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Originally Posted by Neapolitan
Instead of whole heartily agreeing with this experiment I think to myself isn't there something in this experiment that should had done differently. How about you are you totally fine with the proceedure? If there was something you would had done differently what would it be? Many experiments I hear of uses a placebo, maybe in this case a placebo should had been used. Say for instance have three unmarked vials give two scientist the brewer's yeast and the third scientist amoebae as a placebo and see if the same result of multi-cellularity would happen for all three or just the first two.
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I think you misunderstand the point of having a placebo. When testing drugs, you use placebos because people taking drugs commonly have something called a placebo effect. What that means is that whenever someone takes a drug which is not very harmful, the drug should be expected to have a positive effect regardless of whether or not the chemicals in the drug actually have an effect. People's belief in medicine makes it work, even when it has no effect on it's own.
That makes it hard to test new drugs because when you see beneficial effects, you don't know whether it's caused by the drug or just the placebo effect. So, because of this, people partaking in medical experiments may recieve placebos (they don't know whether they get the placebo drug or the real drug). Then the effect on their health is registered. For a drug to pass such a test, it needs to have an effect which is significantly better than the placebo effect.
Needless to say, a placebo is not needed for this evolution experiment as there are no placebo effects going on here. They're not testing a drug. In my opinion, the experiment is just fine and I was actually impressed with how easy and elegant it was.