Biodynamics is a Hoax

originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
I'd be surprised if you could be definitive. It's not easy for me to see how some of the claims that I have seen could even be tested. To say that it has the same relationship to science as the argument from design would be to insult the argument from design, which, in the 18th century at least, meant to commit itself to empirical argument.
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Agreed- Here are some (fair use) quotes from Clive Coates' "The Wines of Burgundy:"

"The principle behind biodynamism is cosmic: that not only the moon, but also the position of the planets in the Zodiac should govern when we plant, when we should plough, when we should treat and when we should harvest-- that the planets, not just the moon, exert an influence on agriculture on the earth."

"There are four elements in any plant: The root, the leaf, the flower and the fruit....These correspond to the four elements of Earth, Water, Air and Fire as follows: Earth-Root:Taurus,Virgo,Capricorn...." and so on.

Now, as evidence for the fact that "it works. We should learn not to scoff." we get the following:

"A friend in Burgundy, no mean garderner, planted three rows of new potatoes at 10 day intervals in 1995. The first and third, she later found out happened to coincide with a biodynamically recommended day. These thrived. The second, sown on a bad day, produced a meagre harvest."

Now I have tremendous respect for Clive Coates, but in no way was the potato experiment valid as proof of anything. Setting up a controlled experiment to validate some of this stuff would be extremely difficult, almost to the point of the claims being non-falsifiable.

The harm in all this comes when somebody decides to set up the Church of Biodynamique, apply for tax-exempt status, aggresively recruit converts by going door-to-door with a little book called "Bionetics" while charging people thousands of dollars to get to each of the next levels of learning. (You can only change levels when Saturn and Mars are in the correct positions of course.)

Off to get some pamphlets printed,

John
 
originally posted by MLipton:
This conflict was famously tested when the editor of the prestigious journal Nature invited a proponent of homeopathy, Dr. Jacques Benveniste, to publish his findings about the activity of highly dilute solutions of an antibody. Benveniste did and within a few months his results had been widely re-examined and traced to experimental error rather than any homeopathic effect.
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So the one truly confounding factor in the whole equation is the people: the ones who do the test and (some of) the ones who look at the test.

Certainly, with homeopathic medicine there is a large placebo effect to account for.
 
originally posted by Thor:
Scientology & biodynamics. *shudder* You just ruined my day, John!
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I think L. Ron would be proud. Was he a wine geek, I wonder?

Maybe we can bring back alchemy too. At today's prices it sure would be nice to turn some lead into gold.

J-
 
originally posted by John DeFiore:
originally posted by Thor:
Scientology & biodynamics. *shudder* You just ruined my day, John!
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I think L. Ron would be proud. Was he a wine geek, I wonder?

Maybe we can bring back alchemy too. At today's prices it sure would be nice to turn some lead into gold.

J-
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This is disrespectful of alchemy, which was based on the best scientific knowledge of its day and did set up experiments that failed: when the lead didn't turn to gold, you know the entity in question wasn't the whatever it was called.
 
For what it's worth (more on the lead side of the equation than the gold I'm sure), when I Inc'ed myself, I chose Alchemy Wine.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:

This is disrespectful of alchemy, which was based on the best scientific knowledge of its day and did set up experiments that failed: when the lead didn't turn to gold, you know the entity in question wasn't the whatever it was called.
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Oh, but I was under the impression that Steiner experimented with yarrow in many kinds of bladders, and found that using a stag's had by far the most effective and consistent results.

Or maybe not.
 
And then there are epicycles. The best model of its day. Explained a lot although it was complicated.

("Philosopher's Stone", by the way.)
 
"Philosopher's Stone." Thank you, Jeff.

My point, paradoxically, wasn't that BD isn't like alchemy, but that alchemy isn't like BD. It was the best way they had to think about nature and it did accept the notion of error, though it hadn't made it procedural. They were doing the best they could and out of that best came other things. The same can be said for the argument from design in the 18th century. And neither can be said for intelligent design or BD, to my mind.
 
originally posted by Thor:
Thsiahmoepthcpst.
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I thought they looked more like this:

T___________________________o____________s .

And you shouldn't rush to judgement. If my understanding of homeopathy is correct, this homeopathic posting will gradually eliminate all the other posting symptoms in this thread. Which some would certainly consider a healthy development.
 
Obviously, the logical conclusion is that the most effective argument is an empty post.

...and now we see the real genius of Coad's current status. He's not actually on hiatus, he's just posting hundreds of homeopathic messages.
 
When you consider how hair splitting evaluation can get in Burgundy and the extent to which uncontrolled variables are constantly present, I often wonder how anything of genuine accuracy is ever arrived at. That is the main reason I think the BD debate is much like terroir debates, it will not be conclusively proven to be superior to satisfy the skeptics. My personal view is that when it comes to the long term sustainability of a high quality of life for humans, deft symbiosis with nature is how that is achieved and that to me means not using synthetic concentrated substances in agriculture. Our infatuation with our short term solutions seems to always backfire on us over the long term.
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Exactly. Which I why I find the more dogmatic claims on either side to be misguided.

None of the BD defenders that I have seen has stated a belief in the mystical mechanisms that Steiner put forward*. Rather, they are stating their belief that the jury is still out on whether the physical treatments suggested by BD have any efficacy, and expressing doubt in the supposed infallibility of the scientific method when applied to problems with an endless string of independent variables, only a select few of which are controlled for in any given experiment. This is the same sort of scientific investigation that first told us that sugar was a greatly unhealthy food that must be avoided...then a few years later, it turns out that sugar wasn't the culprit, it was butter and we should eat margarine instead...then a few more years down the road, it was margarine that was bad for us and butter that was healthy in moderate quantities. It's almost enough to make a man 'skeptical' that the scientific method is the infallible precision instrument that some evidently view it as, when applied to problems that have more than five or six independent variables.

*Though I'm sure such defenders must exist, I have yet to see a proof of their existence.
 
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