I have got involved in a Saturday-morning stoush about genetically modified (GM) crops at Professor Quiggin’s blog[1]. For those who don’t know him, John Quiggin is a left-wing economist and blogger who wrote the book Zombie Economics, and I think is generally well-respected for his sensible policy views, though he can be spectacularly wrong. I like to think that John and I share a kind of “scientific” leftism, that is a generally left-wing outlook that is informed by evidence and reason. For example I support the criminalization of heroin use, think that nuclear power has a potential role in mitigating anthropogenic global warming (AGW) and is safer than many believe, and of course I accept the science of AGW. One thing I have noticed about scientific leftists though is that they tend to have a tense relationship with the environmental movement, and especially with the more ratbaggy, dreadlocked and “deep eco” arm of it. This friction is most obvious in the disagreements many scientific leftists have with the environmental movement over GM crops, and I think this friction is both generally misguided and misguided in the specific instance of GM crops. In this post I’m going to explore why I think anti-GM leftists have a valid point based in science, and I’m also going to explore why these scientific leftists are so often uncomfortable with their patchouli-scented fellow travellers.
First though I’d like to review the successes and history of the modern environmental movement, because it seems to me that just going on the balance of probabilities, disagreeing with the environmental movement is a good sign that you are probably wrong. I mean this purely in a probabilistic sense, not in a logical sense (I really shouldn’t have to clarify this, but it is the internet). Let’s look at some of the major successes of the environmental movement:
- They predicted DDT was very bad, and excessive use of DDT for general crop spraying led to the development of resistance in mosquitos, with sad consequences for malaria-endemic countries until pyrethrims were put into controlled use (and note that modern use of anti-malarial sprays follows exactly the guidelines that should have been followed with DDT)
- They were right about acid rain
- They were right about GFCs and the ozone layer
- They were spectacularly right about AGW
- The clean air act
- Meat and cancer
- Meat and malnutrition in the developing world
- They predicted the collapse of the Grand Banks cod population and after they lost the battle to preserve the fisheries, the entire community that depended on those fisheries died
- In Australia the Greens and others predicted the collapse of the old growth woodchip industry due to competition from overseas plantations and tried to develop an industry assistance plan based on plantation forests, but the CFMEU fought it because jobs! and now – surprise! – the big woodchipping companies are going under due to overseas plantation competition
The environmental movement has, of course, been spectacularly wrong about nuclear power. Note also that in some cases – like DDT and AGW – we can now say that the movement was more right than it realized at the time. We now know that the consequences of AGW are going to be way way more serious than originally suggested, and since the advent of the global burden of disease studies we have strong evidence that coal is really really bad for human health – vindicating the intentions of the original clean air act in the USA and various campaigns in other countries. So, just on the balance of probabilities, taking a side against the environmental movement on their big ticket issues is likely to make you wrong more often than right. And of course scientific leftists like John Quiggin will look at all the entries on that list and be firmly in favour of the environmental movement’s position on them – except meat. So why are they so suspicious of the anti-GM movement? And why do they accuse anti-GM campaigners of being “anti-science” so easily, when the history of the environmental movement is that it has had science on its side?
Before I address that, let’s look at the anti-GM movement. John Quiggin suggests in his post that they are only concerned about human consumption of GM foods, and constructs a classic straw environmentalist with this attack:
It would be more effective and more honest for GM opponents to come out and say “we don’t like the idea of tinkering with DNA. We don’t care what the evidence is, or whether there is any observable difference from ‘natural’ foods, we just don’t want to eat this stuff”.
By doing this he ignores substantive issues that environmental campaigners have raised about the potential threats to the environment from GM crops, and the risk to human health through environmental contamination (rather than simply consumption). He wants us to believe that anti-GM campaigners are scared of eating modified DNA because reasons, and doesn’t want us to think that there might be any other reasons for opposing GM crops. But there are other reasons – much more significant than the food safety reasons – and the environmental movement is clear about these reasons. For example Greenpeace Australia has a long FAQ about GM crops and most of the points are not about food safety. The two other big issues with GM crops – environmental contamination and international food inequality – are very important in that FAQ.
