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Heisenberg Was Right About the Theology of Frightened Warts
When I learned how to scare warts, my view of the whole world changed. The procedure is pretty simple. A patient comes in and asks me to remove a wart from his hand. I’m busy or don’t want to deal with cryo or surgery that day, so I frown at the wart, stroke my chin, and say, “Yeah, well, sure, but to remove that is a very painful procedure that takes a long time. We don’t have sufficient time in the schedule today for it. Come back in six weeks. We’ll do it then.” The patient comes back in six weeks, and the wart is gone. It’s called scaring a wart. I was taught this in my post-graduate training, and I used the technique (It often works!), I just didn’t understand how it worked. Because what that means, is that if your brain really wants to get rid of that wart, it can. But how?
One of my board certifications is in Clinical Lipidology, which is sort of the study of the underlying biochemistry, genetics, and molecular biology of atherosclerotic plaque deposition and rupture. I was at a Lipidology conference some years ago when a researcher brought up scaring warts. This seemed like an odd topic for a cardiovascular conference. But he had been researching the scaring of warts for years. (He must have been fun at cocktail parties: “…no, I don’t actually scare warts, I study the molecular biology which allows for the scaring of warts…” * …pretty girl slowly backs away with a frozen smile on her face… *)
Anyway, he would isolate the particular white blood cells which attack the particular viral particle which causes that particular type of wart on that particular person’s hand. Then he found a way to mark these particular cells with radionucleotide tags. He would then scare the wart, and perform serial radionucleotide scans to track the movement of these cells around the body. Simple experiment, although the details are a little tricky.
He found that these cells were pretty evenly distributed around the body, as one might expect, until he scared the wart. And then a huge majority of these cells would go directly to the wart in question. They would not go to other warts. Only the wart in question. Now think about that for a second.
That means that one of those particular white blood cells is drifting around the body, minding its own business, until it receives some sort of signal from the brain. Then, in response that signal, the cell will come to an intersection in an artery, and choose right or left, and choose again at the next intersection, and again and again and again, until it completes an extremely complex journey through a convoluted system of arteries, arterioles, and capillaries, until it gets to a very specific location on the person’s hand. And then it starts kicking some viral butt.
Now how on earth does that cell know where it’s going? How does it propel itself (or how do the arterial walls propel it) down a certain course? How does the signal from the brain work – does it use some system like GPS coordinates? Apparently blood does not flow around your body like water in a stream. It seems to be an organ which intelligently distributes resources to where they are needed at the time. Or something like that.
How on earth?
We have no idea. Not a clue.
But we spend a lot of time researching this because if we ever figure out exactly how this works, we’ve just cured cancer. We could give someone chemo, tag it to go only to the pancreas, and give enormous doses of chemo with no side effects elsewhere in the body. We could send antibiotics only to the lungs, to treat pneumonia, with no risk of intestinal complications. Just imagine what we could do. The possibilities boggle the mind. But during the lecture, that’s not what my mind was boggled by.
I was sitting there, a cup of Starbucks getting cold in my hand, wondering how something like that could simply evolve through random chance, natural selection, evolutionary pressure, survival of the fittest, and so on. Lightning hits a mud hole, and a few hundred million years later we have cellular anti-viral assassins with GPS guidance systems and elaborate communication systems to an intelligent central control hub? Man, I don’t know. That’s a little different from Boyle’s Law or something.
So I’m a slow learner. I lived my whole life surrounded by God’s miracles and I completely missed them. Until one day, God whaps me upside the head with wart research. And I just couldn’t avert my gaze any longer.
God: “Yo! Mr. Genius! Maybe things will look a little clearer to you if you OPEN YOUR #$%& EYES! C’mon! Why don’t you try using that brain I gave you, for a change?!?”
I suspect that God whapped Heisenberg upside the head with something a bit more glamorous than warts. Something like quantum mechanics. Whatever works, I suppose.
