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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (149591)	10/28/2004 12:50:29 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Good! We are getting somewhere. This is in fact the misunderstanding about making some brute force solutions off limit. The opponents often think that they just don't have the time for the alternative solutions. More often they agree that the alternative is the better solution but they just don't have time for it now and after this immediate problem is solved they will go for it. In reality however "tomorrow" never comes. The problem with the point you are making is your implicit assumption that we'd have to "wait" i.e. make no progress in medicine while MRI and fiber optics were unavailable. There is no reason to believe so. In fact, the "quick" solutions often bring with them a lot of unwanted side effects that take a long time to deal with. This is as true for politics as it is for medicine (see Dr. Andrew Weil for some of the problems with quick medical solutions). I think the single biggest progress in medicine over the past 200 years (actually over the past 600 years) was made by Louis Pasteur who debunked the widely accepted myth of spontaneous generation, and set the stage for modern biology and biochemistry. No more possession and mumbo jumbo. (Actually if you go back to some of my previous posts, you see that about 1000 years ago Avicenna set the foundation for modern hospitals by having separate wards for difference diseases and by hanging meat around the city and measuring its infection rate so as to find the cleanest location for his hospitals). The pattern of logic in Pasteur's scientific career and the brilliance of his experimental method are well documented. It started by studying crystal structures. Pasteur observed that the organic compound tartrate, when synthesized in a laboratory, was optically inactive (unable to rotate the plane of polarized light), unlike the tartrate from grapes, because the synthetic tartrate is composed of two optically asymmetric crystals. With careful experimentation, he succeeded in separating the asymmetric crystals from each other and showed that each recovered optical activity. He then hypothesized that this molecular asymmetry is one of the mechanisms of life. In other words, living organisms only produce molecules that are of one specific orientation, and these molecules are always optically active. In the 20th century, the biggest leap in medicine was by Alexander Fleming who before tossing some old petri dishes of culture away, made an accidental discovery of a blue mold growing on the culture that seemed to be able to kill off the bacteria. A series of experiments later proved his findings and led to the discovery of penicillin and in turn to the rest of antibiotic family of drugs. Neither of these had anything to do with anatomy or brute force solutions like trying to force the devil out of the patient (note if you go back a few hundred years, people would probably think they do not have time for some silly drug concoction while the devil is destroying the patient). But again, my point is not about medicine or the study of anatomy. The point is that if you decline to use brute force solutions, while you may not see some immediate results, there is no reason to believe you will be any further behind in the long or even medium run. In fact, you will most likely end up doing a lot better.