The science connected with environmental contamination is fairly solid and self-evident. For example, Farm Industry News reports on the rapid spread of glyphosate-resistant weeds in the USA, based on a study funded by Monsanto (who make round-up resistant crops), and the clear recommendation of this scientific research is that farmers need to rotate their roundup-resistant crops in order to reduce the development of resistance. The article states that
the rate at which glyphosate-resistant weeds are spreading is gaining momentum, increasing 25% in 2011 and 51% in 2012
and pins the blame on overuse of roundup on roundup-resistant crops. This is a classic case of the need for community action: no matter how sensible you might be on your farm, if your neighbours are over-spraying then eventually you will get infected with their roundup-resistant weeds, with serious consequences (some of these weeds can destroy an entire crop). This kind of over-spraying is also going to contaminate river-water (through runoff) and groundwater, and scientists are developing standards for river-water based on the risks to animal and human health. For example, these South African scientists are developing standards for river water based on the harm to river fish; a search of pubmed will reveal studies showing the potential for glyphosate to interfere with human reproduction, which suggests that consumption through contaminated water is a risk to human health. None of this research is anti-science and all of it supports the need to be very careful about the use of these crops.
It’s not as if we don’t have a precedent for this either. In 1962 Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, leading to a movement to ban widespread spraying with DDT. She identified the risk of DDT-resistance, and despite widespread opposition by industry to her findings that is exactly what happened. Why people like John Quiggin think it is anti-science to see the same risk in roundup resistant crops is a mystery to me – I don’t think he can be ignorant of the history of DDT or the toxic debate that has surrounded this chemical in the last 10 years. So why repeat these errors and object to a similar approach to GM crops? And instead of lambasting the anti-GM movement for criminal vandalism and anti-science ideology, why not engage with it to try and produce a constructive, scientific-based approach to the regulation and management of GM crops? I doubt, for example, that John is particularly supportive of overturning the generally-agreed upon ban on geo-engineering. But we could probably develop some kind of horrible plankton or algae that would eat CO2 and stabilize it – surely it’s not anti-science to try? Yet the scientific consensus is that this could be very very dangerous, and no one supports such an effort. What’s the difference?
I think the difference is the activists connected with the movement, and a kind of innate discomfort that a lot of scientific leftists have with their more radical allies who actually do the dirty work on the ground. The anti-GM movement’s foot-soldiers are drawn from the same ranks of dreadlocked hippies as the radical animal rights movement and the anti-forestry movement, and I think scientific leftists – being primarily academics or middle-class professionals – are inherently uncomfortable with the behavior of these scary-looking weirdos. But the reality is that those ratbag activists have achieved a great deal for the environmental movement, which won a great many of its victories through criminal behavior and property damage. This is nowhere more true than in the animal rights movement, which though much-maligned by mainstream leftists has been the most successful international political movement since feminism and has achieved almost all of its gains from a starting point of criminal property damage and theft. In the 1980s animal liberation front (ALF) invasions of vivisection labs produced shocking examples of cruelty that led to the complete revision of ethical guidelines towards animal experiments. Their continued actions against vivisection labs in the 1980s and 1990s forced the practice of animal experimentation into the public mind, and radically changed the way it was done. Similar achievements were gained in slaughterhouses, the live animal trade, factory farming, the fur industry, the pet industry, and especially the cosmetics industry. Laws were rewritten, food production practices changed, and attitudes towards animals revolutionized. Every single one of these campaigns started from direct action and vandalism, often perpetrated by dreadlocked society drop-outs. Many of them involved campaigns against academics – something that obviously won’t appeal to scientific leftists like John Quiggin who are firmly within the establishment academy. But let’s not make any bones about this: those academics needed to be challenged, and this was not happening within the law. The video Hidden Crimes, released in 1986, contains extensive footage of the kind of cowboy behavior and blatant cruelty of these early vivisectionists, and it certainly does not make for pleasant viewing. The great achievement of the animal rights movement has been to force these cruelties into the open, and to completely reshape the institutional landscape within which these crimes are committed. The same is true of the campaign against whaling: while reasonable people talk pointlessly in meetings of the IWC, the sea shepherds are preventing the Japanese from actually catching actual whales. In his biography, Paul Watson makes clear that this action is conducted precisely because no one is willing to act, and before Japan he targeted the USSR and US allies in south America. The whaling issue would be completely under the radar if it weren’t for the behavior of people like Paul Watson, and it is as a direct result of the public pressure arising from Watson’s behavior that Australia raised the whaling issue in the international criminal court.
