[Question to Dr. Margulis] You have attacked population genetics—the foundation of much current evolutionary research—as “numerology.” What do you mean by that term?
[Answer by Dr. Margulis] When evolutionary biologists use computer modeling to find out how many mutations you need to get from one species to another, it’s not mathematics—it’s numerology. They are limiting the field of study to something that’s manageable and ignoring what’s most important. They tend to know nothing about atmospheric chemistry and the influence it has on the organisms or the influence that the organisms have on the chemistry. They know nothing about biological systems like physiology, ecology, and biochemistry. Darwin was saying that changes accumulate through time, but population geneticists are describing mixtures that are temporary. Whatever is brought together by sex is broken up in the next generation by the same process. Evolutionary biology has been taken over by population geneticists. They are reductionists ad absurdum. Population geneticist Richard Lewontin gave a talk here at UMass Amherst about six years ago, and he mathematized all of it—changes in the population, random mutation, sexual selection, cost and benefit. At the end of his talk he said, “You know, we’ve tried to test these ideas in the field and the lab, and there are really no measurements that match the quantities I’ve told you about.” This just appalled me. So I said, “Richard Lewontin, you are a great lecturer to have the courage to say it’s gotten you nowhere. But then why do you continue to do this work?” And he looked around and said, “It’s the only thing I know how to do, and if I don’t do it I won’t get my grant money.” So he’s an honest man, and that’s an honest answer.

UN.BE.LIEV.ABLE.

Gotta love Lynn Margulis, rest her soul … she died late last year. I was first introduced to her by creationist author Jerry Bergman in a fascinating paper entitled “Did God Make Pathogenic Viruses“. Margulis helped change my view (shared by most people today) that “microorganisms are primarily germs and pathogens.” This is pure Pasteurian nonsense. We should have listened to his rival Bechamp instead. (Hat tip to Joel Salatin for introducing me to Bechamp) Bacteria are actually vital to all life on earth and viruses are too. Bergman uses a flower and bee analogy, where bacteria are like flowers and viruses are like bees “pollinating” bacteria with genetic information. Google the terms “Margulis Sonea Panisset Mathieu new bacteriology” for more info. Margulis also was the co-author of a theory which I now – at long last – consider to be brilliant – the Gaia Hypothesis. I didn’t understand it at first and I just dismissed it as some sort of New Age Woo, but it’s not at all. The earth is in fact a sort of living super organism and the person that alerted me to this was … drum roll … Joel Salatin, one of my main heroes of late. It was Joel who made me realize that it is actually possible for us to restart the natural hydrological cycle over arid places like the Sahara desert by using one of nature’s most powerful tools – Herbivore Herds on Perennial Grasses managed holistically (Alan Savory) to restore ecosystems. As the vegetative cover returns to the land, this causes transpiration which induces precipitation. See “Modeling Feedbacks Between Water and Vegetation in the North African Climate System” by James R. Miller and Gary L. Russell in Scientists Debate Gaia, p. 297-305 (you can read most of it for free). And, last but not least, Dr. Margulis recently joined Actor Ed Asner and 1600+ professional architects and engineers who are speaking out against the official government NIST story about what caused the 9/11 disaster. http://www.ae911truth.org/ And this brings me to the last part of my blog post title “Or Worse?”  If what the “ae911″ people including Margulis and Ed Asner are saying is true, then scientists like Dr. Shyam Sunder, lead investigator for NIST are engaged in a cover up of some very scary stuff. He said, “World Trade Center 7 collapsed because of fires fueled by office furnishings. It did not collapse from explosives or from fuel oil fires.” http://architects-engineers.org/ Video … start watching at 3:40 to hear Dr. Sunder.  Really, Dr. Sunder?  Office furnishings catching on fire can bring a modern skyscraper down? I wonder why it didn’t bring this one down. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/world/asia/10beijing.html Much worse fire. Engulfed the entire building. Yet it did not collapse.

Why is it that when I used to go to the doctor for an ear infection or sore throat my doctor never told me this in spite of the fact that he took the Hippocratic Oath?

Instead he told me “Here’s a prescription … $70 please … bye!” Cha ching.

