Does anyone Use/Believe in Crystal properties?

Jruzer wrote: »

GnothiSeauton23 wrote: »

ninerbuff wrote: »

It's bogus. There is NO peer reviewed clinical evidence showing that shining light through crystals, laying them on you, etc. do ANYTHING to heal or help. Pseudoscience at it's best to sell crystals to make money. They are pretty though.

A.C.E. Certified Personal and Group Fitness Trainer
IDEA Fitness member
Kickboxing Certified Instructor
Been in fitness for 30 years and have studied kinesiology and nutrition

There was also a time when scientists believed the world was flat.

There's a really great essay by Isaac Asimov about this:

In the early days of civilization, the general feeling was that the earth was flat. This was not because people were stupid, or because they were intent on believing silly things. They felt it was flat on the basis of sound evidence. It was not just a matter of "That's how it looks," because the earth does not look flat. It looks chaotically bumpy, with hills, valleys, ravines, cliffs, and so on.

Of course there are plains where, over limited areas, the earth's surface does look fairly flat. One of those plains is in the Tigris-Euphrates area, where the first historical civilization (one with writing) developed, that of the Sumerians.

Perhaps it was the appearance of the plain that persuaded the clever Sumerians to accept the generalization that the earth was flat; that if you somehow evened out all the elevations and depressions, you would be left with flatness. Contributing to the notion may have been the fact that stretches of water (ponds and lakes) looked pretty flat on quiet days.

Another way of looking at it is to ask what is the "curvature" of the earth's surface Over a considerable length, how much does the surface deviate (on the average) from perfect flatness. The flat-earth theory would make it seem that the surface doesn't deviate from flatness at all, that its curvature is 0 to the mile.

Nowadays, of course, we are taught that the flat-earth theory is wrong; that it is all wrong, terribly wrong, absolutely. But it isn't. The curvature of the earth is nearly 0 per mile, so that although the flat-earth theory is wrong, it happens to be nearly right. That's why the theory lasted so long.

It's a great essay about scientific truth and what it means. Read the whole thing here:
http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm

So another science geek? Here's something I wrote regarding holes in evolutionary theory:

44,000 generations. That's how long it took for a bacteria to naturally develop a potentially beneficial change - to digest a new nutrient.

Most mutations are not beneficial, they do not increase viability, or fitness, they do not increase fertility or mating odds and they do not increase the viability of subsequent generations.
Particularly - and especially - if there are physical differences that can be perceived by other individuals in the group.

It took 44,000 generations for asexual reproduction to produce a potentially beneficial change.
Sexual reproduction, while allowing for greater genetic diversity within a species, also protects against mutations that lower fitness. An example is that if the asexually reproducing parent has a detrimental mutation (as most mutations are), their generations after, being a clone of the original, would have that mutation. The next generation to develop a mutation would be less fit than the original parent, and their offspring would have two detrimental mutations, as they are simply the clone of the prior generation.

Sexually producing parents, while introducing different traits, also DECREASE their chance of passing on mutations to the subsequent generation.
So with an exponentially slower speed of reproduction, an exponentially less likely chance to pass on mutations to subsequent generations, and with physical changes having a negative affect on sexual selection, you have an extremely slow rate of change.

44,000 generations for bacteria to do it.

Let's see what happens when we intentionally speed that process up, as in genetic engineering, which is what I studied in college, and won science fairs for in high school, competing at the national level.

Let's say you want to produce a cotton crop that is resistant to it's natural predator, the pink bullworm.
So you genetically engineer the cotton crop to do so. In scientists' minds, the crop is a different species, because it actually contains foreign genes from a bacteria and a protein toxic to the pink bullworm. Yet this cotton crop can and has drifted and contaminated other cotton crops.

Which means speciation did not occur, even when artificially introducing genes foreign to all cotton plants.

Next, one would think this artificaially induced hardiness would be beneficial to their progeny - it is not. These hybrids are notoriously weak in the second generation, producing significantly less yields, so the seeds are not viable for a third. In other words, speciation does not occur. There is a limit.

So circling back to your comment that "it is the best explanation we have."

I would say that scientific integrity demands that we say, here is one opinion, and the evidence that supports it, here is another, and the evidence that supports it. Because we cannot fall back on, it's the best we got, so roll with it.

Because that kind of thinking led to acceptance of many erroneous scientific beliefs and practices (some of them deadly) and introduced cognitive bias in a scientific community that is advertized as being open to new ideas, and questioning accepted ones.
If it weren't for people who pressed, and questioned, and addressed holes, and demanded a higher integrity, doctors would still be refusing to wash their hands in between handling corpses and assisting with births and surgeries, and we'd still be discussing which of the humors cause disease.