to buy a bride until you're 40-45), influence from Western society, etc., the chance will increase a lot with each of these factors being present). or it would have been contained in the population, because normally the small tribal populations would not mix and the tribe having AIDS would eventually die
Still, the disease did not spread until the roads, the trucks and the prostitutes conquered the jungle.
Now, compare this model with the alternative hypothesis (that the government designed the virus in order to control population size)
In order for that to be true, they needed to know a lot of things in the 70s that were only discovered in the 80s, 90s, and even just a few years ago (for example the interactions of the virus with the RNAi system of cells and the many others I listed in a previous post). Of course, you can always claim that the military scientists know so much more than regular scientists, but this nothing more than making up things ad hoc, rather than coming up with serious explanations, because here we're talking about enormous advances in our understanding of cell and molecular biology.
And even if you don't agree with these arguments, I've saved the killer one for the end: if you're going to design a virus in order to kill large numbers of people from specific groups and you have all the knowledge and expertise you need, what would you do? Well, the last thing I would do is to make a virus that takes years to decades to even develop a disease, is very difficult to transmit (because a virus that dies within minutes when exposed to open air is not a virus that spreads efficiently) and infects everybody (with few exceptions). Such a virus does not do the job and it hasn't done it in the 25 years since it was discovered