RangerJoe
Posts: 13450
Joined: 11/16/2015 From: My Mother, although my Father had some small part. Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: witpqs quote:
ORIGINAL: Lokasenna quote:
ORIGINAL: JohnDillworth quote:
Yes, that is one hypothesis. Well gravity is still a theory too but but most modern scholarship points firmly at Kansas, and then it jumped to Fort Riley, and spread through other over crowded Army bases, boarded a ship with the troops and landed in Breast France, infected thousands there, went quite in the summer, mutated (they have a solid genetic chain of evidence, much of it cited in the footnotes of the article you posted including the accepted best book on the subject and the meticulously referenced and researched The Great Influenza by John Barry), came back in a more deadly, mutated strain, brought 4 great armies to their knees, halted the 1918 German offensive, came back across the Atlantic and killed tens of thousands in Army bases and millions in cities and traveled around the world, again, killing millions more. It's not hard to trace these things over time. Heck, scholars have used written records to track the progress of great plagues since Roman times. Just want to note that "theory" in science is not the same as "theory" in colloquial language. In science, it means a model that is proven and encompasses all the evidence and principles therein. In conversation, it means simply a hypothesis. I wasn't aware of the research you mention - I'll have to dig into that sometime... sometime. PS - Breast France sounds like a swell place. Isn't it more like "not falsified", "consistent with the evidence"? In other words, no examples which contradict the theory have been identified? I agree, it is still not proven as a fact but it is consistent with all observations.
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Seek peace but keep your gun handy. I'm not a complete idiot, some parts are missing! “Illegitemus non carborundum est (“Don’t let the bastards grind you down”).” ― Julia Child
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