When I started my study of basic science, as a child, everything made sense. Basic science just makes sense. You can see it. But as I delved deeper and deeper into more advanced scientific study, it started to make less sense, rather than more. The things I knew became less obvious, and the things that I didn’t know became more difficult to ignore. Until I felt myself becoming less certain of even the things I thought I knew. Of everything, really. For a math/science guy, searching for understanding, it’s a disconcerting feeling.
But once I realized that perhaps things were not necessarily as random as I had previously believed, then things started to make sense again. There is a lot about science that we can understand, but I think we will eventually reach a point where we’re staring into the mind of God, and we won’t necessarily understand what we see.
I am one of the many who feel that they lack sufficient faith to remain an atheist. I tried for years. I really did. I thought I was so clever. But even clever people can’t rationalize away the obvious, sometimes. They often can, but sometimes they just can’t.
Some people see God when they look at a sunset. I see Him when I study subendothelial pathophysiology. It’s beautiful, once you know what you’re looking at. I now see the study of science sort of like a course in Art Appreciation. It’s ok if you don’t always understand what you’re looking at. It’s ok to just marvel at the wonder of it all sometimes. You continue in your unending search for understanding, but you accept that there will always be some things which remain beyond your grasp.
Atheists tend to find this to be scary – an urgent problem to be fixed – or perhaps ignored – or even more dangerously – a problem to be rationalized with false hypotheses which confirm their pre-existing biases. Religious students tend to find these same problems to be exciting – wondering “Cool! How the heck did He do this?”.
I can understand atheist artists, or atheist auto mechanics or whatever, but I really don’t understand atheist scientists. They are a very recent phenomenon, historically. How you can spend your whole life in the pursuit of scientific knowledge and not believe in God is one of the many things that is beyond my understanding. How can you not see that which you spend your life studying?
Although I couldn’t see it either, for years. It sometimes takes a while, especially for us slow learners. I hope God understands.
I know that Mr. Heisenberg does.
Published in General
Wow.
Shallow? Afraid? Accepting the unknown and mortality is shallow and afraid? But making up a fantastical wonderland to inhabit after death is a sign of confidence?
I wonder why the patient came back if the wart was gone.
Perfect answer. :)
I’ve always wondered about how many times doctors think their remedies work because their patients never come back.
It reminds me of the witch doctor/quack who would “cure” people by performing any number of unnatural, stinky, painful procedures when a patient comes to him with a problem. Any sane patient would rather tolerate most ailments that aren’t entirely debilitating rather than submit to the “remedy” again.
Are you certain?
Heretic!
Well, we have some different views. I must say that my thoughts on these matters have ranged widely over my lifetime. A major puzzle for me in attempting to reconcile an atheistic belief approach with a scientific concept of evolution as raised in earlier comments here is the apparent mismatch of humankind’s nature with the developed mental capacity. How and why does evolution produce something like we have now?
As Jordan Peterson has noted, if it’s all a fantastical wonderland, why is there a hell? Furthermore, why are so many people scared about hell? Buddhism and Christianity are filled with horrific (and entertaining) depictions of hell.
I accept this statement as reasonable and a good explanation of evolutionary changes. At some point it looks as if humankind got some kind of very significant bounce in brain function that we have used to great advantage to raise our standard of living and sustain much larger populations of humans. We also manage to kill our fellow human beings in greater numbers than any tribal chief would have ever thought possible or imagined necessary. And we face a point where we can be the perpetrators of events that lead to our own extinction. The rational capacity in our brain development may not be sufficient to overcome our animal nature to avoid this.
That’s why it is so important to acknowledge that good and evil do exist, unlike those who want to live in la-la land.
To make the make-believe heaven seem even better, of course. But there need not be a reason. People want to believe, and so they do, absent any logic or fact. It’s a human tendency, but that doesn’t make it admirable.
My mother used to buy them from kids for a nickel. That worked, too.
Most folks learn a lot of things from me. I learn a lot from Ricochet.
Sounds rather magical.
Someone may have beaten me to this, but: “aspirin-phenacetin-caffeine“.
