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Answers with Hellbound Alleee transcripts -
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101. Animal Experiments and You ! Alleee, is animal experimentation really useful, or just cruel ? Animal experiments have been at the forefront of medical research for as long as we’ve had medicine. At the turn of the last century, local anesthetics were first developed on rabbits and dogs, and modern inhaled anesthetics were tested in the fifties on many kinds of animals. Blood transfusions were first tested and perfected on dogs, guinea pigs and rabbits. Vaccines that saved millions of children, such as whopping cough vaccines and polio vaccines, were developed with mice, rabbits and monkeys. Human transplants started in 1967, but they wouldn’t be done at all without experiments on dogs. In the future, we can look forward to more fruits of animal research, such as a possible vaccine for malaria, or gene therapy, both of which are in development right now thanks to research on mice and monkeys. Animal experiments gives benefits to veterinarian science as well, such as the canine distemper vaccine and the feline leukemia vaccine. Whether science is accepted or not, its benefits to human and animal life are undeniable. 102. The Watchmaker argument – refuted by science ! Alleee, I know about the philosophical refutations of the Watchmaker argument, but you’re saying that it’s refuted scientifically too ? That’s right. The Watchmaker argument says that, if we found a watch in a forest, we would assume that it was designed. So we should think the same thing about the universe. Both seem to be just too complex to be natural. Well, there are plenty of reasons to reject this argument, the most obvious being that there’s no relation between complexity and design. But science gives us another reason. It turns out that nature does make watches – circadian rhythms ! For example, Drosophila has an internal clock composed of five genes. The clock is set by light exposure during the larval stage and just keeps going and going. We know it evolved because it’s similar to a simpler blue light sensitive clock in a species of fungus, Neurospora crassa. We also find similar genes in the circadian rhythm of mammals, showing gradual adaptation from very simple biological clocks to very complex ones. Science has put to rest the old Watchmaker myth ! 103. Recovered memories or false memories ? Has there been any scientific study of false memories and how they may affect the field of so-called "recovered memories" ? Yes ! In 1996, Harvard researcher Susan Clancy made the hypothesis that perhaps people who have "recovered memories" are just more likely to have false memories than an average person, and self-appointed therapists are just taking advantage of that tendancy. So she designed a memory test to measure this, and found that people who were traumatized and had "recovered memories" also had a greater capacity to generate false memories. Then she decided to try to falsify her result by testing alien abductees, and came to the same conclusion. Of course, all the therapists and victims who make money because of alien abduction beliefs find it a hard pill to swallow. Because the functioning of our own brain is mostly hidden from us, people naturally assume that their perceptions and their memories are a perfect mirror of reality. But we know that's not the case. Self-awareness is the best protection against delusion ! |
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