What could be more majestic than a mountain chain that rises more than 10,000 feet with views to the ocean? Encompassing views that provide new perspectives. And the volcanoes! Oh! the volcanoes. Thousands: Extinct, dormant, active, many, like Aconcagua, awe-inspiring. And in those high elevations, walks a mountain camel that provides some of the best wool and possibly a cure for coronaviruses. It is the llama toward which the attention of scientists at Belgium’s VIB-UGent Center for Medical Biotechnology has now turned for nanobodies, really tiny antibodies that might protect us from Covid-19.* Oh! the lengths—and heights—to which we will go when we are desperate. Oh! the ideas we will pursue.
And, if we read all the newspapers and listen to all the reports during this 2020 pandemic, we are desperate. We see the numbers. We can’t avoid seeing the numbers. Scary numbers. So, why shouldn’t we look at llama blood? Who knows? Maybe something will come of the research. Maybe the researchers will discover a cure that works for all of us.
But like a trip into the Andes, the journey is uphill, and like the new disease, it takes away the breath. Nevertheless, when we are desperate, we humans will often pursue every path, explore every option. That’s often how we progress, through multiple working hypotheses. Run through enough of them, we believe inductively, and we’re bound to hit on an answer to any problem.
Take the formation of the Andes themselves. Why are they there? Charles Darwin climbed them in the 1830s, long before anyone thought of moving crustal plates, Plate Tectonics, and seafloor spreading. Long before anyone knew about subduction zones and why the Ring of Fire exists. Darwin, climbing above 10,000 feet, saw fossils of marine animals in the rocks and posited two working hypotheses. The first was the standard of his time, that the Deluge had inundated the world, with only Noah and family left to repopulate. The second was that the seafloor had somehow been raised to great elevations. Darwin, looking out from the heights, thought, “Wait a minute. If the water covered the planet to the elevation at which I currently stand, where did all the excess water go?” The consequence of having questioned the Great Flood hypothesis and finding it wanting, was his decision to run with the other hypothesis, that the mountains had been formed by uplifting. Rocks once on the sea floor had been elevated thousands of feet. Sure, Darwin didn’t really know what was going on tectonically, but his hypothesis looked pretty good; it seemed certainly truer than the accepted truth. And when Darwin descended from lofty elevations, he found that the sea level location where he started his upward journey had undergone an earthquake in his absence and that a promontory of rock had suddenly appeared in the water offshore. Rocks were being pushed up. His second hypothesis seemed surer than sure. And those who pursued Darwin’s kind of thinking over the ensuing century established a new way of looking at orogeny and volcanism.
And so it might be with llama blood, or with any camel-species blood. Someone in Belgium, just on a hunch, might test an hypothesis that changes how the medical profession develops a vaccine against a deadly pandemic.
Multiple working hypotheses free us from narrow inhibitive thinking. And they don’t have to apply to scientific endeavors only. They can be used to discern what is true—or truer—in all our endeavors, even, believe it or not, in psychology, sociology, and political science.
While scientists pursue their multiple working hypotheses on coronavirus, each of us might consider which hypotheses we pursue in our daily life. We might ask ourselves whether or not we are locked onto a single hypothesis or are open to multiple hypotheses. Much of the opposition to Darwin’s work derived from those who supported a single hypothesis, that Noah’s Flood had remade the world and laid the marine fossils high in the Andes and other mountains. That opposition to Darwin still exists, as you know, in spite of almost two centuries of information that supports the tectonic processes that build great mountain chains and cause volcanic activity.
As you know, much of what you perceive to be opposition to your way of thinking comes from those locked onto single hypotheses about psychology, sociology, and politics. That begs a question for you to ask yourself: “Am I locked into a single hypothesis?” And another question: “Why are so many people inclined to stick with a single hypothesis?”
Very few, if any, of Darwin’s opponents over the past century and a half have ever pursued his working hypotheses with objective thinking and research. After all, if accepting Noah’s Flood explains marine fossils in mountain rocks, why pursue any other mechanism? Don’t most of us cling to one hypothesis to explain beliefs either because we are too lazy to pursue refinements and question anomalies to those beliefs or because we find security in a nostalgic adherence to our beliefs?
Probably, each of us adheres to some hypothesis without testing and without pursuing multiple other working hypotheses. It’s only when we open ourselves to re-examining our hypotheses or to examining the hypotheses of others objectively that we can establish a better degree of truth, if not THE TRUTH.
Maybe the constituents of llama blood will have no relevance to curing or preventing Covid-19 in humans, but I applaud those who try to discover a new kind of medical approach to a pandemic. The beauty of multiple working hypotheses is that on occasion one of those hypotheses or two or three of them in conjunction will provide a solution to a problem. Who really cares about the source of a cure if the cure works? Who will, after the fact of a cure, deride those who took a different path toward truth?
And if you consider multiple working hypotheses to explain your life and the lives of those around you, I applaud you. Like Darwin in the Andes, you have a perspective that others either miss or ignore because they never ventured to the heights that provide sweeping perspectives. Whereas it is possible that pursuing multiple working hypotheses might never yield a final “answer,” it does provide a better chance of finding a truer truth and a cure for what ails not just individuals and groups, but also much of humanity.
