Free The Animal

Here represents a core fundamental of scientific method.

Suppose you lived in Europe any time during the last few hundred years and were fortunate enough to observe the lovely swan in action. Suppose further that you noticed that every single one was white. How about you observed a million of them over time? Could you say, definitively, that "all swans are white?"

No. You. Can't.

You could hypothesize, which, if you're a scientific researcher, would naturally involve attempting to find swans that aren't white. Grasp that: you look for swans that are not white, because, it doesn't matter if you find 10 billion white swans, you still can't say definitively that all are white universally, or even globally, unless every nook and cranny of the Earth has been checked for non-white swans. OK, but so what? Could we work with and find use in hypotheses that may not be substantiated universally, but are true in a limited context? Sure. It's done all the time, and it's fine, so long as it's done right.

But this isn't how politicized, government, and big-industry "science" is done, now -- especially in areas like diet, medicine, environment (yea, all you "health-nut" greens: the bad science is exactly the same, and I've looked into it just as extensively as health going back far more years than I've been into health / fitness). What is done now is that everyone is going about looking for white swans, finding them, and proclaiming that, (!!!) yep, all swans are white.

But it gets worse. Way, way worse. Why? Simple: all swans aren't white. It only took a single exception to disprove the "rule." Here, let me have the always delightfully candid Robb Wolf elaborate:

In the case of vegetarianism from the China Study perspective, we should see a simple dose response curve with meat intake and cancer. We do not. In fact, we only need ONE (1) example of a conflicting finding to completely discredit the hypothesis. The Inuit Paradox is just such an example. Now the vegetarians will start back-pedaling and yamering a bunch of bull-shit, but the fact is we have a well documented example of a society that consumes greater than 90% of it’s calories from MEAT yet suffers NO: cancer, diabetes, or heart disease until the introduction of neolithic foods. This fact is forgotten, ignored, dismissed…but it’s still a fact. The inuit, are BTW but one of hundreds of hunter gatherer cultures who represent this interesting “Paradox”.

So this is what you're up against, folks. It is the literal equivalent of having government and big industry marching about and conducting research, today -- often spending your tax dollars -- to tell you that they have -- yay! -- located even more white swans. And you're trusting your health and that of your kids to that kind of...FRAUD?