Of course, this fringe-dwelling hippy radical movement has its fair share of anti-vaccinationists, fluoride conspiracy theorists and new world order nutcases. The anti-vivisection movement was soon hijacked by Hans Ruesch and his anti-medicine cohorts, just as the Union of Concerned Scientists is heavily influenced by anti-nuclear doctors. Every movement that runs up against powerful institutions attracts these people (and I would suggest the anti-AGW movement has been most vulnerable to these types of people – witness Monckton the birther and Agenda21 conspiracist as one of their central figures). But these people acting as the uncontrolled foot-soldiers of a social movement doesn’t make the ideas behind the movement itself wrong, and it’s dangerous to throw out the lessons of the broader movement just because you don’t like the look and feel of a few of its members. Had this approach been taken by Peter Singer towards animal rights, for example, he would have been essentially arguing that any amount of cruelty is legitimate in the pursuit of science. Instead he wrote Animal Liberation and developed a theory of ethics that is easy to apply, practical and enormously influential inside and outside the academy. Peter Singer chose to engage with the movement that his ideas describe, and indeed now many of the ideas the ALF espouse that were once considered extreme and dangerous are now well within the mainstream – as are many of the ideas espoused by earlier generations of environmental activists about hunting and food production. But always these groups are lampooned as anti-science extremists when they first get involved in an issue.
I guess moderate rightist academics do the same thing in respect of their fringe-dwelling nazis and street thugs, though I don’t pay much attention to what’s happening in the cultural sphere where centrist approaches to immigration theory are developed – I get the impression that moderate right-wing academia is strongly opposed to the views of its street-level thugs on immigration, but I don’t really know much about it. I don’t know if the same situation applies there. But in debates about science and the management of scientific processes, I think it’s far far better for scientific leftists to engage with and try to understand the environmental movement than just to reject it out of hand as anti-science, as John Quiggin does in this case. The Peter Singer model of offering academic structure and guidance to the theoretical background of a movement is, in my opinion, far better than what John Quiggin and many other scientific leftists do with GM crops, which is to construct an anti-science straw movement and then knock it down. This isn’t going to move debate forward and it certainly isn’t going to stop the spread of herbicide-resistant weeds.
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fn1: My last comment appears to have gone into moderation and disappeared.
January 26, 2014 at 1:49 pm
As Bruce Wilder at CT has frequently pointed out, the liberal mainstream has spent decades studiously divorcing itself from partnership with actual mass membership, full of grotty unintellectual types with suspicious agendas (unions, mass parties and so on). JQ is par for the course here.
I’m broadly in your and JQ’s scientific left camp, but sceptical that we collectively can reason our way out of our environmental dilemma without a change in worldview to something closer to pantheism – an inherent reverence for the natural world. Which tree-huggers bring a bit closer.
January 27, 2014 at 9:06 am
That’s a good point that I should have mentioned: I think that scientific leftism (as I’m thinking of it here) can be quite conservative and focused on incremental change. This can be good but it’s very bad if it misses the fact that a non-incremental change is being forced upon you by environmental circumstance. Maybe this is another reason why the scientific left is leery of environmentalism, which often suggests extreme risks? Certainly John Quiggin is often at pains to assure his readers that moving to a zero-carbon economy won’t be such a big deal, and his claims that petroleum is just 3% of the economy so whatevs seem to attract quite a lot of criticism. I think the fringe ratbags of the environmental movement might be more aware of the huge changes that are potentially required in order to shift to a zero-carbon economy, especially the longer we delay. And yes, it may be that these changes will require a change of mindset away from that which the academic left values.
Of course this is all irrelevant because we’re not going to mitigate until it’s too late, and then climate fascism will be sprung on the world in a desperate rear-guard action.
January 27, 2014 at 11:17 am
I find the dishonesty of the Greenpeace FAQ a little disturbing. For example it (a) links to the well-known 1999 Cornell study concerning btcorn impacting Monarch butterflies yet fails to acknowledge the plethora of followup studies that are widely accepted to have debunked the study and (b) the untrue claim that farmers who use RoundUp Ready crops are forced to use Roundup when in fact Monsanto’s glysophate patent expired 14 years ago and most farmers today choose one of the cheap generic brands.
I also wonder why Greenpeace doesn’t put more effort into investigating the health and environmental concerns that pertain to organic farming, for instance copper and nitrate soil and ground water contamination.
What motivates the differential treatment? As you apparently have considerable expertise in these matters, I’d love to gain the advantage of your insights. Cheers.