NOTE: I haven’t been to the doctor (or a dentist) for over a year because finally – no thanks to him – I learned what Hippocrates was teaching 2500 years ago.

(Thank you Joel Salatin, Weston Price, Joel Fuhrman and others)

http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/248774.Hippocrates

Chronic Buckyball Administration Doubles Rat Lifespan
Posted by Lyle J. Dennis, M.D. on April 16, 2012 in Drugs · 42 Comments

C(60) fullerene is a naturally occurring molecule containing 60 carbon atoms arranged in a sphere. It is famously known as the buckyball, short for buckminsterfullerene, and discovered in 1985. Since 1993, the molecule has been suspected to have multiple potential biological benefits. This list includes UV and radioprotection, antiviral, antioxidant, and anti-amyloid activities, allergic response and angiogenesis inhibitions, immune stimulating and antitumour effects, enhancing effect on neurite outgrowth, gene delivery, and even hair-growing activity.
In the current study researchers fed the molecule dissolved in olive oil to rats and compared outcomes to a control group of rats who got plain olive oil. The main question they wanted to answer was whether chronic C60 administration had any toxicity, what they discovered actually surprised them.
“Here we show that oral administration of C60 dissolved in olive oil (0.8 mg/ml) at reiterated doses (1.7 mg/kg of body weight) to rats not only does not entail chronic toxicity,” they write “but it almost doubles their lifespan.” “The estimated median lifespan (EML) for the C60-treated rats was 42 months while the EMLs for control rats and olive oil-treated rats were 22 and 26 months, respectively,” they write.
Using a toxicity model the researchers demonstrated that the effect on lifespan seems to be mediated by “attenuation of age-associated increases in oxidative stress” FULL ARTICLE

Can’t wait to read about them trying this on humans. Could we live to be 150? 180? I think that would be cool. Still would be a long ways from 969 but it’s a start. Personally, I think they will keep on discovering things and may in time discover the “Methuselah Secret.”

To the New York Times and everyone interested in truth:

The recent editorial by James McWilliams titled THE MYTH OF SUSTAINABLE MEAT contains enough factual errors and skewed assumptions to fill a book and normally I would dismiss this out of hand as too much nonsense to merit a response. But since it specifically mentioned Polyface, a rebuttal is appropriate. For a more comprehensive rebuttal, read the book FOLKS, THIS AIN’T NORMAL.

Let’s go point by point. First, that grass grazing cows emit more methane than grain-fed. This is factually false. Actually, the amount of methane emitted by fermentation is the same whether it occurs in the cow or outside. Whether the feed is eaten by an herbivore or left to rot on its own, the methane generated is identical. Wetlands emit some 95 percent of all methane in the world; herbivores are insignificant enough to not even merit consideration. Anyone who really wants to stop methane needs to start draining wetlands. Quick, or we’ll all perish. I assume he’s figuring that since it takes longer to grow a beef on grass than on grain, the difference in time adds days to the emissions. But grain production carries a host of maladies far worse than methane. This is simply cherry-picking one negative out of many positives to smear the foundation of how soil builds: herbivore pruning, perennial disturbance-rest cycles, solar-grown biomass, and decomposition. This is like demonizing marriage because a good one will include some arguments.

As for his notion that it takes too much land to grass-finish, his figures of 10 acres per animal are assuming the current normal mismanagement of pastures. At Polyface, we call it neanderthal management because most livestock farmers have not yet joined the 20th century with electric fencing, ponds, piped water, and modern scientific aerobic composting (only as old as chemical fertilization). Hence, while his figures comparing the relative production of grain to grass may sound compelling, they are like comparing the learning opportunities under a terrible teacher versus a magnificent teacher. Many farmers, in many different climates, are now using space-age technology, bio-mimicry, and close management to get exponential increases in forage production. The rain forest, by the way, is not being cut to graze cattle. It’s being cut to grow transgenic corn and soybeans. North America had twice as many herbivores 500 years ago than it does today due to the pulsing of the predator-prey-pruning cycle on perennial prairie polycultures. And that was without any corn or soybeans at all.

