(no subject)
My favourite news story of the year:
An indiginous language in Mexico is in danger of extinction, because the last two native speakers have fallen out and are no longer talking to each other.
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It was pretty awful to see Jeannette Winterson publish a big article this week supporting homoeopathy. You kind of expect it from some quarters, but not necessarily from intelligent novelists (albeit not very good ones - thank God Sarah Waters came along so that lesbian fic fans could stop pretending to like Winterson).
I have no problem with people taking whatever they want if it makes them feel better. But all trials to show that this is any more than the placebo effect or regression to the mean have failed. The placebo effect is obviously a great thing, and anything we can use that harnesses it is good. But why pretend that homoeopathy has some basis in science when it just doesn't?
I read a whole load on the subject a couple of years back while researching some story. This is how homoeopathy works, for those who don't know. You take a substance, like charcoal or arsenic. You create an extract of that substance and put one single drop of it in a jar containing a hundred drops of water. Then you shake the jar (they call it "succussing") until you have a very dilute solution. Then, you take one single drop of that solution, and add it to another hundred drops of water. Shake and repeat. A lot. A typical homoeopathic remedy will have been re-diluted thirty times, before being dropped on to a sugar pill. The really "strong" (ie weak) ones have been through this process a hundred or even a thousand times!
Does that sound ridiculous? Well, that's because it is. Winterson babbles thusly:
Objections to homeopathy begin with what are viewed as the impossible dilutions of the remedies, so that only nano amounts of the original active substance remain, and in some cases are only an imprint, or memory. Yet our recent discoveries in the world of the very small point to a whole new set of rules for the behaviour of nano-quantities. Thundering around in our Gulliver world, we were first shocked to find that splitting the atom allowed inconceivable amounts of energy to be released. Now, we are discovering that the properties of materials change as their size reaches the nano-scale. Bulk material should have constant physical properties, regardless of its size, but at the nano-scale this is not the case. In a solvent, such as water, nano particles can remain suspended, neither floating nor sinking, but permeating the solution. Such particles are also able to pass through cell walls, and they can cause biochemical change.
I mean it's just a total failure to understand basic principles. By what process exactly does water have a "memory"? And "nano-particles"? What? It's like a really shit episode of The X-Files! There are no such things as "nano-particles" - it just doesn't mean anything. After a hundred dilutions, elementary mathematics can show you that not a single molecule of the original substance is present in the water. It is literally just water.
"Nano-" means one-billionth (that's US billion, i.e. a thousand millionth), but that is a wild overstatement. Even in a 30x solution, the original substance has been diluted to 1 part in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Which is a lot. For a 100x solution the substance has been diluted by more than the number of atoms in the known universe. If the idea had any value, tapwater would be a homoeopathic cure for everything known to man.
I hate these stupid fucking debates. Why do we have to keep having the same conversations over and over, as though Science is some kind of evil conspiracy theory trying to suppress all the lovely magic in the world? Science is not some fashionable theory, like liberalism or free-market economy. It's our cumulative, relentlessly peer-reviewed, testable system of knowledge, and you know what, it's taken us a long fucking time to work out that that's the best way of doing things and getting results. The only reason I can read Winterson's stupid article in the first place is because she typed it up on a word processor and I can see it on the internet, and because neither of our mothers died in childbirth and both of us didn't get smallpox or cholera.
There was this thing, called the Enlightenment? Is this ringing any bells? JESUS.
An indiginous language in Mexico is in danger of extinction, because the last two native speakers have fallen out and are no longer talking to each other.
-------------------------------------------
It was pretty awful to see Jeannette Winterson publish a big article this week supporting homoeopathy. You kind of expect it from some quarters, but not necessarily from intelligent novelists (albeit not very good ones - thank God Sarah Waters came along so that lesbian fic fans could stop pretending to like Winterson).
I have no problem with people taking whatever they want if it makes them feel better. But all trials to show that this is any more than the placebo effect or regression to the mean have failed. The placebo effect is obviously a great thing, and anything we can use that harnesses it is good. But why pretend that homoeopathy has some basis in science when it just doesn't?
I read a whole load on the subject a couple of years back while researching some story. This is how homoeopathy works, for those who don't know. You take a substance, like charcoal or arsenic. You create an extract of that substance and put one single drop of it in a jar containing a hundred drops of water. Then you shake the jar (they call it "succussing") until you have a very dilute solution. Then, you take one single drop of that solution, and add it to another hundred drops of water. Shake and repeat. A lot. A typical homoeopathic remedy will have been re-diluted thirty times, before being dropped on to a sugar pill. The really "strong" (ie weak) ones have been through this process a hundred or even a thousand times!
Does that sound ridiculous? Well, that's because it is. Winterson babbles thusly:
Objections to homeopathy begin with what are viewed as the impossible dilutions of the remedies, so that only nano amounts of the original active substance remain, and in some cases are only an imprint, or memory. Yet our recent discoveries in the world of the very small point to a whole new set of rules for the behaviour of nano-quantities. Thundering around in our Gulliver world, we were first shocked to find that splitting the atom allowed inconceivable amounts of energy to be released. Now, we are discovering that the properties of materials change as their size reaches the nano-scale. Bulk material should have constant physical properties, regardless of its size, but at the nano-scale this is not the case. In a solvent, such as water, nano particles can remain suspended, neither floating nor sinking, but permeating the solution. Such particles are also able to pass through cell walls, and they can cause biochemical change.
I mean it's just a total failure to understand basic principles. By what process exactly does water have a "memory"? And "nano-particles"? What? It's like a really shit episode of The X-Files! There are no such things as "nano-particles" - it just doesn't mean anything. After a hundred dilutions, elementary mathematics can show you that not a single molecule of the original substance is present in the water. It is literally just water.
"Nano-" means one-billionth (that's US billion, i.e. a thousand millionth), but that is a wild overstatement. Even in a 30x solution, the original substance has been diluted to 1 part in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Which is a lot. For a 100x solution the substance has been diluted by more than the number of atoms in the known universe. If the idea had any value, tapwater would be a homoeopathic cure for everything known to man.
I hate these stupid fucking debates. Why do we have to keep having the same conversations over and over, as though Science is some kind of evil conspiracy theory trying to suppress all the lovely magic in the world? Science is not some fashionable theory, like liberalism or free-market economy. It's our cumulative, relentlessly peer-reviewed, testable system of knowledge, and you know what, it's taken us a long fucking time to work out that that's the best way of doing things and getting results. The only reason I can read Winterson's stupid article in the first place is because she typed it up on a word processor and I can see it on the internet, and because neither of our mothers died in childbirth and both of us didn't get smallpox or cholera.
There was this thing, called the Enlightenment? Is this ringing any bells? JESUS.