January 27, 2014 at 1:06 pm
Thanks for commenting Captain Moonlight. I’m not sure if it could be said that the 1999 study was “debunked,” but it led to a large research effort that collected new data and found no increased risk. But the DOA and a couple of universities thought it an important enough question to devote considerable research effort to it, and this effort is important. If one of these engineered crop types proves dangerous to bees, for example, then it will create serious problems for surrounding farms. It’s important to rule out these issues. You’ll note I didn’t argue in the post that Greenpeace are honest, just that their concerns about GM crops are not anti-science (and I think my links back up that claim). This is a very limited claim.
I did want to mention in the post, but forgot, that I think organic farming is largely a load of bunkum, including (but not limited) to claims about better taste. I’m sure that like most farming practices it has its time and its place, but I can’t see it feeding the world and this is an important point I also failed to get around to in my post: usually when someone peddles a technological solution to world hunger, they’re peddling a lie. The solution to world hunger is regulation of agribusiness (internationally), reform of trade agreements, and development policies which better incorporate agricultural development and socially sustainable farm policies in poorer nations. Monsanto wants us to believe that the solution to world hunger is their seeds. Now why would they want that? I don’t think the environmental movement is doing any better by claiming some other farming method will achieve the same goal, and they distract from the real issues when they try.
I guess that what motivates the differential treatment is a desire to promote a technological alternative to industrial agriculture. They shouldn’t be. This is a political error. Note that I didn’t anywhere in the post claim that greenpeace (or the environment movement generally) are angels or never wrong. I’m happy to add support for organic farming (at policy, rather than individual-preference level) as a mistake along with opposition to nuclear. But are they really pushing this policy in any coherent and committed way?
January 27, 2014 at 4:08 pm
1. How is deliberately misleading presentation of the scientific evidence not anti-science?. This kind of thing (selectively quoting long-refuted studies) is a central part of the MO of anti-vaxers, climate denialists, creationists etc. Having dealt with all of these, as well as anti-wind farm cranks and similar, I can’t discern any difference in argumentative approach.
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2013/06/17/bad-science-about-gmos-it-reminds-me-of-the-antivaccine-movement-revisited/
2. The anti-GM campaign is precisely a claim that what matters in solving world hunger is the right choice of technology. Monsanto says it’s GM, Greenpeace says its exclusion of GM. Neither is directly relevant to the key issues which you correctly identify here. Monsanto’s impact on food is just the same whether it uses GM, sterile hybrids or PVRs. The anti-GMers give lip service to the latter two issues, then attack public good research on GM, including research into GM safety.
January 27, 2014 at 5:35 pm
Thanks for commenting, John. My apologies for elevating a comment stoush to a blog post – I couldn’t say what I wanted to say over at your place, and figured it would be a huge distraction anyway from the flow of that post.
1. Would you say that economists who deliberately or accidentally present misleading information are anti-science? I would say they’re dishonest, and dishonesty is very common amongst practising scientists. But to get to the heart of such a debate you need to define what “anti-science” means, and the sad reality is that the phrase has become as meaningless on the internet as calling someone a fascist or calling some act terrorism. The blog you link to doesn’t mention Greenpeace and doesn7t really say anything interesting about the science of a broad swathe of concerned anti-GMers. Instead it picks a few ludicrous cases and yes, those ludicrous cases are pretty loony. Can we throw out whole movements on the basis of a few ludicrous cases? Because if so, economics is first against the wall I’m afraid.
There is clearly a difference in argumentative approach between anti-GM movements and anti-vaxers, and especially Greenpeace, who are pro-vaccination and helped develop delivery technologies. Can you explain why their anti-scienceness stops at GMOs, and doesn’t extend to vaccination? Why compare them? I have given examples in my post of perfectly legitimate studies of the risks of GM crops that are consistent with the kinds of concerns the anti-GM movement raises.
2. The anti-GM campaign makes the point I made above, that world hunger is a political and not a scientific problem. I really can’t believe you don’t know this. Here is Greenpeace (from their FAQ):
Here is some random crappy organics website giving a position statement on GMOs. It is four pages long and the first page is about world hunger. Their argument is put thus:
They also point out that some of the major crops being grown with GMOs are animal feed, i.e. they are a feedstock to one of the most inequitable foods on the planet. In case it’s not clear, I’m not endorsing any of the opinions on this website (I don’t have a clue what the commonest GMO is, for example) but it’s clear that they are not turning the world hunger debate into one technology vs. another, and neither are Greenpeace. This argument – that world hunger is a political issue not a farming challenge – has been around since the days of the EC butter mountain, back in the 80s. Are you really unaware of it?