Apparently if you lie often and big enough, some people will believe it: pastured chicken has a 20 percent greater impact on global warming? Says who? The truth is that those industrial chicken houses are not stand-alone structures. They require square miles of grain to be carted into them, and square miles of land to handle the manure. Of course, many times that land is not enough. To industrial farmers’ relief, more often than not a hurricane comes along just in time to flush the toilet, kill the fish, and send pathogens into the ocean. That’s a nice way to reduce the alleged footprint, but it’s devilish sleight of hand with the data to assume that ecological toxicity compensates for the true land base needed to sustain a factory farm.

While it’s true that at Polyface our omnivores (poultry and pigs) do eat local GMO (genetically modified organism) free grain in addition to the forage, the land base required to feed and metabolize the manure is no different than that needed to sustain the same animals in a confinement setting. Even if they ate zero pasturage, the land is the same. The only difference is our animals get sunshine, exercise, fresh pasture salad bars, fresh air, and a respectful life. Chickens walking on pasture certainly do not have any more leg sprains than those walking in a confinement facility. To suggest otherwise, as McWilliams does, is sheer nonsense. Walking is walking–and it’s generally considered to be a healthy practice, unless you’re a tyrant.

Interestingly, in a lone concession to compassion, McWilliams decries ranging hogs with rings in their noses to keep them from rooting, lamenting that this is “one of their most basic instincts.” Notice that he does not reconcile this moral imperative with his love affair toward confinement hog factories. Nothing much to use their noses for in there. For the record, Polyface never rings hog noses, and in the few cases where we’ve purchased hogs with rings, we take them out. We want them to fully express their pigness. By moving them frequently using modern electric fencing, polyethylene water piping, high tech float valves, and scientifically designed feed dispensers, we do not create nor suffer the problems encountered by earlier large-scale outdoor hog operations a hundred years ago. McWilliams has apparently never had the privilege of visiting a first-rate modern highly managed pastured hog operation. He thinks we’re all stuck in the early 1900s, and that’s a shame because he’d discover the answers to his concerns are already here. I wonder where his paycheck comes from?

Then McWilliams moves on to the argument that economic realities would kick in if pastured livestock became normal, driving farmers to scale up and end up right where we are today. What a clever ploy: justify the horrible by eliminating the alternatives. At Polyface, we certainly do not discourage scaling up–we actually encourage it. We think more pasture-based farms should scale up. Between the current abysmal state of mismanagement, however, and efficient operations, is an astronomical opportunity to enjoy economic AND ecological advantages. McWilliams is basing his data and assumptions on the poorest, the average or below. If you want to demonize something, always pick the lowest performers. But if you compare the best the industry has to offer with the best the pasture-based systems have to offer, the factory farms don’t have a prayer. Using portable infrastructure, tight management, and techno-glitzy tools, farmers running pastured hog operations practically eliminate capitalization costs and vet bills.

Finally, McWilliams moves to the knock-out punch in his discussion of nutrient cycling, charging specifically that Polyface is a charade because it depends on grain from industrial farms to maintain soil fertility. First of all, at Polyface we do not assume that all nutrient movement is anti-environmental. In fact, one of the biggest reasons for animals in nature is to move nutrients uphill, against the natural gravitational flow from high ground to low ground. This is why low lands and valleys are fertile and the uplands are less so. Animals are the only mechanism nature has to defy this natural downward flow. Fortunately, predators make the prey animals want to lounge on high ground (where they can see their enemies), which insures that manure will concentrate on high look-out spots rather than in the valleys. Perhaps this is why no ecosystem exists that is devoid of animals. The fact is that nutrient movement is inherently nature-healing.

BUT, it doesn’t move very far. And herein lies the difference between grain used at Polyface and that used by the industry: we care where ours comes from. It’s not just a commodity. It has an origin and an ending, start to finish, farmer to eater. The closer we can connect the carbon cycles, the more environmentally normal we will become.

