I had a curious thought just now, which I might want to run by the Pnictogen Wing's science division (i.e. @alyx_woodward) for critique.

I had a curious thought just now, which I might want to run by the Pnictogen Wing's science division (i.e. @alyx_woodward) for critique. It's roughly this:

Why NOT the "four humours"? The four bodily humours which persist as symbols and poetical language are among those old-fashioned concepts which it became fashionable to deride in the era of the European Enlightenment (so-called) which favored an atomistic perspective upon explaining issues with human health. The human body is compared to a fantastically intricate machine, and diseases of the body tend to be explained in terms of individual faults or agents.

A vague and flawed general conception of biology and genetics has encouraged this atomistic view, which (when allowed to fester) has engendered a great deal of "magical thinking" about the powers of genes, in service of various racial and eugenicist goals. For cultural reasons, the United States and "the West" has developed a strong emotional attachment to the notion that everything begins at the beginning and nowhere else—this irrational tendency to value only starting conditions and first impressions and single tests and so forth has inflamed belief in the mystically predetermining power of genes. This has the advantage of pushing the blame for all troubles into the past.

The preoccupation with atomistic models and itty bitty causes has obscured the simple fact that there's general value in modelling the bulk properties of the human organism in some systematic way, using a sensible basis set of general abstractions. The principle of four bodily humours was suggested by the general division of material things into four "elements", which correspond roughly to phases of matter. The body has its solid earthy bits, its liquid watery bits, its gaseous airy bits, and there's also a division between neutral and ionized matter in the human body that might be considered as some analogue to fire. After all, they do call the general aqueous substance of the blood "plasma", although that's distinct from plasma as a phase of matter.

~Chara of Pnictogen