January 27, 2014 at 6:07 pm
Faustusnotes:
“I have given examples in my post of perfectly legitimate studies of the risks of GM crops that are consistent with the kinds of concerns the anti-GM movement raises.”
Actually you’ve done no such thing. All you’ve done is highlight studies in respect of glysophate (a discrete subject) that make adverse findings without determining whether any follow-up studies have confirmed the results. Anyone can do that on any subject.
As BN Ames of “Ames Test” fame notes, the health literature is now fouled with studies that blame everything from olives to carrots for cancer and one out of every two chemicals ever subjected to rodent tests attracts at least one study that deems it a carcinogen.
January 27, 2014 at 6:22 pm
” Would you say that economists who deliberately or accidentally present misleading information are anti-science?”
Absolutely, if it’s deliberate. From my most recent econ post:
“I haven’t said much about the other side of the debate: the New Classical/Chicago/austerity camp. That’s because, on this as on most issues (climate science, energy, environmental hazards etc), the political right has immunised itself against evidence that conflicts with its desired views. The difference between economics and the natural sciences is that natural scientists have almost uniformly rejected the Republican/right position (around 6 per cent of scientists identify as Republicans). By contrast, in economics, there are plenty of Nobel prizewinners (yes, yes I know) on both sides. ”
If you think Greenpeace misinformation is accidental, why don’t you write and set them straight? Based on lengthy past experience with denialists of all kinds, I’m confident you’ll get nowhere.
January 27, 2014 at 6:26 pm
But, it seems we are arguing about semantics now. We all appear to agree that Greenpeace and other anti-GM groups misrepresent the state of the scientific evidence in order to advance their preferred policy views, which are arrived at on the basis of non-factual considerations. That’s what I call “anti-science” whether it’s practised by antivaxers, climate delusionists, economic fundamentalists, creationists etc
If you prefer a different definition, feel free to put it forward and use it.
January 27, 2014 at 6:45 pm
FN:
“Can you explain why their anti-scienceness stops at GMOs, and doesn’t extend to vaccination? ”
I don’t see why the pro-science side of the argument should have to make such explanations but I will point out that motivated, ideological reasoning is involved in both cases.
If you look at the history of the anti-vaccination campaigns from earlier in the last century, they were mostly (but not always) linked to right wing anti-communist groups like the John Birch Society in America and the League of Rights in Australia that rejected mass socialized medicine on ideological grounds. Although today there are anti-vaccination pockets on the left, in America anti-vaccination sentiments are still stronger on the right according to surveys. http://scienceblogs.com/tfk/2013/04/04/vaccines-and-the-republican-war-on-science/
January 27, 2014 at 7:58 pm
”List of stuff the green movement was right on”
Really? You’re going for selection bias as the starting point of your argument? I can probably find a mathematician who regards that as bad analytical practice.
Without listing and assessing their failures too this argument is just an appeal to authority. Or am I making flawed assumptions and you seriously mean to suggest their flawless given the absence of qualifying remarks?
”climate fascism”
It’s interesting you use that term. One of the criticisms I’d level at AGW activists is that there is a high probability of them (trying to) hide wealth re-allocation policies inside AGW mitigation activities. Monbiot is the classic example of this.
The tendency probably contributes towards anti-AGW thought in right wing circles because they (partially correctly) diagnose it as a socialist [1] activity. That then leads to outright rejection by the right-winger.
If the AGW movement did a better job of constructing thought models where rich people got to continue skiing on icy cold slopes while poor people died due to lack of /whatever/ then it’d probably get some better traction (due to calling out its assumptions for discussion [2]). And it’s not like it’s then hard to discuss “This policy calls for poor people to die for LOLs, how about we run some sort of re-distributionist activity in parallel?”
Assuming your prediction of a massive swing towards AGW action comes true, then I’ll predict that lowering income inequality will be the last thing on the movement’s mind. It’s more likely to lean towards “Kill the brown people, the environment can’t support them” [3].
Still this is a different argument. Let’s do it some other time.
“You’ll note I didn’t argue in the post that Greenpeace are honest, just that their concerns about GM crops are not anti-science (and I think my links back up that claim).”
What? Do you have some sort of honesty detector? Does the CIA know? Cause it may cut the enrolment in the waterboarding classes!