Secondly, herbivores are the exception to the entire negative nutrient flow argument because by pruning back the forage to restart the rapid biomass accumulation photsynthetic engine, the net carbon flow compensates for anything lost through harvest. Herbivores do not require tillage or annuals and that is why all historically deep soils have been created by them, not by omnivores. It’s fascinating that McWilliams wants to demonize pasture-based livestock for not closing all the nutrient loops, but has no problem, apparently, with the horrendous nutrient toxicity like dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico the size of New Jersey created by chemical fertilizer run off to grow grain so that the life of a beef could be shortened. Unbelievable. In addition, this is one reason Polyface continues to fight for relaxing food safety regulations to allow on-farm slaughtering, precisely so we can indeed keep all these nutrients on the farm and not send them the rendering plants. If the greenies who don’t want historically normal farm activities like slaughter to occur on rural acreage could understand how devastating these government regulations actually are to the environmental economy, perhaps McWilliams wouldn’t have this bullet in his arsenal. And yes, human waste should be put back on the land as well, to help close the loop.

Third, at Polyface, we struggle upstream. Historically, omnivores were salvage operations. Hogs ate spoiled milk, whey, acorns, chestnuts, spoiled fruit and a host of other farmstead products. Ditto for chickens, who dined on kitchen scraps and garden refuse. That today 50 percent of all the human edible food produced in the world goes into landfills or greenie-endorsed composting operations rather than through omnivores is both ecologically and morally reprehensible. At Polyface, we’ve tried for many, many years to get kitchen scraps back from restaurants to feed our poultry, but the logistics are a nightmare. The fact is that in America we have created a segregated food and farming system. In the perfect world, Polyface would not sell eggs. Instead, every kitchen, both domestic and commercial, would have enough chickens proximate to handle all the scraps. This would eliminate the entire egg industry and current heavy grain feeding paradigm. At Polyface, we only purport to be doing the best we can do as we struggle through a deviant, historically abnormal food and farming system. We didn’t create what is and we may not solve it perfectly. But we’re sure a lot farther toward real solutions than McWilliams can imagine. And if society would move where we want to go, and the government regulators would let us move where we need to go, and the industry would not try to criminalize us as we try to go there, we’ll all be a whole lot better off and the earthworms will dance.

Joel Salatin

Polyface Farm

[Following is my original rebuttal posted April 14, 2012]

Wow.  James McWilliams of the New York Times is defending industrial meat industry.  Link here. I’m surprised but I guess I shouldn’t be.  OK, let’s see what his points are …

1)  ”Grass-grazing cows emit considerably more methane than grain-fed cows.” ANSWER: Perhaps, but according to researchers at the University of Sydney, healthy soil bacteria absorb far more methane than cows produce.  ”Typical methane production by beef cattle is round about 60 kilograms of methane per year, and some of the high country soils are taking more than that out of the atmosphere every day, so one hectare is taking out, or oxidising more methane than a cow produces in a year” says Professor Mark Adams. http://www.abc.net.au/rural/nt/content/200908/s2649444.htm 

2) “Pastured organic chickens have a 20 percent greater impact on global warming.” ANSWER: No studies cited.  But presumably he’s talking about methane for the same reason given for cows.  Again, see the study cited above.  Next.

3) “If we raised all the cows in the United States on grass (all 100 million of them), cattle would require (using the figure of 10 acres per cow) almost half the country’s land (and this figure excludes space needed for pastured chicken and pigs).” ANSWER:  Mr. McWilliams isn’t telling the whole story here.  First, ALL cows whether finished on grain or grass spend their first 9-12 months on grass anyway which takes about 4 acres per cow on average in Missouri.   Secondly, if you didn’t grain finish cows, you would free up tons of acreage for grass which is currently growing corn and soybeans.  Thirdly, the leaders in grass fed beef production are reporting much less than 4 acres per cow.  For instance Joel Salatin reports less than 1 acre per cow.  Add to this that high density rotational grazing with proper resting of pastures stimulates pasture growth, builds topsoil through root shedding and litter stomping and sequesters carbon.  There is simply not a land problem with grass fed beef.

4) “A tract of land just larger than France has been carved out of the Brazilian rain forest and turned over to grazing cattle. Nothing about this is sustainable.”  ANSWER:  Why, Mr McWilliams?  You cannot just assert things.  The truth is that “it depends on how the cattle are managed.”  If managed properly such as Allan Savory’s Holistic Planned Grazing Method, then it is very sustainable.  Otherwise not.

