> in what
> future society might it not be true arsenic would kill you. If
> everyone but the people in the isolated Chilean village was wiped
> out, then the future society that descended from them might be an answer.
That would be so if a) Lamarck was right or b) the Chilean villagers' children kept taking their arsenic shots. a) would be much more interesting since it would imply a plasticity in the genome that I really wish were demonstrated. Unfortunately we're still waiting for that bit of good news. b) would just be a public health measure, like smallpox vaccination or good sewers, and wouldn't say anything about a *biological* transformation of the critter Homo Sapiens. Cultural transformation, yes.
> What's painful in this thread is the browbeating
> that would have Kenneally dismissed as a lightweight and a fraud and
> shag dissed for paying attention to her.
Now Suh, them's fightin' words. If Kenneally's book appears to some of us to be work of shallow flyweight popularization, then are we not to say so? That's "browbeating"?
And who has been "dissing" Shag? Shag's been fighting her corner very effectively, as always, and she's got us all reading stuff we wouldn't otherwise have read. Argumentation doesn't amount to "diss", or whatever the deverbative noun of "dissing" is.
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Michael Smith mjs at smithbowen.net http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org