Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Grainne who wrote (35461)	4/20/1999 12:22:00 AM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

>But can you suggest an explanation with fewer logical holes in it, explaining how else the mummies ingested the cocaine?< No. But more scientifically - I can suggest how the mummy samples came to test for cocaine. Without the ancient Egyptians ever having heard of the stuff. Bottom line is this. I cannot say that the more daring hypothesis is impossible. (but I DO maintain that it is implausible ... lol) But I can come up with less exciting but more plausible ways the tests came out positive. 1) Bad tests. 2) Faked results. 3) Sloppy grad students late at night with runny noses. <lol> I'm not suggesting that the above are the answer! But a good scientist needs to do the work to affirm or refute these simple if disappointing possibilities. Science with holes in it is everywhere. Those guys in Baltimore faked the mouse gene thingies. The Mars meteorite may have picked up amino acids from 12000 years on Earth. Those fossils require positing the existence, yea the utterly abundant dominance, of "nannobacteria", something we haven't established exists or existed even on Earth! This is great academic Beer Talk, but it is not, or should not be, the stuff of Nature papers until some serious challenges to the hypothesis have been methodically addressed. Science is a humanity. Our hypotheses, our directions of research are heavily influenced by the mores and ideas of the times. Look at early-20th-century genetics and politics, how incestuous they were. It takes time and care to winnow good science out of popular or academic preconception. The mummy thing is cool because it would change the shape of anthropology and late prehistory. But its coolness evokes a credulity that needs to be carefully circumscribed with a Surgeon General's label stating that this is unproven. Just my pair o'dimes