5) “Advocates of small-scale, nonindustrial alternatives say their choice is at least more natural. Again, this is a dubious claim. Many farmers who raise chickens on pasture use industrial breeds that have been bred to do one thing well: fatten quickly in confinement. As a result, they can suffer painful leg injuries after several weeks of living a “natural” life pecking around a large pasture. Free-range pigs are routinely affixed with nose rings to prevent them from rooting, which is one of their most basic instincts. In essence, what we see as natural doesn’t necessarily conform to what is natural from the animals’ perspectives.”  ANSWER: No, it is not a dubious claim.  Allowing chickens – whatever the breed – to frolic in grass chasing grasshoppers and pecking through cow pies is FAR more natural (and fun to chickens!) than confining them in a concentration camp like Tyson does.  Come on.  Get real.  As for pig nose rings, I don’t know … I don’t think that natural food leaders like Joel Salatin do this kind of thing.

6) “The economics of alternative animal systems are similarly problematic. Subsidies notwithstanding, the unfortunate reality of commodifying animals is that confinement pays. If the production of meat and dairy was somehow decentralized into small free-range operations, common economic sense suggests that it wouldn’t last. These businesses — no matter how virtuous in intention — would gradually seek a larger market share, cutting corners, increasing stocking density and aiming to fatten animals faster than competitors could. Barring the strictest regulations, it wouldn’t take long for production systems to scale back up to where they started.”  ANSWER: Confinement pays?  Who?  Tyson?  IBP?  The heart surgeons benefitting financially from all the heart attacks in people eating unnatural meats?  It certainly doesn’t pay the farmer well who grows them.  And what is the basis for this prediction about how the market would evolve?  I don’t get that at all.

7) “But rotational grazing works better in theory than in practice. Consider Joel Salatin, the guru of nutrient cycling, who employs chickens to enrich his cows’ grazing lands with nutrients. His plan appears to be impressively eco-correct, until we learn that he feeds his chickens with tens of thousands of pounds a year of imported corn and soy feed. This common practice is an economic necessity. Still, if a farmer isn’t growing his own feed, the nutrients going into the soil have been purloined from another, most likely industrial, farm, thereby undermining the benefits of nutrient cycling.”  ANSWER: Chickens are not a required part of the nutrient cycling.  They are just a profitable add on for Joel.  Many mob grazers like Joel – Greg Judy for example – do not run chickens behind cows and do not even have to have a mineral block after their pastures have been mob grazed for several years.

8) “Finally, there is no avoiding the fact that the nutrient cycle is interrupted every time a farmer steps in and slaughters a perfectly healthy manure-generating animal, something that is done before animals live a quarter of their natural lives. When consumers break the nutrient cycle to eat animals, nutrients leave the system of rotationally grazed plots of land (though of course this happens with plant-based systems as well). They land in sewer systems and septic tanks (in the form of human waste) and in landfills and rendering plants (in the form of animal carcasses).”  ANSWER:  Finally, a point I agree with.  I am against (and so is Joel) sewers and septic systems and land fills.  All that waste is valuable and should be recycled to pastures.  And it could be with a little planning and some attitude changes.  Then we would have complete nutrient cycling.  But the problem of septics and sewers and landfills is a problem for ALL animal products, not just pasture raised ones.  Not sure why Mr Mc Williams thinks this is only a problem for pasture raised animals.

9) “Farmers could avoid this waste by exploiting animals only for their manure, allowing them to live out the entirety of their lives on the farm, all the while doing their own breeding and growing of feed. But they’d better have a trust fund. Opponents of industrialized agriculture have been declaring for over a decade that how humans produce animal products is one of the most important environmental questions we face. We need a bolder declaration. After all, it’s not how we produce animal products that ultimately matters. It’s whether we produce them at all.”  ANSWER:  If we stop producing animals completely, then we will accelerate the extinction of the human race significantly.  Mr Mc Williams needs to read my article  … http://truthmatters.info/allan-savory-the-only-viable-human-plan-for-saving-the-planet/ … Counterintuitive as it may seem, Holistic Managed Grazing of herbivores on perennial grasses is the only viable means for reversing desertification and thus feeding our grandchildren and great grandchildren in the future.

