30 Things Science Hasn’t Proven Yet But Folks In This Online Group Have A Hunch Are True Anyway

Neurodiversities are an expression of social evolution and by trying to get neurodivergent people to be "normal" we're shooting ourselves in the foot.

If someone is interested, I can explain further, but I think I came into the post way too late.

Millions years ago, organisms went from unicellular to multicellular by having cells join and work together spliting tasks. Eventually the system was so complex that today's human's neurons, for example, can't feed themselves. They have to depend on other cells to help them do basic tasks. Your body is so complex that if some cells stop doing their work, the whole system collapses and you die.

So, if you look at society now, we work like this. Some people farm food, others transmit information, others work as society's immune system, and that have allowed us to grow and turn more complex. Basically, evolve. Society is now working as a multicellular organism because we have split tasks.

Now, neurodiverse people are notorious for not being able to do some very basic things, but they excel at others. Forcing them to act "normal" and do tasks they can't and someone else could do for them is wasting their specific potential. Hawkings wasn't neurodiverse, but I like to use his disability as an example: thanks to all the people that worked hard to keep him alive and allowed him the technology to communicate, we got to benefit from his incredible mind. If we had judged him as a burden to society because he couldn't tie his own shoes, we would have lost all his knowledge.

By forcing neurodiverse or disable people to perform normality (mask) instead of giving them help to thrieve as they are, society is wasting their potential and slowing our social evolution. Diversity is a necessity for our evolution.

I agree with Gordon Burghardt that pretty much 99% of all animals are sentient, and our testing for sentience is wrong.

Depression, just like cancer, is not a single disease.

Treating students more like adults/people will cause them to begin to develop into adults more quickly.

A lot of teachers that I've worked with/talked to treat students like a subclass of humans who are expected to give respect but not receive it. I treat my students like collegues and I end up getting a lot more output and learning from them.

I have collegues who shame them when they don't do what they think is right. When my students act like stupid kids I tell them, "Of course you did that. You're kids. Kids act like stupid kids." and usually after those conversations they start to act more like adults. I think it's because instead of shaming their behavior, I justify their behavior as a maturity and show them that if they grow in maturity they'll be more deserving of the benefits of maturity.

Antibiotic resistant organisms are going to be a massive problem in the coming decades

I’m not sure if this really fits but, intergenerational trauma.

We know that physical and psychological stress in one generation (whether it be war, rape, genocide, alcoholism, drug use, growing up in the system, I could go on forever) can “pass on” to the next generation. But, we don’t really know how. Heritable epigenomic changes has been the first proposal.

But no one has done this *specific* research. My supervisor demonstrated a change in mitochondrial DNA copy number, resulting in epigenomic changes in regions of the genome associated with disease. Epigenomic changes mean that the expression of the underlying genes can be altered. This can result in disease.

Usually as a result of intergenerational trauma, people suffer more health repurcussions, and no one could really explain why. I want to explain why on the genetic level. I think I’m on the right path and I’m excited!

Babies start crawling earlier when they have pets

There probably is a food addiction, specifically towards food rich in sugars and fats, but it's still incredibly difficult to prove it, decipher the specific mechanisms, decipher it from eating disorders and establish if it's an addiction to food, an addiction to eating

As a former math and physics major, I took meticulous notes of my son’s epileptic seizures. At one point, I added barometric readings and current weather data to standard information of date, seizure type, and seizure length in seconds. I’m convinced that low pressure weather systems increased the frequency and intensity of his epileptic seizures. During a trip to North Carolina, the area had an unusually high, stable high pressure system. He didn’t have any seizures during our time there.

My theory is that high or low pressure weather systems microscopically change the flow of fluids in the brain or other neurologically sensitive areas of the body such as the micro biome of the gut.

Microbiologist — our only hope in being able to fight of total antibiotic resistance is to develop bacteriophages (viruses that eat/destroy bacteria) that we can use and prescribe in place of existing antibiotics

Gut bacteria has evolved to influence our behaviour, either directly or indirectly, to crave foods that benefit it. That's why it's hard to "come off" certain foods.

Anecdotally, it's hard to give up high sugar, high fat foods, yet if you go for long enough without them, your desire for them drops massively. I believe it's because the gut flora that likes that food dies off and no longer influences your behaviour.

It's very, very hard to prove, but it seems self evident that if bacteria even had the slightest opportunity to evolve a means to do this, it would almost be a certainty.

Environmental Geologist - That’s there’s a huge amount of environmental contamination (soil, water, air) in residential areas, and rapid development is only making the problem worse. Most people in populated areas are likely very very close to known sites with dangerous contamination, and the number of unknown sites dwarfs what’s been addressed.

