Suddenly, Supers!

[Gedrin]

Originally Posted by vitruvian

They couldn't assume, perhaps, but neither could they assume the converse. What they'd have to do is do full background on every confirmed superhuman. If everything about a person's history checks out in terms of birth records, no history of childhood abduction, etc., Occam's razor would suggest deprecating the changeling hypothesis, at least provisionally.

Which requires fewer new assumptions:

Radical physical changes do not impact the mind.
OR
Radical physical changes impact the mind.

Just looking at my medicine cabinet, I'd say alterations to the body impact the mind enough that there's a lot of time spent warning about the topic, and none of the medicines in my cabinet are likely to be significant enough to give super powers.

Of course, that assumes that super powers are physical in the first place. The change could well be mental, or spiritual, even if "Option A".

RE: DangerousThing
The possibility of Option C is one of the things that actually helped IMC. With the vast majority of supers appearing in the USofA(TM) there was a portion of the society, which might well have responded negatively, that took a "Chosen Land" view of the emergence of supers. Of course, just as many thought it was Option B, and for the same reasons. They essentially balanced each other out.