Truly, bacteria are the smartest cell biologists on the planet because they control events in cells of higher organisms in a way that mere human scientists can only dream of imitating.

And I love the final question he poses …

(II) How did the bacteria come to be such sophisticated cell biologists and evolve the capacity to produce molecules that subvert the cell control regimes of higher organisms to their own (i.e. the bacteria’s) benefit? To my mind, this is a far deeper and, ultimately, far more rewarding question to pose. 

Let us conclude this blog in the head-scratching mode, which is the right place for scientists to be. I am in the habit of telling students, “If you’re not confused, you’re not doing science” — by which I mean: if we already know the answer, there is nothing new to learn from asking the question. Even when we think we know the answer, as in the case of bacteria evolving antibiotic resistance, nature may well have another solution we never considered. It is salutary to remember that this last point proves more often to be the rule than the exception. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-a-shapiro/bacterial-antibiotic-resistance_b_1192507.html

I have an answer for Dr. Shapiro … “In the beginning God created … ” But Dr. Shapiro does not seem quite ready to embrace that answer although he seems closer than some. Way back in 1997 he wrote …

The point of this discussion is that our current knowledge of genetic change is fundamentally at variance with neo-Darwinist postulates. http://shapiro.bsd.uchicago.edu/Shapiro.1997.BostonReview1997.ThirdWay.pdf

Yes, Dr. Shapiro, it is indeed. I would highly recommend Shapiro’s “Third Way” paper to anyone who likes discussing science and the Bible with people. The Bible is the accurate, infallible Word of the Creator to Mankind … but many Christians today have trouble answering tough questions. Hope this helps!

So … strange as it sounds … the most “responsible citizen” thing you can do might just be … buying grass fed beef / dairy products from your local rancher!   Maybe more important than voting for president.

I didn’t come up with this idea on my own, by the way.  I got it from Joel Salatin, my hero for the last 4 years.  Joel first pointed out the idea that eating grass fed beef is a “responsible world citizen” thing to do in his book “Salad Bar Beef.”  Here’s how it works.  When you buy grass fed beef, two things happen.  First, you are helping to reverse land degradation – and without productive farmland, we’ve got no country at all.  As Joel Salatin puts it, you are helping to “heal the land” and when the land gets healed, lots of other things get healed too — people, relationships, communities and government.  Secondly, you are putting multinational corporations like Monsanto on a “diet” by reducing the amount of GMO corn used to feed cattle.  I am of the opinion that the more we reduce the power and influence of multi-national corporations, the more freedom we will have in this country.  I think “bigness” is bad when it comes to government, corporations and some people say … churches.

Talking about visiting your local rancher to buy grass fed beef and dairy products makes me think … another way to reduce the size of government … again, a more effective way than voting for president in my opinion is …

STARVE THE BEAST.

“The Beast” in this context being the Federal Government, Monsanto, Tyson, and other big multinational corporations (yes, I view the federal government as a big multinational corporation). Don’t like Monsanto? Then starve it. Don’t buy anything made directly or indirectly by Monsanto. Corn and soybeans mainly. If everyone stopped buying corn fed beef (Monsanto corn) and factory chicken it would put Monsanto on a severe diet … ha! Think the federal government is too big? Again, starve it. Or to be a little kinder, put it on a strict diet. How? Well, by Working Toward Self Sufficiency. Think about it.  Becoming more self sufficient lowers your Income Requirement, thereby lowering your Income Tax which in turn puts government on a “diet.” Additionally, Self Sufficiency reduces your need to buy from multi-national corporations like Walmart, thus lowering THEIR income and hence their income tax, again putting government on a “diet.” See how that works?

Anyway … those are my latest and greatest ideas for fixing the country … BUY LOCAL … BUY GRASS FED BEEF and … STARVE THE BEAST!

And yes, I do really believe that the kinds of things I’m talking about here have more power to bring renewal and revival to this country than voting for president does.  Not saying you shouldn’t vote.  Not saying you shouldn’t be involved in politics.  Just saying that there are other things I believe you can do which will have a greater impact.