I’ve never met one that was very organized at all. Like most human endeavors, they tend to be a shambles.
Definitely not so.
I would add to what others have said about how eloquent and well-crafted your original post is, @drbastiat.
It’s definitely so according to every website I looked at within a few minutes, so it’s at least plausible. But I wouldn’t know. I’ve had warts go away without doctor intervention before. Maybe it was because of my menacing stares.
How?
I’ve had one for a quarter of a century. I know others who also had them for much longer than six weeks.
You need to scare it more!
Man, if my face doesn’t scare it, nothing will.
I haven’t posted since the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, but this post by the great Dr B is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever read on Ricochet, and I also, just before reading it, was considering writing a Father’s Day post bragging about my daughter.
I ‘allowed’ my only child to attend the People’s Republic of Berkeley, hoping that a STEM course (she got an honors degree in cell & micro biology) would keep her too busy to be indoctrinated in social justice. At first, I was encouraged when I overheard her joking with roommates about a course they (I thought derisively) nicknamed “How to Hate the White Man 101”. After graduation, she joined a leukemia research lab at UC San Francisco, and during her three years there she seems to have gotten as ‘woke’ as the average member of that community. She got really upset when I merely brought up the topic of Intelligent Design, asking her if there was any respect at all given to the sort of themes of today’s post.
I would love to be able to share this article with her, but she has made it clear she believes all religion is incompatible with science. She is fond of taking the position that opponents of politically correct settled science “just don’t understand the science”.
Here is the great challenge for me: she just won a million-dollar (not exaggerating, you could look it up) scholarship funded by the National Institutes for Health to enter the Medical Scientist Training Program at Weill Cornell med school in Manhattan. This program leads to dual PhD and MD degrees and takes at least eight years. She is back home in Japan for the first time in two years, and might not be able to come back for a long time. Cornell requires all MSTP students to start on July 1. Summers are devoted to intensive research.
When I drop her off at the airport, I would love to be able to hand her a printout of this article. It so wonderfully expresses how I understand the world, but I’m afraid if she scans it and sees the word “God”, she will just throw it in a trash bin. I suppose I can at least hope that the ‘right coast’ will be somewhat not as left as the ‘left coast’ she is leaving.
You will both be in my prayers.
My best friend in the world is my younger brother. However, he married a woman who at least since 1992 has been a Hillary acolyte/devotee. My brother and I can talk about politics somewhat, but she mostly won’t stay on the phone with me, let alone talk about anything more than a polite greeting.
I’m still best friends with my brother, no matter his politics. I know where he stands and he knows where I stand and we love and respect each other.
I hope you can get to that point with your daughter. I suspect handing out printouts from Ricochet wouldn’t be productive.
I don’t pray. But people should search out the very best arguments that they disagree with. I would tell that this is the very best argument to disagree with so should know it. Steel-manning is underrated.
I’m a bad scientist. None of it makes sense to me.
I grew up learning about those early Christian scientists. It was a Christian chemist who designed the periodic table of elements, predicting what would be found based on what had already been found, assuming (through faith) that it wasn’t random – it was ordered.
He’s one of the guys I point to when asked what evidence of God’s existence have I.
I might not be a scientist, but I see the beauty in it, too.
How sweet. My dad told me this joke many years ago, though in his version it was a leg. His jokes were a ritual we shared. Always started out the same way, “I heard a good one today…”. 😊
I don’t because… math. Get me a credible mathematical model that shows- using realistic population sizes, mutation rates, relative prevalence of advantageous/disadvantageous/immediately lethal mutations and time scales- the pathway from an organism without a pancreas and no need for a pancreas to an organism with a functioning pancreas and the entire set of other biological changes that would have to accompany the evolution of this new organ, with all of this occurring simultaneously and spontaneously, without any guiding input – and then you’ve got a credible case. Until then, it’s just the mutation fairy coming down to perform miracles just when the species needs them. It’s basically the “emergent properties of the gaps” argument.