View source for Bruce Lipton

Bruce Harold Lipton (născut în 1944) este un biolog american, cunoscut pentru ideile sale despre cum biologia este sub imperiul conștiinței (vezi: [[Mintea domină materia]]), mai precis, crede că genele și ADN-ul pot fi manipulate și programate prin intermediul convingerilor și credințelor oamenilor. Este autorul cărții „Biologia credinței” (2005).

== Noua biologie ==

Unul din cele mai populare clipuri cu el este „The New Biology: Where Mind and Matter Meet by Bruce Lipton Ph.D”

Lipton does seem to have a genuine desire to share his ideas with people. He doesn’t merely push a string of products at his audience in the manner that has become standard for New Age teachers. He comes across as a friendly, enthusiastic chap who I’m sure bears no ill will to anyone.

Lipton claims, seriously and scientifically, to have a cure for cancer. Lipton presents some reasonably complicated cell biology, and as far as it went, I think he did a fair job of explaining a couple of basic concepts. Unfortunately, '''these basic concepts do not support his central argument'''.

<blockquote>It’s your belief about the environment that adjusts your physiology. And your beliefs become most important because your beliefs are connected to your genes.

And the expression* that you have is related to what you have going on in your head. Think about it. Maybe think about a time when you were really sick and you said “Oh I can’t get up” and then somebody said “Look you gotta come to work right now, you gotta do something. You have to change your belief.”

What happened? You changed your belief, you got up, you got dressed and you did the job just fine, until you were able to go home and say “I think I can go home and be sick now again.”

And so the issue is this, that the point is the truth: perception selects genes, but perceptions may not always be right. And therefore perceptions by definition are called beliefs. And therefore when I put that back into the equation, you are not controlled by genes, you’re controlled by belief.</blockquote>

He is completely misusing the term gene expression. It doesn’t refer to your day to day feelings or activities. He talks about “expression” all the way through the lecture without ever telling the audience what it means.

I will focus on Lipton’s teachings about the nature of cells; about the role of DNA in both human and cell behavior; and finally about the nature and effects of perception, as defined by Lipton.
The first core concept that I will deal with, is the idea that each cell in the human body shares the same attributes (functions and organs/organelles) with the individual cells in our body.

=== The cell as a microcosm of the human body ===

Lipton's whole argument relies on making the reader draw a parallel between the body and a cell -- that you can understand how a cell works by making analogies with how a body works. He states:

<quoteblock>With all the magnificent machinery that we call the human body, there is no new function that's present in your human body that's not already present in every single cell. You have a digestive system, a respiratory system, etc, so does a cell.</quoteblock>

Then he pushes things even further: humans live in communities; and in biology,  multicellular organisms are sometimes described as "colonies of cells". There is a good biological basis for describing a human as a colony of cells, but there is no reason at all to believe that you can learn about cells from drawing analogies with human societies. But this is exactly where Lipton's reasoning takes him, when he goes on to deduce the cause of cancer:

<quoteblock>If a cell doesn't listen to the community's voice, then the cell is not part of the community. cancer cells have withdrawn from the community. They're still in there but they're not listening to the voice of the community. They're doing their own thing. '''Why would some cells get out of the community? And the answer is why are people homeless?''' Why are people out of work, or why are people out of work or why are people suffering? If their community is not supporting them at some point the cells recognize at some point "My God what do I want to be in this for?" So there's a point that cancer starts to recognize as a result of break down of the community.</quoteblock>

This is not a simplification to explain a carefully developed theory grounded in cell biology. This '''IS''' the theory. It's an assertion which has simply been presented as fact, and the entire proof relies on the listener accepting the analogy as proof.

=== The brain of the cell ===

He makes it look as if biologists have in fact been searching for an actual "brain of the cell", thus setting up a straw man argument. Science, he notes, is male dominated; men think with their testes, and that's why scientists concluded that the cell nucleus, full of genetic material like the testes, must be the "brain of the cell".

Having convinced the audience that scientists believe the nucleus is the brain of the cell, Lipton boldly sets out to demolish that straw man. He argues that this can't possibly be the case, because cells can live for months in a dish after they've had their nucleus taken out, but human bodies die without a brain. Therefore, scientists are wrong when they claim the nucleus is the brain of the cell.

Science doesn't, in fact, predict that all chemical reactions will cease as soon as the nucleus is removed. Lipton must have been snoozing when the role of the nucleus and DNA in cell division was being explained.

=== The primacy of DNA ===

Having failed to disprove a nonexistent theory, Lipton turns his attention to debunking an even more important non-existent theory: The "Primacy of DNA". Note that all the top items on Google for this search are a bunch of articles in New Age journals. This is how he describes it:

<blockquote>So our belief in the primacy of DNA says this. Who you are, what you are, is predetermined in the blueprint, the DNA. So you become a read-out of the DNA.</blockquote>

This also completely and utterly wrong. Biology has not reached any such conclusion, as can be seen by glancing at any field of biology at all.

=== You're controlled by your perceptions ===

Lipton thinks that the brain of the cell is the cell membrane, since it's through the membrane that the cell gets messages from the environment, which ultimately originate in our beliefs. (He's pointed out elsewhere that the word even contains "-brane".)

He "demonstrates" this by a very simple technique: he takes an accepted scientific term, gives a complicated scientific explanation of its meaning,  and then pushes that word through a series of redefinitions. Each of these steps is based on his idea of the cell as a microcosm of the human being — that any attribute a human being has, must also be found in a cell.

He relabels chemical interactions that take place at the cell membrane as "perception". He relabels chemical interactions that take place inside the cell as "behavior". Then he jumps to the conclusion that the cells' perceptions and our perceptions are linked, and since our perceptions depend on our beliefs, then there is a chain of causality from our beliefs to cellular activity.

This would imply that our beliefs cause any medical problem we might have of a genetic nature, and likewise our beliefs can heal such problems. According to Lipton, by changing our beliefs we can can even cure cancer.

This is coming from a man who spends a lot of this lecture bashing mainstream science for supposedly thinking genes "control everything". Science does not hold such a reductionist, one dimensional and idiotic position. But Lipton does. All he has done is replace a non-existent belief in the primacy of DNA with a vastly more stupid, and sadly very existent and very dangerous belief in the Primacy of Belief.

Note that he actually goes through the motions of discussing biochemistry in front of his audience, with the purpose or making his presentation sound really sciency. His listeners are left with the impression that they understand science, and that science says that all that complicated cell chemistry basically boils down to the analogy cell-body, to the simplistic causality chain: beliefs => perceptions => cell behavior.

== Referințe ==

* [https://spiritualityisnoexcuse.wordpress.com/2012/11/25/motivational-biology-with-dr-bruce-lipton-cancer-quack/ Motivational Biology with Dr Bruce Lipton, Cancer Quack]
* [https://spiritualityisnoexcuse.wordpress.com/2012/07/06/bruce-lipton-quack-creationist-buffoon-phd/ Bruce Lipton: Quack, Creationist, Buffoon, PhD]
* [https://spiritualityisnoexcuse.wordpress.com/2012/04/13/bruce-lipton-phd-quack-ignoramus/ Bruce Lipton PhD: Quack, ignoramus]
* http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Bruce_Lipton

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