So there … opinions are like noses … everyone has one … and now you have mine!

1) Animals in the wild do not get vaccinations of any kind and they do just fine.
2) Joel Salatin, quite possibly the most successful farmer in America right now by a number of measures, does not vaccinate ANY of his animals for anything (and gives no antibiotics) and his animals do just fine.
3) Antoine Bechamp, a rival of Louis Pasteur, taught in the 19th century that microbes are not intrinsically pathogenic. They become pathogenic because of unnatural “terrain” – the environment in the body because of an unnatural diet, stress, etc. I was introduced to Bechamp by Joel Salatin, who uses his principles to keep his animals healthy with no medication.
4) Now over 100 years later, mainstream science is finally starting to discover what Bechamp proposed way back then. For example, it has recently been found that the pathogenicity of E. Coli may depend on it’s shape, which in turn is controlled by several environmental factors (as Bechamp pointed out long ago)

Bacterial morphology is affected by a combination of selective pressures – access to nutrients, cell division, attachment/dispersal, predation and motility (among others).
…

Masters of change

Legionella pneumophila, a causative agent of Legionnaires’ disease, can take on different shapes (here singular, paired and filamentous in red) © CDC
We tend to think of bacteria as having fixed morphologies. We even name them after their shape (e.g. Streptococcus). But environments aren’t static, and neither is bacterial shape. Some bacteria – including a number of human pathogens – change their form dramatically as the go through different development pathways. For example at least eight different morphological forms are adopted by Legionella pneumophila during its developmental cycle. Helicobacter pylori is usually identified as short spiral rods but can appear as corkscrews (filaments) in biopsy specimens. And an impressive study of uropathogenic Escherichia coli identified four distinct morphological forms as the bacteria infected bladder epithelial cells: nonmotile rods, cocci, motile rods and filaments.

Does shape change have anything to do with pathogenesis? For fungi we know it does. Most pathogenic fungi are dimorphic, with yeast and hyphal (filamentous) stages, and only one form is pathogenic. The study of bacterial morphology and virulence is still in its infancy, but at least for E. coli shape change seems to play a central role during infection. LINK HERE

5) Alfred Russel Wallace, a scientist and contemporary of Darwin spoke out strongly against vaccinations, including those for smallpox and whooping cough, when they were first introduced. See his book Wonderful Century HERE Chapter 18 entitled, “Vaccinations: A Delusion, their Penal Enforcement a Crime.” Highly recommended reading.
6) Florence Nightengale, the most famous nurse of all time, said this

Diseases are not individuals arranged in classes, like cats and dogs, but conditions, growing out of one another. Is it not living in a continual mistake to look upon diseases as we do now, as separate entities, which must exist, like cats and dogs, instead of looking upon them as conditions, like a dirty and a clean condition, and just as much under our control; or rather as the reactions of kindly nature, against the conditions in which we have placed ourselves? I was brought up to believe that smallpox, for instance, was a thing of which there was once a first specimen in the world, which went on propagating itself, in a perpetual chain of descent, just as there was a first dog, (or first pair of dogs) and that smallpox would not begin itself, any more than a new dog would begin without there having been a parent dog. Since then I have seen with my own eyes and smelled with my own nose smallpox growing up in first specimens, either in closed rooms or in overcrowded wards, where it could not by any possibility have been ‘caught’, but must have begun. I have seen diseases begin, grow up, and turn into one another. Now, dogs do not turn into cats. I have seen, for instance, with a little overcrowding, continued fever grow up; and with a little more, typhoid fever; and with a little more, typhus, and all in the same ward or hut. Would it not be far better, truer, and more practical, if we looked upon disease in this light (for diseases, as all experience shows, are adjectives, not noun-substantives):

- True nursing ignores infection, except to prevent it. Cleanliness and fresh air from open windows, with unremitting attention to the patient, are the only defense a true nurse either asks or needs.

- Wise and humane management of the patient is the best safeguard against infection. The greater part of nursing consists of preserving cleanliness.

