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Historians since
Thucydides[1] have described how the rise and
fall of civilizations, the victories and defeats of campaigning armies, have been shaped
by changing patterns of disease[2]. Interactions
among humans, other living creatures, plants, animals, micro organisms, ecosystems, and
climate, geography, and topography are so complex that despite much study we are often
uncertain what is really happening. Medical science supports the historians, but theories
can mislead us if they try to explain complex historical events with inadequate supporting
empirical evidence[3]. Life, the universe, and
everything in it, are a crazy mixture of orderly with random, haphazard, chaotic processes
that may defy rational analysis and explanation. |