*Reuters. Belgian, U.S. scientists look to llama in search for COVID-19 treatment. Science News. 5 May 2020. Online at https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-antibodies-llamas/belgian-u-s-scientists-look-to-llama-in-search-for-covid-19-treatment-idUSKBN22H2QA
Accessed May 8, 2020.
And, if we read all the newspapers and listen to all the reports during this 2020 pandemic, we are desperate. We see the numbers. We can’t avoid seeing the numbers. Scary numbers. So, why shouldn’t we look at llama blood? Who knows? Maybe something will come of the research. Maybe the researchers will discover a cure that works for all of us.
But like a trip into the Andes, the journey is uphill, and like the new disease, it takes away the breath. Nevertheless, when we are desperate, we humans will often pursue every path, explore every option. That’s often how we progress, through multiple working hypotheses. Run through enough of them, we believe inductively, and we’re bound to hit on an answer to any problem.
Take the formation of the Andes themselves. Why are they there? Charles Darwin climbed them in the 1830s, long before anyone thought of moving crustal plates, Plate Tectonics, and seafloor spreading. Long before anyone knew about subduction zones and why the Ring of Fire exists. Darwin, climbing above 10,000 feet, saw fossils of marine animals in the rocks and posited two working hypotheses. The first was the standard of his time, that the Deluge had inundated the world, with only Noah and family left to repopulate. The second was that the seafloor had somehow been raised to great elevations. Darwin, looking out from the heights, thought, “Wait a minute. If the water covered the planet to the elevation at which I currently stand, where did all the excess water go?” The consequence of having questioned the Great Flood hypothesis and finding it wanting, was his decision to run with the other hypothesis, that the mountains had been formed by uplifting. Rocks once on the sea floor had been elevated thousands of feet. Sure, Darwin didn’t really know what was going on tectonically, but his hypothesis looked pretty good; it seemed certainly truer than the accepted truth. And when Darwin descended from lofty elevations, he found that the sea level location where he started his upward journey had undergone an earthquake in his absence and that a promontory of rock had suddenly appeared in the water offshore. Rocks were being pushed up. His second hypothesis seemed surer than sure. And those who pursued Darwin’s kind of thinking over the ensuing century established a new way of looking at orogeny and volcanism.
And so it might be with llama blood, or with any camel-species blood. Someone in Belgium, just on a hunch, might test an hypothesis that changes how the medical profession develops a vaccine against a deadly pandemic.
Multiple working hypotheses free us from narrow inhibitive thinking. And they don’t have to apply to scientific endeavors only. They can be used to discern what is true—or truer—in all our endeavors, even, believe it or not, in psychology, sociology, and political science.
While scientists pursue their multiple working hypotheses on coronavirus, each of us might consider which hypotheses we pursue in our daily life. We might ask ourselves whether or not we are locked onto a single hypothesis or are open to multiple hypotheses. Much of the opposition to Darwin’s work derived from those who supported a single hypothesis, that Noah’s Flood had remade the world and laid the marine fossils high in the Andes and other mountains. That opposition to Darwin still exists, as you know, in spite of almost two centuries of information that supports the tectonic processes that build great mountain chains and cause volcanic activity.
As you know, much of what you perceive to be opposition to your way of thinking comes from those locked onto single hypotheses about psychology, sociology, and politics. That begs a question for you to ask yourself: “Am I locked into a single hypothesis?” And another question: “Why are so many people inclined to stick with a single hypothesis?”
Very few, if any, of Darwin’s opponents over the past century and a half have ever pursued his working hypotheses with objective thinking and research. After all, if accepting Noah’s Flood explains marine fossils in mountain rocks, why pursue any other mechanism? Don’t most of us cling to one hypothesis to explain beliefs either because we are too lazy to pursue refinements and question anomalies to those beliefs or because we find security in a nostalgic adherence to our beliefs?
Probably, each of us adheres to some hypothesis without testing and without pursuing multiple other working hypotheses. It’s only when we open ourselves to re-examining our hypotheses or to examining the hypotheses of others objectively that we can establish a better degree of truth, if not THE TRUTH.
Maybe the constituents of llama blood will have no relevance to curing or preventing Covid-19 in humans, but I applaud those who try to discover a new kind of medical approach to a pandemic. The beauty of multiple working hypotheses is that on occasion one of those hypotheses or two or three of them in conjunction will provide a solution to a problem. Who really cares about the source of a cure if the cure works? Who will, after the fact of a cure, deride those who took a different path toward truth?
And if you consider multiple working hypotheses to explain your life and the lives of those around you, I applaud you. Like Darwin in the Andes, you have a perspective that others either miss or ignore because they never ventured to the heights that provide sweeping perspectives. Whereas it is possible that pursuing multiple working hypotheses might never yield a final “answer,” it does provide a better chance of finding a truer truth and a cure for what ails not just individuals and groups, but also much of humanity.
*Reuters. Belgian, U.S. scientists look to llama in search for COVID-19 treatment. Science News. 5 May 2020. Online at https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-antibodies-llamas/belgian-u-s-scientists-look-to-llama-in-search-for-covid-19-treatment-idUSKBN22H2QA
Accessed May 8, 2020.
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