- The specific disease doctrine is the grand refuge of weak, uncultured, unstable minds, such as now rule in the medical profession. There are no specific diseases; there are only specific disease conditions.”

Nightingale, Florence, Notes on Nursing, 1st ed., 1860, p. 32, quoted in “Bechamp or Pasteur” by Hume.

7) Joel Salatin wrote the following …

“The point is that if I, as a beef producer, don’t feed grain and silage to my animals, even if your steak has some E. coli on it, you won’t get sick. For decades on our farm we’ve treated ourselves to ice cream bars after processing chicken. We’ve never even washed our hands. Guts to ice cream. Yum. We’ve never even gotten sick.” Folks, This Ain’t Normal (2011), p. 300

In other words, Joel is saying (and demonstrating with his personal practice) that E. Coli is not harmful if the “terrain” is natural. Classic Bechamp.

8) What about viruses?  Joel Fuhrman, MD, top nutritional advisor to the huge health food store chain, Whole Foods, Inc. said

“It’s time for all of us to reconsider the notion that viruses are the sole or even primary cause of serious viral-associated illnesses. Most often the exposure to and presence of a virus, and its association with the disease and its complications, is not the only cause and not even the main cause that initiates an illness. Certainly, exposure to the virus and its multiplication within our body is at the core of viral infections. However, though it is not generally recognized, the virus adapts itself to the host (our body) and becomes dangerous and multiplies as a result of the host’s disease promoting environment, created by nutritional inadequacy. In most cases, a virus, when exposed to a healthy, well-noursihed body, would remain harmless.”–Dr. Joel Fuhrman in “Super Immunity”, 2011, p. 29

So … my studied opinion is that the way to avoid having your children get Whooping Cough (or any other sickness, viral or bacterial) is to take a hard look at your children’s diet. Greatly reduce the Cokes, candy, Twinkies, donuts, chips, fries, McDonalds hamburgers and other junk food and start feeding them mostly NATURAL FOODS. Simple concept. Hard to do. It will really require a big commitment to an entirely different mindset, but if you work at it, you can do it. AND your kids will thank you someday.

… statistically speaking hospitals are just about the most dangerous places to be in the United States. Three times as many people die every year due to medical errors in hospitals as die on our highways — 100,000 deaths compared to 34,000. The Journal of the American Medical Association reports that nearly 100,000 people die annually in hospitals from medical errors. Of this group, 80,000 die from hospital acquired infections, many of which can be prevented. Given the above number of admissions that means that 1 out of every 370 people admitted to a hospital dies due to medical errors. So hospitals are very dangerous places.

It would take about 200 747 airplanes to crash annually to equal 100,000 preventable deaths. Imagine the American outcry if one 747 crashed every day for 200 consecutive days in the U.S. The airlines would stand before the nation and the world in disgrace. Currently in our non-transparent health care delivery system, Americans have no way of knowing which hospitals are the most dangerous. We simply take uninformed chances with our lives at stake. LINK HERE

And people think I’M the kooky one for taking my cue from Weston Price and trying to avoid getting sick (or going to the dentist) by changing my diet. So far, it’s working … I haven’t been to the doctor OR dentist in over a year and I don’t plan on going ever again if I can help it. My “No Doctor / no Dentist” diet is simple. Eat natural unprocessed foods. That is, grass fed beef and grass fed raw milk, pastured poultry and eggs, organically grown fruits and vegetables, deep sea (non-polluted) seafood and so on. This is my personal answer to Obamacare.  Yes, yes, I know … we need hospitals for some things – like surgery and … uh … um … what else?  Well anyway, surgery.  But then we have to ask, why do people need surgery?  Well … at THIS hospital, they list the following …

Most Common Surgeries Performed
The most common surgeries performed at St. Cloud Hospital and facilitated through the Center for Surgical Care are:

Inpatient

Laminectomies (for herniated discs and other conditions related to the spinal cord)
Total joint replacements (knee, hip, etc.)
Cardiovascular procedures
Hysterectomies
Cervical disc procedures
Appendectomies
Transuretheral prostate surgery
Radical prostatectomies

… most of which, I believe, can be prevented by proper nutrition / lifestyle. But what do I know? I’m a kooky radical.