Sunday, October 05, 2014

Disproving the disproof

Weird – Your Baby Could Have DNA From Past Lovers

It would be nice if "journalists" would quit writing about stuff they don't understand.  The study in this article doesn't say anything about babies having DNA from previous lovers.  It does say that a baby may inherit certain non-genetic traits from previous mates.  Okay, actually it says that this phenomenon happens in fruit flies, not necessarily in other types of animals.  I'm not even sure it proves that.

But, let's assume for a moment that it does prove that traits are passed from previous mates.  The thing that I find most interesting about this is pretty typical of a lot of science.  Specifically in this case, I'm talking about how science has "disproved" telegony, only to turn around and disprove its own disproof later.  This type of proving and disproving makes me wonder just how it is that there are so many people who have a kind of blind faith in science.  They like to say things like "Science is real."  And it is real, at least until it isn't any more.  And then science is hailed as having found yet another absolute truth, at least until it disproves it.  Forget about whether this new finding flies in the face of what was thought by scientists to be true in the past.  Scientists know stuff.

Now I'm not saying that the original idea of telegony was necessarily true.  I haven't read enough about it to have any idea how it is that folks like Aristotle thought it happened.  It's just that they thought it did happen, only to be "proved" wrong by science, and subsequently science itself proved that what it once disproved is at least a possibility in the "real" world of science.

The point of this all is that a lot of people who claim to be skeptical are anything but skeptical when it comes to science, apparently because science is "real."  And if anything, stories like this should point people toward the idea that science is deserving of skepticism at least at the same level as other things, such as religion.  In fact, I would argue that there is little, if any, real difference between science and religion, and in the future, as time permits, I intend to show not only how there is no significant difference between religion and science, but that the two are not mutually exclusive.  Unfortunately, in order to see the relationship between the two, one must have an open mind, something that is a truly rare commodity in today's world.

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