Dr Carlo’s Man- Made Theory

During his presentation, Dr Carlo laid out a theory that I thought was so extraordinary it deserved some attention of it’s own. If you like this theory, your regard for Dr Carlo will be enhanced, and that’s as far as I’m going to go with that sentence. So I’m including it partly because I find it interesting, and partly so you can form your own opinion of what sort of thinker Dr Carlo is.

Unfortunately, Dr Carlo didn’t have any handouts, and I can’t find his theory on his web page, or anywhere in fact. But he expressed it very clearly, and when he was questioned about it he re-affirmed it very specifically, so I think the following is a faithful rendition:

Radio waves that carry information do not occur naturally, they are solely man-made.

Therefore life has evolved in the complete absence of those waves.

Therefore no organism has ever developed defensive mechanisms against those waves.

Therefore those waves are toxic and...

There can be no safe dose of those waves.

Now there are some aspects of that theory that I like. For one thing, it’s falsifiable. All good theories are. An example of a non-falsifiable theory would be “This magic button radiates special waves that are not detectable”. Nobody could ever prove that wrong, so generally speaking theories

like that aren’t allowed in real grown-up science. But the Carlo theory is falsifiable, to a degree anyway,  and I commend it for that, if nothing else. It is also a very brave theory, in that there are lots and lots of man made things around, and it’s staking out a lot of turf to say that every single one of them is toxic even in the tiniest quantities.

There are some aspects that I don’t like, though, mainly the fact that the last two lines are clearly non-sequiturs from first three. This is not a theory you can simply state and therefore its true, just by the brilliance of its own logic, its a theory you’d need to prove. Or even have a little bit of evidence for. And it wouldn’t hurt to describe what the mechanism is that causes all man made things to have that effect, it seems rather co-incidental to me and in need of proof. Oh, and before I forget, the other thing I don’t like about it is that it is a complete load of utter rubbish dressed up all scientific with the sole purpose of scaring the pants off people, and someone who calls himself an epidemiologist ought to know better. In my opinion.

So here’s the challenge - can you think of any man made thing (say a substance or maybe some environmental factor) that life must have evolved without, that does, in fact, have a safe dose?

Now the dose is allowed to be as small as you like. Carlo’s theory is very explicit - any amount is dangerous, there is no lower threshold. So feel free to think about really low doses of things, like one molecule of it, maybe applied for short periods of time, like microseconds, or maybe exposed from a large distance, like ten miles down the road. Maybe a hundred miles down the road, just to be safe.  And if you are still worried about it, we can just dilute the dose downward from there. I’m pretty sure that we’ll get to a safe dose of anything eventually.

What might be a safe dose of duct-tape? A small patch applied to the skin for a few minutes doesn’t seem likely to be fatal, but to be on the safe side, how about a pin-head sized piece of it applied for just one second? Too dangerous for you? Take it off after a microsecond. Or don’t apply it to your skin at all. Just expose yourself to it’s harmful presence. Stick the pin-head sized piece on the ceiling and see how long it takes to make you sick. And if it does, just use a bit less next time, you’ll get there in the end.

The point is, Dr Carlo’s grand theory of all things manmade being automatically toxic in any dose is so easy to falsify that you’d have to be an idiot to offer it up.