Obeisances to the High Priestess. Does Cadbury's Fruit and Nut count?
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There are certainly better ways of producing penicillin than those that include spitting in a vat and leaving the mixture exposed to the open air.
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Perhaps if you have a pretty limited tool-set this method is not bad at all. But my argument was that the ritual actually brought together in one package a set of items - modes of creating solidarity both between and across generations, and so on - that we do not normally bring together.
I don't want to make the claim that this way of knowing is superior to science - just that it is different. Today, we can organize things so that a man will spend his life making nails, and very good nails they will be; earlier ways of being had less specialism, and blunter nails. but they were not, for all that, simply lost in mists of ignorance.
If you say that there is no other knowledge but the scientific kind, you seemingly pour hundreds of thousands of years of human existence into a large muddy bucket of error.