There is no material difference between anti-science and dishonest. There are shades of asshole-ry, but the slicing of the difference can safely be left to people who have answered how may angels can dance on the head of a pin and are now working on a model to describe what happens if they attempt to engage the angels on another pin in hand to hand combat. [4]
Or are you willing to accept that WattsUpWithThat? may be written in good faith, but with a flawed understanding?
”The solution to world hunger is regulation of agribusiness (internationally), reform of trade agreements, and development policies which better incorporate agricultural development and socially sustainable farm policies in poorer nations.”
”his argument – that world hunger is a political issue not a farming challenge – has been around since the days of the EC butter mountain, back in the 80s. ”
But we know that the world has successfully produced sufficient food in some years over the last decade [5]. Your logic saying that it’s “all about the politics man” EndSmellyHippy suggests that this was impossible instead of (more correctly) identifying improvements in food technology (i.e. Monsanto and others) as the reason that food distribution methods is the debate. Without this technological capacity, the debate reverts to Malthus’s logic of working out who should die.
This argument (political system failures) is the one you have after technology delivers the solution you needed for the prior couple of millennia. It goes something like “We’ve had technology X for 15 minutes, so we should take it for granted and oppose any further improvements to it because I can barely use my iPhone as it is.”
”Because if so, economics is first against the wall I’m afraid.”
WTF? You sit there with imaginary numbers as an explicit tool available to you and you want other modes of thought up against the wall?
Death to maths more complex then basic university mathematics! And to the ones that dragged my grade average down [6]!
”As BN Ames of “Ames Test” fame notes, the health literature is now fouled with studies that blame everything from olives to carrots for cancer and one out of every two chemicals ever subjected to rodent tests attracts at least one study that deems it a carcinogen.”
Captain Moonlight: You mean to say that 50% of stuff doesn’t cause cancer? Wow. I’ve been living the precautionary principle in my own life.
Well, really more assuming than living. I still eat/breath/inject whatever. But I assumed I was getting cancer from all of it.
[1] In the American sense.
[2] And before someone says that “Keeping people alive is assumed to be a good thing”, remember that we actually have a political system based on discussing the optimal way to do so. An assumption of “Oxygen is awesome to breathe” goes without saying. “We should reduce inequality in society to achieve XYZ” does not.
[3] Do I need to say this would be bad? If so, just record my vote as “1 Despair”.
[4] The answer, clearly, is “roll for initiative”.
[5] Going from memory. It was google for evidence or get a another beer. I think you know which way I went.
[6] We may be left with insufficient maths to balance a bank account. I’m also pretty dice-y on working out tangents on parabolas.
January 27, 2014 at 10:11 pm
This is interesting … I might have to break this response up into a couple of different themes.
First, defining anti-science.
John complains that “we are arguing about semantics now.” Of course we are, because your definition of the term is useless. It might be rhetorically useful but it’s not predictive and it’s completely content-free. It’s of the same quality as the definition of a christian sometimes used by christian apologists: “a christian is a good person.” It enables you to pull the one-true-scotsman move at the same time as dodging a whole array of logical traps. Do you seriously believe that scientists never “misrepresent the scientific evidence”? If that’s a standard for being anti-science then we best throw out Brahe, Newton and probably Einstein with the anti-vax crowd. Along with pretty much every statistician from the inter-war period – Pearson and Fisher were great advocates of eugenics of the good old-fashioned variety. A whole bunch of social scientists who advanced shoddy science in defense of the worst anti-Japanese propaganda (and exterminationist ideology) can join them. Is this your standard? Captain Moonlight has added “motivated, ideological reasoning.” Well, Einstein rejected quantum mechanics because “God does not place dice with the universe.” Newton suppressed the work of Young because reasons. Kepler spent years failing to achieve anything because he wanted the orbits to be perfect spheres. Out of the canon they go!
Your definition of a scientist appears to be “honest person” and of an anti-scientist “person who is dishonest for political reasons.” This isn’t going to get you far in analyzing the opinions and behaviors of actual people. Furthermore, falling back on motivated reasoning is tautological. Why are Greenpeace anti-science? Because they show motivated reasoning about GM! Why do they show motivated reasoning about GM? Because they don’t like GM! Why don’t they like GM? Because they’re anti-science! This is a tautology. You need to ask why are they anti-science? It can’t be because they oppose all scientific work – they sponsor a scientific research institute at Exeter Uni that publishes actual papers in journals; they fund work to promote vaccines cheaply in developing nations; they accept the science of vaccination and AGW; they support technologies as diverse as satellites, solar and wind power, and telecommuting. They are fully behind the science of the water cycle, ocean acidification, acid rain, etc. So why are they anti-science? Because they are anti-GM. But why? You don’t have an answer. My answer is: they disagree with you about the implications of this particular scientific advance.
