A fascinating discussion (link at bottom) with biologist Rupert Sheldrake on the dogma that creeps into science and becomes institutionalized. There are too many examples of scientific reversals to list, but let's start with the basic discovery that the Earth is not the center of the solar system. Copernicus put forth the theory in 1514 that the planets orbit the sun, then Galileo proved it a century later, whereupon he was convicted of heresy and made to spend the rest of his life under house arrest.
Gee, thanks guys!
I'd like to speculate a bit on why scientific dogma (well, any kind of dogma really) is so resistant to change, and to do that I'd like to look at the ongoing denial of a broad range of evidence that what we put in our mouths and swallow is the primary cause of cancer.
Nutritional biochemist T. Colin Campbell unearthed historical evidence for this by spending 1985 in four libraries: the Bodleian Library and the Wellcome Trust Library in Oxford, and the Royal College of Surgeons and the Royal College of Physicians in London. And Campbell presents this data, some of it going back more than a century, in his new book The Future of Nutrition, which I am finding a most fascinating read.
I'm going to encourage everyone to click the link above and read the reviews of this important book. And then go get a copy from the library.
The resistance of established scientific perspective to change is based primarily on three phenomena, the first is the unconscious sense of security we get from "knowing" something, particularly when that "knowing" is institutionalized in the form of collective bodies of expertise. The second resistance is the fear of loss of status. And the third resistance is the defense mounted by a status quo that affords it's practitioners some level of material gain.
Campbell describes the two theories of cancer causation debated a century ago, one being the local causation theory, which is conceptually simple and elegant, and gives rise to local treatment modalities of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. The local cause of cancer, then, is a bit like a broken arm - it's a local problem that has a bio-mechanical fix.
The other is named the nutritional causation theory (or more accurately, the malnutrition causation theory...remember malnutrition is also too much of a nutrient). The nutritional causation theory is systemic, biologically complex, and "messy" from a science perspective. Definitely not what the doctor ordered, armed as he is with anatomical interventions.
And a quick word about the recent additional theory, the genetic theory of cancer causation. It's attractive to the medical establishment because it keeps control of treatment modalities in their hands only. But genes are not the cause of cancer either. This has been shown to be the case in a number of ways, the easiest to wrap our heads around is by looking at populations with inherent very low levels of cancer....incidence of cancer only rises with a deterioration of nutrition. The McDonaldization of China for example. Same population, same genes, but cancer rates only rise with deterioration of diet quality.
We hear a lot about this "promising" modality. That's because Big P wants it to be true really badly, and they can afford a lot of advertising. (Seen much TV lately?) And as we all know by now, Big P "owns" the medical establishment.
Back to the history...the local theory prevailed for a variety of reasons, nutrition was not well understood a century ago, there was no mechanical leverage for the surgeon, and surgery had become a technological wonder with an influential and growing body of practitioners. The local fix modality was theoretically attractive and profitable. Local treatment modalities were going to eliminate cancer deaths, the problem of course is they didn't.
Campbell has pushed the understanding of nutrition forward tremendously, which can be read in his previous books The China Study, and Whole. Unfortunately the medical establishment, agribusiness, and processed food megaliths are working overtime to repress Campbell's research and insights in every way possible.
In addition to the fact nutrition was not well understood a century ago, the early evidence for nutritional causation was mostly observational: populations that derived the majority of their nutrition from plant foods had very low incidence of cancers to begin with. So local theory prevailed in a blatant example of the way unconscious bias creates a kind of collective denial.
Meanwhile, due in huge part to Campbell's work, the science for the nutritional cause of cancer has become quite compelling in the last few decades, but as mentioned it continues to be ignored and repressed by the dogmatic medical science establishment.
It's a bit like the reaction of medical science to the initial hypothesis that smoke taken into the lungs on a regular basis causes lung cancer, an idea met with derision at the time (and not all that long ago). But it's only a bit like that, as the cancer industry has become a behemoth compared to the tobacco industry, and we also have to consider the international food companies that are basically peddling addiction.
And it's not all that difficult to imagine the consistent introduction of low level toxins into the body for decades can result in cancer.
Right?
Back to Sheldrake, and unrelated to cancer. He has been proposing something that established science rejects out of hand, and that something is the idea that there may indeed be something that might be called a sixth sense. My mother was something of a "psychic", which caused me to wonder about so-called psychic phenomena, and being inclined to fiddle around with electronic circuits it seemed to me the mechanism for those phenomena would really be quite simple: our nervous system is a "transceiver" (transmitter and receiver) that would be acutely attuned to other mammalian "transceivers", particularly those of the human variety, as the structures are nearly identical.
Briefly, when we put an electric voltage thru a conductor an electromagnetic wave is propagated out from the conductor. These waves can travel distances (think of radio waves). But "electro-physics" has yet to discover a "sixth sense" as these tiny waves, emanating from the very tiny complex structures of the nervous system, would be infinitesimal relative to the sensitivity of current measuring devices. In addition, even if we could measure them, then we would have to interpret them. As Campbell points out frequently, biology is exceedingly complex.
Here, as promised, the fascinating Sheldrake conversation: Science does not tolerate dissent:
https://youtu.be/riWpytNIS60
