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  • From: Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] Pernicious, infectious memes--OT
  • Date: Thu, 3 May 2012 13:07:41 -0700

Okay, I'm still thinking about this because these arguments are used to
promote such dangerous memes (a form of infectious virus), and I love the way
logic demolishes them. Here's what's up with, for example,

> an infection is always a secondary illness; infections arise after tissue
> has been damaged, by malnutrition or intoxication.

This relies on circular logic: "a virus can only infect a damaged organism,
because if an organism gets infected, it must be damaged or that would not
happen." It assumes what it intends to prove, and you can't get out of that
one until you see it is circular. It's certainly true that healthy organisms
tend to get fewer infections. This is because their immune systems work much
better. But it does not then follow that an organism must be unhealthy in
order to be infected. It does not undermine the fact that viruses alone are
often sufficient to cause infection, and mountains of evidence exist to show
this. The only evidence against it are some thought experiments ("then why
does X happen?") and some circular reasoning like that above. The main reason
that viruses do not routinely infect healthy creatures is because viruses
have been in an arms race against the immune system for eons. The immune
system is full of machinery to block viral and bacterial infection. Viruses
are full of machinery specifically designed to evade the immune system (like,
they've stolen receptors from the immune system so they can neutralize immune
boosting hormones; they wouldn't do that if they weren't infectious).
Sometimes one wins, sometimes the other. To claim that not getting an
infection is a sign that viruses don't infect is to confuse statistics with
function. Viruses would not contain that machinery if evading the immune
system--infecting a host--were not critically important for them. And the
immune system would not mount a huge response, every time, to viral challenge
if viruses by themselves were not a big threat to organisms; that machinery
would not exist.

In my experience, virologists tend to be smarter than the people denying the
viral model, and they understand well-reasoned arguments much better.

Many people cannot develop or make it through chains of reasoning like this
and so they fall for cleverly crafted zombie arguments, like those of the
Creationist/Intelligent Design propagandists. Our school system specifically
discourages critical thinking so that we will be compliant and susceptible to
corporate and government memes ("humans aren't in charge of climate" being a
good example), and one side effect is that crackpot theories like "viruses
don't cause infection" and "life requires a designer" get far more traction
than they would in an educated society. We owe it to ourselves, the planet,
and our children to learn how to think critically.

Toby
http://patternliteracy.com







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