The Enemies of Reason II: Richard Dawkins on Homeopathy
November 24th, 2007 by MarkThis is the second part of The Enemies of Reason, in which Professor Dawkins interviewed various practitioners of pseudo-science. In this video, Dawkins focuses on the booming alternative health business:
It’s the hottest alternative health fad. It boasts and impressively vast and well-stocked medical cabinet; it’s endorsed by royalty and the stars, and is doing a booming trade in high street pharmacies. Five hundred million people world-wide claim to use it.
What is it? It’s a system for dosing up on a dilute solution of… water.
Related Posts: The Enemies of Reason: Richard Dawkins on Astrology
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November 25th, 2007 at 1:08 am
i love this guy!!!! i love his reverence for science. on the topic of self-healing, when my children were infants, i found the best thing for their colds wasn’t medicine but sleep. sleep was so powerful in letting their immune systems work that it was more important to let them sleep than to wake them up to eat.
November 25th, 2007 at 1:10 am
ps, mark, if you were to choose a career in science, what would you want to do?
November 25th, 2007 at 1:28 am
I’m interested in just about everything. I suppose I’m leaning towards bio-informatics, but the best thing might be to start by improving my general background in math and all the hard sciences.
November 26th, 2007 at 12:32 am
bio-informatics? have to google that one.
November 26th, 2007 at 3:49 am
It’s basically the intersection of computer science and biology– sequencing DNA and making sense of it and that sort of thing.
Believe it or not, that probability puzzle I just posted is very relevant to bio-informatics.
November 26th, 2007 at 5:28 am
i agree, because of protein sequencing, gene sequencing, etc. but was that probability puzzle related to the probability involved in expert witness testimony vis a vis your intro to that ’simple’ puzzle? i don’t think so.later you called it a ‘novel’ puzzle, unlike the usual examples of probability we come across. therefore i must accuse you of false advertising in the set up to your puzzle challenge. false advertising that made most of us approach the problem in a traditional way. how could you do that to me? to my sense of self as a problem solver? you can see from some of the responses you got that many are still reeling from our failure to get the correct answer…! for that you shall pay in bad karma.
November 27th, 2007 at 3:51 pm
Mathematical blunders by experts in court have very, very long and varied history. The problem is that most don’t realize when they don’t understand something. It’s the same here. The number of wrong answers on my poll outnumbering those who said they couldn’t solve it by a ratio of over 40 to 1!
If I’ve made you a more cautious problem solver, that’s a good thing… especially if you are or will be an expert.