Now you might argue, there is only one interpretation that can be drawn from any science, but such a view is completely ignorant of actual scientific practice. Meta-analysis and systematic reviews were developed precisely because doctors couldn’t agree on the interpretation of bodies of evidence. Are all doctors anti-science? No, they’re confused by the diversity of evidence. We have an example of this on this very page. I presented a link to a news report about a study that I said presented “legitimate studies of the risks of GM crops”. Captain Moonlight claims this has no relationship to roundup-ready GM crops. Well, Captain Moonlight is wrong. Purdue university have this report on the same survey and stated:
This took me to the Glyphosate, Weeds and Crops website, which has this report (pdf) that states:
Should I then conclude that the 16 universities who are members of that site are anti-science, for concluding exactly what the anti-GM movement was warning about before roundup-ready was approved? Should I conclude that Captain Moonlight is anti-science for rejecting their scientific research?
Or should I try to build a better definition of anti-science?
Semantics matter a lot when your terms are bullshit.
January 27, 2014 at 10:23 pm
Next, let’s talk about motivated reasoning and the anti-GM movement. Captain Moonlight states
This is assuming motivations not in evidence. If you want to claim that “motivated, ideological reasoning” is involved, you need to present the motivation. You haven’t, except in the most tautological sense. For an example of motivated reason, witness Watts from Watts Up With That: he stated openly in a video interview that he started questioning AGW because he didn’t want to pay higher taxes. That is motivated reasoning. Note that he did not say that he opposes AGW because he doesn’t like the idea of AGW.
So, if you want to accuse the anti-GM movement of motivated reasoning you need to pinpoint the motivation. A good example of motivated reasoning within the environmental movement is the nutritional opinions of animal liberationists. Vegetarians are primarily vegetarian for environmental, political or moral reasons, but there are many books defending vegetarian or vegan diets and claiming vegetarianism and veganism are healthy. This is necessary in order to support the idea that everyone can be vegetarian (i.e. that it is an ideal world state rather than just a better personal choice). Unfortunately these books are riddled with errors and draw on research that is either old or dodgy. This motivated reasoning undermines a political stance about spreading vegetarianism to others, and it may be bad for individuals who trust these books instead of settled dietary science. It does not undermine their vegetarian ideology, however, which is independent of this (being based on morality rather than science).
If you want to claim motivated reasoning for anti-GM people, you need a motivation. Note that anti-vaxxers have a motivation: they witness adverse reactions or are parents or friends of parents of autistic children, and they are looking for answers. Many are also religious. Some are opposed to state interference in parenting. Some are opposed to animal experiments or the use of animal products in medicines. This is their motivation for flawed reasoning. They don’t just appear on earth opposed to a random medical procedure and then start inventing science to support their cause.
I would also point out that John himself is a victim of motivated reasoning. Previously on this blog and at Crooked Timber we have had disagreements about the decriminalization or legalization of heroin. John is largely ignorant of the work on heroin overdose and successful heroin prohibition, and as a result he is wrong on the cost of legalization, but when I point him to the research he refuses to accept the facts and interpret things my way. This is because John has a natural preference for liberal laws about personal choice, and has witnessed the horrors of the US war on drugs. These beliefs motivate him to reject sound evidence that decriminalizing heroin use would be a public health disaster. Should I conclude that John is anti-science, or a victim of motivated reasoning? Is his motivated reasoning a bad thing? Is anyone truly free of this practice?
January 27, 2014 at 11:06 pm
Finally a separate theme for Paul because he deserves it.
That’s an appeal to fallacy. I think I’m going to ban appeals to fallacy on this website. I’m not arguing from authority here: I’m simply pointing out that the environmental movement is right more often than it is wrong. If you want to be right (and let’s face it, I run a blog, so what else do I want?) then siding with the environmental movement is going to work more often than not. That is the entire content of my statement. See my point above about scientists finally discovering what the anti-GM movement was warning about in the 1990s. Shall I add it to the list?
