Rolfe
Adult human female
Well, we've got these two stories going here.
On the one hand we're talking about metabolic pathways and glycolysis and electron transport and membrane biochemistry (you uncouple the phosphorylation by destroying the integrity of the mitochondrial membrane so that the inside and the outside are no longer two separate compartments), and we could go on, in extreme and boring detail, about the catalysing enzymes and how much energy is released from the combustion system at each step of the reaction and so on.
Then you've got a different story about some other sort of "energy" that I don't know how to measure, and "toxins" and "impurities" that nobody will give me the chemical formulae for, and no doubt the vis vitalis will get a mention any time now.
We adhere to our world-view of the metabolic pathways. I admit I didn't discover these myself, and much of what I know was told to me by my teachers, but the teaching did include reading about the experiments which were done to prove the hypotheses, and reproducing some of the most classic findings (including the bit where we smashed the mitochondria and measured the very different way the reactions could be demonstrated to go). In addition, I can see very marked effects in the real world which are consistent with this world-view, such as the way insulin is awfully good at decreasing plasma glucose concentrations.
But the woo-woos adhere to their world-view. They simply don't understand when we ask for evidence or insist that certain demonstrable effects are contrary to their suppositions. It's a story they've been told, it sounds superficially convincing, and that's enough for them. Why should their story not be just as good as our story? Why is Harry Potter not a documentary?
The tragedy of it is, they really have no idea.
Rolfe.
On the one hand we're talking about metabolic pathways and glycolysis and electron transport and membrane biochemistry (you uncouple the phosphorylation by destroying the integrity of the mitochondrial membrane so that the inside and the outside are no longer two separate compartments), and we could go on, in extreme and boring detail, about the catalysing enzymes and how much energy is released from the combustion system at each step of the reaction and so on.
Then you've got a different story about some other sort of "energy" that I don't know how to measure, and "toxins" and "impurities" that nobody will give me the chemical formulae for, and no doubt the vis vitalis will get a mention any time now.
We adhere to our world-view of the metabolic pathways. I admit I didn't discover these myself, and much of what I know was told to me by my teachers, but the teaching did include reading about the experiments which were done to prove the hypotheses, and reproducing some of the most classic findings (including the bit where we smashed the mitochondria and measured the very different way the reactions could be demonstrated to go). In addition, I can see very marked effects in the real world which are consistent with this world-view, such as the way insulin is awfully good at decreasing plasma glucose concentrations.
But the woo-woos adhere to their world-view. They simply don't understand when we ask for evidence or insist that certain demonstrable effects are contrary to their suppositions. It's a story they've been told, it sounds superficially convincing, and that's enough for them. Why should their story not be just as good as our story? Why is Harry Potter not a documentary?
The tragedy of it is, they really have no idea.
Rolfe.
Rolfe
Adult human female
