Good thing no one’s saying that, then. Appeals to extreme cases are usually logically unsound, and certainly a dead waste of time.
This is a very good point, I think. Billions of years of evolution have made discoveries that can’t be stumbled on in a laboratory so easily.
This became clear to me just by observing my wife and her almost magical garden full of traditional herbal cures. 
Wikipedia and Google were generally aware of their medicinal uses, although they weren’t localized into specific chemicals. And these were all widely known species — not the rare herbs used by just a few tribes in the middle of the Amazon jungle.
I made one pharmacological discovery myself! Tea made from the leaves of the star gooseberry tree is contradicted for co-use with nitrates, like nitroglycerine sublinguals (similar to the contraindication with sildenafil). After I accidentally discovered this myself, Google led me to some hints, but nothing explicit.
Uh…no one born in the mid-70s or later got the smallpox vaccine. I’m 40 and they stopped administering it five years before I was born. If eliminating smallpox was going to cause autism, wouldn’t the autism rate spike have shown up decades earlier in the US when the last known outbreak was in the late 1940s?
Nice backpedal.
Speaking of nice backpedals, former Doper Alex Pyron says “oopsie.”
How is murder part of nature?
Scientific American recently had an article on the controversy over conservation efforts geared towards saving the American Burying Beetle. Saving it is costing a fortune in opportunity cost, and a lot of people wonder if it’s really worth it. They point out that the beetle is now extinct in most of its historical range, and yet the sky hasn’t fallen there. In fact some wonder if the beetle’s decline is due to the extinction of the passenger pigeon, which may have once been the primary food source for the beetles’ larvae, and that therefore the ecological cost of losing the beetle may be minimal. The problem is that no one want’s to step forward and explicitly adopt a policy of “this isn’t worth saving”, since no one knows what Pandora’s box that might open.
Well, they give the USA a reason to get along with China, so maybe that’s good for peace.
Male mountain lions, for example, will kill the kittens of one they have mated with so that the female will go back into heat. Murder in order to get laid. I think humans have done that. And otters have been known to rape baby seals to death.
We are part of nature. Nature constructed us. Every fucking thing we do or make is no less natural than a spiderweb or beaver dam. And nature, well, she is amoral and kind of an asshole.
I’m surprised no one has asked, but what was his username?