raprap wrote:The ones you've mentioned are important ideas all, but then some just as important ideas may not be quite so so obvious----as I've seen good evidence that advances in plumbing and sewerage disposal has, in the last century, been responsible for saving more human lives than all the advances in medicine.
Rap
This brings to mind two important aspects of science which make it so much superior to superstition, for less than obvious reasons. The first is that the methodical study of circumstance, without reference to a preconception of how the world is organized, can yield dramatic results. John Snow was a physician in London during the 1853-54 cholera outbreak (he is important to the development of medicine in other ways, but he is famous for this) who used epidemiological demographics to demonstrate that "tainted" water was a vector for the spread of cholera, without reference to a "germ theory" of medicine. He was able to show that cholera was epidemic "below" the sewer systems then in operation, and that those who drew their water from pumps "above" the sewage system did not contract the disease. A careful review of the demographic statistics of the spread of the disease compared to a study of the water sources in the affected neighborhood revealed the disease vector 20 years before morbid microorganisms were definitively identified.
But as important, and perhaps more important, than clean water and efficient, isolated sewage removal have been automobiles. This is where the law of unintended consequences shows is positive side. Unintended consequences are not always disastrous, and can in fact be beneficial. Those who invented and marketed automobiles cannot reasonably be said to have had good public health in mind. However, as the horse disappeared from urban landscapes, and urban livery stables disappeared, the incidence and prevalence of childhood diseases and tuberculosis dropped dramatically. A century ago, one could expect, even in the wealthiest families, that (on average) one half of one's children would not survive to adulthood. The most common vector for the diseases which killed children, not understood even after the promulgation and demonstration of the validity of a germ theory of disease, was flies. The horse manure in the streets of cities brought clouds of flies, which spread disease in what is in retrospect a predictable manner--but no seems to have noticed at the time. Additionally, horses are a vector for tuberculosis, and with livery stables and private stables spread throughout cities, tuberculosis was endemic.
No one who built cars thought of themselves as fighters in an epidemiological war. The effect, nevertheless, was dramatic and salutary. I don't believe that any creationist can claim such a victory for their mumbo-jumbo.
