Re: Miroslav Hill responds

From: Dace (edace@earthlink.net)
Date: Wed 14 Dec 2005 - 20:49:18 GMT

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    Derek,

    > To say that "the more one selects for resistance the more mutants one
    > finds" (p.214 top) is meaningless, for the above reason, unless one can
    show
    > that in cells never exposed to the _selection pressure_, there are fewer
    > resistant colonies. Since Hill maintains that in cells never exposed to
    the
    > _selection pressure_, there are actually _more_ resistant colonies, this
    > experiment is by definition control-less.

    Unfortunately, in his latest response, Dr. Hill addressed your uncorrected post and homed in on the error you subsequently corrected.

    It sounds to me like you've seized upon a purely logical means of dismissing Hill's results. I'm afraid that's not going to cut the mustard. If the cells not exposed to the selection pressure nonetheless show resistant colonies, in your mind this automatically invalidates the experiment. But this conclusion follows only from your neo-Darwinian assumption prohibiting long-distance "entanglement" among closely related cells. You are thus begging the question. How do you know that similar mammalian cells cannot exchange information without material contact? If radios can do it (on the basis of charge), why not cells (on the basis of form)? Clearly, no principle of physics is violated, particularly in light of quantum mechanics. It may be that there cannot be a true control in an experiment involving closely related cells and a large number of passages.

    Hill's experiment could be replicated a thousand times in a thousand different laboratories, and still you would deny the results, as they don't conform to your predetermined beliefs and therefore, by definition, cannot be true. This is not science but dogmatism.

    ted

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