On top of that in the USA low income housing projects don’t need to meet as stringent environmental regulations, so a site that fails for normal residential use might still qualify for low income housing.

That the language we speak (our native language) affects us from our culture to how we perceive the world to how we make decisions and process information and to possibly bring one of or the factor that allows us to have and enjoy this higher level of consciousness. It even effected how our bodies form (larynx shaped differently than in other primates, while it makes us more susceptible to choking, it allows us to make the complex sounds needed in languages). However, there haven’t been many studies on these topics, because, for example, the topic of the origin of language (and other scientific language topics on how it has affected us) was banned by the leading scientific institutions in the 1600s and 1700s, and was considered taboo because, for example, the topic of the origin and evolution of language was used in arguments on how the Earth was older than the Bible made it out to be. It was considered taboo for a long time, and as late as the 1970s these topics were just not to be discussed or researched. It was only in the 2000s that the first major studies started to be carried out, and today, because of this, it is still a relatively unexplored area, though this is starting to change.

Cell biologist: we spend way too much money on cancer research and not enough on basic research and have for decades.

Despite that it's finally working and the wave of immuno oncology drugs that are in clinical testing now will significantly reduce deaths from cancer.

We could have had this 30 years ago if we had spent a ton on basic research and not convinced ourselves we were about to beat cancer in the 70's.

We might be fooling ourselves again, I've not been working on cancer directly for too long. Previously though it seemed like everyone was convinced we were about to cure cancer then it fizzled. This time it seems like few people expect cancer to be cured despite real breakthroughs.

The oceans are incredibly, catastrophically, incomprehensibly f****d. We’ve been using the oceans at a high level for centuries, and our awareness of the impact on the oceans has come far too late. We just don’t have enough data from before industrialization to understand what we’ve done.

edit: a clarification: the total biomass in the oceans is decreased significantly. Its like if we had been hunting every animal in every forest for 1000 years instead of ranching cows and stuff, started doing so industrially 100 years ago, and started worrying about the impact 50 years ago.

Plants might be sentient, a bit.

[The Crespi-Badcock Hypothesis] that autism and schizophrenia are exactly opposite neurological divergences, which develop epigenetically in the womb in response to entirely opposite environmental stressors — a world of excess and a world of scarcity, respectively — and therefore are never comorbid in the same individual.

My extrapolation of Crespi-Badcock is that autism spectrum disorder is really a first world problem in the truest sense. It is rapidly increasing in the developed world, but not the developing world, because compared to the environment in which humans evolved, today's first world embryos receive a stream of resources and conditions indicating it will want for nothing. If the developing human does not anticipate needing the usually large amount of brain resources devoted to reading other people in order to survive, this frees up these resources for understanding systems. Essentially, a person on the autism spectrum is a person whose developing brain received the consistent message that they can make it on their own without relying on many other people, and that their brainpower is better devoted to understanding lots of different and new systems to great detail, so that they *can* make it on their own without relying on many other people.

Schizophrenia, meanwhile, is largely a disease of the developing world, and of urban slums worldwide. The brain that's able to become schizophrenic, meanwhile, receives a consistent message during development that it's entering a world of great scarcity and insecurity, and being attuned to other people and their needs and what they communicate will be absolutely indispensable to their survival. The kickstarting event for the first psychotic break is usually some sort of forceful rejection or other form of psychologically traumatic social interaction, in the late teens or early 20s for men, and 30s for women.

Autistic patients miss messages from other people that are indeed there. Schizophrenic patients see messages from other people that aren't actually there. Hyposensitivity and hypersensitivity to social cues, respectively.

Source: I am an independent general practice physician with a strong interest in psychiatry / behavioral health, who is himself on the autism spectrum, and attracts largely patients who are on the autism spectrum.

That chronic fatigue syndrome is caused by a bacterial phage which attacks the mitochondria

There’s gotta be a way to make pavement more frost resistant. Civil engineering background. I always thought it was the subsoil since they check the density of the rest of the layers that make up the pavement. I live in pothole infested State.

As an early career ecologist I suspect that the results of many experiments in my field would not stand up to replication. There's a huge bias toward "positive results" - those which support your hypothesis - and you are extremely disincentivized from research that is not seen as novel. This is doubly true for those of us without tenure yet, because we need to be seen as at the cutting edge of our field to get a job in the first place.

Meta-analyses help separate the signal from the noise a bit, but I suspect there's still a field-wide confirmation bias