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Originally Posted by Stare At The Sun
unless you are a trained scientist, or have taken a number of high level college courses on research methodology, your assertions of scientific validity carry no weight.
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Be careful of what you're saying. The wonderful thing about science is that by providing verifiable and repeatable results, it is available to anyone, not just the elite. Elitism by scientists will only make science less accessible to the public and promote scientific illiteracy. Carl Sagan was the epitome of what a scientist should be: he was a fearless champion of science, yet he was able to convey it in terms that a layman could easily understand and was patient and willing to calmly and rationally debate or discuss any scientific issue with anyone, even those who made infuriatingly illogical arguments or who tried to trap him with pseudo-scientific arguments.
Those who are more educated in certain areas are more qualified to interpret certain data, but while I don't have an intimate knowledge of epidemiology, medicine, or biology, I can fully understand the meaning of a statement like "In a controlled study of 1000 patients, 7% responded favorably to placebo and 90% responded favorably to the drug." I don't have to know how it works to know that it does because the scientific method produces honest, unbiased results.
With that same lack of knowledge of those fields, I can take a culture of bacteria, observe them under a microscope and verify what strain they are by referencing the same materials biologists at the top of their field use, put a drop of antibiotic in the petri dish, and observe as the bacteria die and fail to reproduce.
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I think it is widely held that AIDS is a man made virus.
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It is accepted that HIV-1 is a mutation of Simian Immunodeficiency Virus that became pathogenic and transmissible in humans. HIV-2 is similar and has been traced back to a species of Old World monkey in West Africa. A sequence of lentivirus (the same genus of virus as HIV) DNA has been found to be embedded in the genetic code of a species of Lemur that is immune to similar lentiviruses and has been in the species' genetic code for roughly 14 million years, indicating that similar viruses have existed for at least that long.
The claim that it is a man-made virus has come up repeatedly and in each case their has been either no evidence to support the claim, and in many cases there is evidence that specifically contradicts those claims.