
Gut Bacteria Divide People Into 3 Types, Scientists Say - robg
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/science/21gut.html?hp&gwh=B3370770269FAE03C441A9D0FD531184
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tokenadult
Interesting work, which ties in with the article "Neuroscience of the Gut"
from Scientific American submitted yesterday.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2465085>

Two statements in the article caught my eye:

"He also notes that so far, all the subjects come from industrial nations, and
thus eat similar foods. 'This is a shortcoming,' he said. 'We don’t have
remote villages.'" So the investigator would still like to know a lot more
about how differences in diet might influence microbiomes.

Also, the article noted, "The scientists then searched for patterns. 'We
didn’t have any hypothesis,' Dr. Bork said. 'Anything that came out would be
new.'" This, of course, could be referred to as data-mining,

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

(See Warning Sign D7: Lack of a Specific Hypothesis, or Overzealous Data
Mining)

and what I think this scientist would himself acknowledge is that before this
research can develop, scientists need to form testable hypotheses about
microbiomes and then put those hypotheses to the test. Typological thinking is
a frequent characteristic of early stages of developing theories in biology,
and it may be that eventually a more nuanced form of population thinking will
emerge in the study of human-hosted microbiomes.

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prewett
I think it's perfectly valid to say "I don't know anything about this area".
Would you prefer him to say "I will arbitrarily assume (because I have no
information whatsoever) a hypothesis that every person has a unique set of
bacteria and see if that is right"? That might actually lead to an experiment
that misses what he found: you would probably take similar people. If you
hypothesis that people have similar sets of bacteria, you'd want to pick
wildly different people. Sometimes we don't even know enough to ask a useful
question, but it is still scientific to examine the area with repeatable
experiments and see what you find.

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igrekel
On the other hand, they had patients with crohn's disease in the sample. Its
hard not to see this as a decisions taken based on the hypothesis that people
affected by crohn's disease have a different bacterial flora.

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aangjie
Ha, reminds me of the three body types (vata,pitha,kaba) reported to be used
in siddha of old times.... <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siddha_medicine>

wonder if there might have been a correlation noticed in those times too...

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nopassrecover
Or the three body types most bodybuilding + weight loss forums discuss:
endomorph, ectomorph and mesomorph.

