Tuesday 24 March 2009


I would have expected better than this foggy thinking from a Sydney Morning Herald article:


"The spinifex hopping mouse, which weighs no more than 30 grams, can suppress its appetite for up to six days when not eating in order to survive for long periods without water.

Associate Professor John Donald, from Deakin University's school of life and environmental sciences, said this ability made the mouse an ideal animal to study when trying to better understand appetite control in people."

Could we understand more about human flight by studying the albatross?
Could we understand more about human sleep by studying the hibernation of bears?

We could say, "We might be able to apply some of these studies to human weight loss." (which is inevitably where it will go- some drug to suppress appetite and induce fat burning).

But you can't say that studying, in a rodent, an ability that we do not have will help us understand ourselves.

Unfortunately the paper seems to be quoting the scientist himself and not just misquoting or misapplying his conclusions.

This fuzzy thinking seems to me to be the end result of human inquiry divorced from understanding the human situation, as the Bible shows us.

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