Since the dawn of time, at least a few million years ago, humanity has always been afraid of change. This is apparent in our mythology, gods that never change and laws that are definitive.
One area that this fear has affected most is technology and science. When humans first learned the Earth was not flat, anyone who stated it was not flat were tortured to death simply for stating the possibility of some other curvature.
In the Dark Ages, any form of technology was met with hatred and violence, the inventor and user were tortured to death, accused of witchcraft and deals with an imaginary adversary. Even today, with the resistance against clean energy and modern genetic modifications, people are fighting hard to prevent this new technology, even going so far as to start wars to slow progress.
The world of religion is the greatest weight against modern technology and scientific advancement, many even oppose some necessary scientific theories, responsible for their survival, out of fear of change. Others are more straight forward, attacking and killing those claiming the new technology is a sign of their imaginary adversary.
However, this is not limited to religion, there are those who oppose change because someone in an obsolete industry told them it's bad. Genetic modification is a method of producing food which we can eat, and grow, that has been used for thousands of years.
Yet people oppose the more modern methods, they often cite studies that are not only fraudulent or fallacious, but often outright lies. The new technique simply takes the margin of error to a minimum, crossbreeding is very prone to error, just ask a cow.
Another such group, which is aptly named anti-vaxxers, oppose modern medicine in place of ancient herbology and other such woo woo. Synthetic medicines and chemicals never add anything, but they do remove other chemicals that can cause harm.
Herbs are the same as drinking a glass of unfiltered water just because there's one drop of lemon juice in it, homeopathy is a gallon of filtered water for the same. Lemons, citrus fruits in general, is a great example of the difference.
Citrus fruits will prevent an illness that plagued sailors, known as scurvy. Scurvy is rare today, we often do jot even hear of it, because we discovered the reason citrus helped prevent it and, using modern chemistry, we started putting it into all of our foods. We also sell this chemical in pill form and tasty candies.
Vitamin C, a chemical that citrus fruits contain high amounts of, is found to be an essential vitamin we have lost the ability to produce, as a genus. Homo species have to get this vitamin through consumption of foods that contain large amounts, this is why all of us apes love fruit, especially citrus fruits.
The problem lies in the quantity required for certain environments, humans have learned to live in all environments so this affects us most. Urban regions are most likely to spread scurvy, as well as other illnesses that vitamin C helps combat, so the vast majority of us need lots of vitamin C to keep healthy.
The fruit is tasty, so eating enough won't be a problem, until you notice the enamel on your teeth vanishing. All fruits that contain vitamin C contain acids as well, citric acid and ascorbic acid are both very corrosive. This means you will lose your teeth eating enough fruits to stay healthy.
The alternative, a process call refining or synthesizing. This allows us to take the essential vitamin from the rest of the chemicals, or produce it, then we can safely consume as much as we need without worrying about the ill effects.
This is what modern medicine is, those against it are paid for by those who would prefer you get sick, or buy their product and live with no teeth. There are many such groups, selling either "organic" and the mythical "all natural" or herbs and woo woo.
The easy way to make them stumble is to ask for the evidence, when they pull up some study look for the scientific journal it was published and verify it. Most likely, it was not even published, often it will be a misrepresentation of the actual paper (common for anti-GMO nuts).
This fear of new needs to end for our species to ever improve beyond today with any pace worthy of our great ape ancestry. This means we must be rid of our superstitions of old, end the delusion called religion, and stop listening to big corporations just because they support dark aged methods.
I love living in the future, but I want to see tomorrow, and will fight all junk science and mythology to increase my chances of this.
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