by Dr David, Editor / Publisher
When I had my cabin up the mountain in Vermont I made my own electricity, powering up a little Honda generator whenever I wanted to use the internet, make carrot juice or run some power tools.
I, and whatever guests were visiting, preferred candles over electric light. And the only other electrical benefit we could have wanted was a refrigerator.
The basement, while not exactly a "root cellar," was always cool, except when the sun shone at its zenith on a summer day. We weren't eating anything that needed a lot of refrigeration, or if we were, we ate it quickly. When we wanted to chill the beer, we put the cans in the brook for a while.
Friday nights I would make the traditional blessing sanctifying the Jewish Sabbath at times over wine and at times over grape juice. The wine we always managed to finish, but sometimes the open grape juice was put away in the basement. Then, after a week of sitting in the basement, the grape juice sometimes became "sparkling." It fermented into wine. More often than not it wasn't half-bad.
Things seem simple when you don't think about them too much; especially at a distance you can't see the details. Take science from a lay person's perspective, for example.
"Anyone who does not believe in evolution is a fool or a religious fanatic." Except in the peer review literature many prominent scientists strongly critique Darwinian evolution, the idea that random changes in the genetic code (however many random changes) have produced new body types. (Darwin's Doubt)
Small changes in the efficiency of existing forms are possible, but Darwinism cannot account for innovation, the creation of something completely new.
DNA is code, not that different than computer code. It's hard to imagine that a random change in the code that runs your computer would result in an improvement in the way Word or Facebook functions... very hard.
How hard? Proteins are the basis for most of biology. For every one change in the amino acid sequence of protein that results in a functional protein there are a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion... (1077) that result in garbage, proteins that do nothing, that do not work at all.
In Darwin's time scientists had no idea of life's complexity. Their microscopes could not make out anything inside a cell. They had no idea that there was a genetic code. Many still believed in "spontaneous generation," that life came into being from lifeless material; much the way that fruit flies seem to spontaneous generate, magically in your kitchen after you bring bananas home from the corner grocer.
Scientists these days are still uncovering life's complexity. They still have their own blind spots and wrong ideas. With the Corona virus we are told that we are "Following the science," as if there were no controversy, no controversy in science itself, on the subject.
Worse still, science is bias towards therapies that benefit big medicine and big pharma. We may be following the science, but I am afraid that the science is following the money.
Do lock downs prevent more suffering and death than they cause? Why don't we follow the science and do a cost-benefit analysis? Or maybe our science can't answer that question.
Hundreds of millions of kids locked down (it seems increasingly clear, without scientific rationale) during developmentally vital years has caused immense suffering, and I shudder to think of future ramifications.
