Steve Novella on the Neurologica blog has taken the opportunity to turn this into a science lesson, pointing out that the taking photos does not an experiment make, but is mere observation, & then going through the steps that would be needed to subject this to true scientific enquiry.
But enquiry takes time, until in the end a consensus of scientific opinion emerges.
Which is a problem in an age when suddenly we are all so keen on the idea of evidence based policy, & giving scientists, or The Science all due respect in the way in which we organise & run our society & our lives.
Sometimes you just have to make a decision before all the evidence is in. Even more importantly, scientists work by controlling for things which might mess up their nice experiments, make the results difficult to interpret without any nice clear law appearing.
Real life (& politics) have a nasty way of being contingent, of operating a in a world where ceteris just aren’t paribus & are in a constant state of flux, so there never will be just one more set of figures or experimental results that will make the decision clearly & unambiguously for you.
The circumstances vary, so the best decision may vary according to which downside or upside risks you are prepared or not prepared to take.
Presumably one of the purposes of investigating the non-decaying burger would be to decide Is it safe to eat, even after several days on the counter top? Most of us can probably get along just fine without having to find out the hard way. But suppose you are buried several thousand feet down a mine, with no obvious rescue in progress when you come across this object? Would you still decide that the risk was not worth taking?
It still astonishes me that mankind was able to decide or find out the answers to such questions long before the age of science. How did Amerindians establish the safe way to prepare bitter cassava for human consumption? Or establish the keeping qualities of casareep which are only now being partially confirmed by modern science?
But I am even more glad that modern scientific food hygiene has largely brought to an end, at least for those of us living in the west, the terrible toll of food poisoning in all its various forms & made nutritious food available to people at all levels of income – even if some of it offends my well-educated palate which has the honour to reside in such a prosperous body.
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