There’s an interesting thing going on here (not that I accuse you of) where these sites on the one hand argue AGW is a communist conspiracy to redistribute wealth and make everyone equal, then on the other hand claim that these AGW fascists want to see most of humanity die. I find these two ideas vaguely contradictory. But I am sympathetic to the fear that AGW is all just a wealth redistribution trick: most supporters of AGW seem to be from the left (along with Margaret Thatcher, that great socialist), so I guess an idiot could misconstrue it as a Trojan horse for world govt! ZOG!
Isn’t this what cap-and-trade is meant to do? Certainly if you read the denialist websites, cap-and-trade is a trick to make bankers rich speculating on a trace gas. This trick having been invented by the socialists to enrich their banker friends[1]. Before they form the world govt that will make everyone equal (except the rich bankers?)
Shall we start by not gracing my statement with the word “prediction”? And yes, I agree that if this nightmare vision comes to reality, income inequality will lose importance very rapidly.
See above. If you want to say “Scientific=honest” then you’re aiming for a very utopian version of scientific that I think most scientists would have difficulty recognizing. Scientists are people, and the scientific process sometimes involves people being dishonest. This is why we have ethics committees, Retraction Watch, and disclosure requirements. See also my links to vivisection videos above. Those guys are scientists, right?
Where you really lose the plot is here …
I really don’t know what you’re talking about here. The world has been producing sufficient food for a long time before GM crops became an issue, but the problem has been that some people can’t afford it. During the liveAid period (1984?) there was a bit of controversy in Europe when it was discovered that Geldof et al were trying to raise money to send food to Ethiopia, but the EC was sitting on a wheat mountain (also I recall a wine lake – or was it milk?) that it wasn’t going to send anywhere. This problem of distribution is well understood, and it’s been around a lot longer than improvements in food technology due to GM crops. It’s not about “SmellyHippy” it’s a simple fact. See also: the Irish famine and The Grapes of Wrath. Part of this problem eased with the relaxing of trade rules and subsidies (I think the EU no longer has its wheat mountain, for example) and one argument that some right-wingers put against the Black Bloc anti-globalization folks is that trade liberalization helps the poorest most, and they should support it. Much of latin American resistance to capitalist governments there arose from cash-cropping, for example (see e.g. the common claim that Cuba was basically a possession of United Fruit until Castro took over) – the whole concept of cash-cropping is dangerous for the precarious poor, since it deprives them of access to local food and makes them vulnerable to international currency movements. There have been other problems develop subsequently, for example IMF-backed development plans that focus on industrialization at the expense of farming and make previously productive nations or sub-national regions suddenly highly dependent on imports (and thus vulnerable to currency shocks). But none of this stuff is new and none of it has anything to do with the technological limitations in agriculture. I think we will reach a point where agriculture will run out of innovations (especially as global warming bites) and we will also need genetically modified crops for e.g. salt resistance and heat resistance. But they won’t necessarily make any difference to the distribution of food. And arguing for better distribution of what we have before implementing new technology is not anti-science, it’s a political decision that recognizes that increasing the size of the pie doesn’t always mean increasing the size of all the slices.
This is why I find it so strange that John Quiggin buys Monsanto’s propaganda about GM crops saving the world’s poor. Is Monsanto going to sell its food at below poverty-line prices to starving Africans when it can sell it to rich Americans or Japanese beef cows? Is Monsanto suddenly a charity? I can’t believe John Quiggin isn’t familiar with these issues, anyone who has been vaguely left-aligned for more than a few years would be aware of them. Hence this post …
—
fn1: who are not Jewish. Definitely not. There is no parallel between this little conspiracy theory and historically quite famous ideas linking bankers and socialists. None. Move on please, nothing to see here.
January 27, 2014 at 11:06 pm
Faustusnotes:
“Captain Moonlight claims this has no relationship to roundup-ready GM crops.”
Nope. My point is that the the inherent goodness/badness of GM and issues of herbicide resistance/ adverse impacts are discrete issues.
Your two quotes merely make the oft-repeated point that farmers who use Roundup Ready crops should be using integrated weed management and crop rotation strategies. This is exactly the same advice agricultural departments have given to all crop farmers since Robert Menzies retired from Office.
I personally think the solution to the problem is to properly resource ag departments so that they can audit farms to ensure they comply with these strategies. It might also make sense to restrict the use of glysophate to licensed persons because at the moment it is cheap and anyone can buy a 40 litre container of it at the local farm chemical store if they so choose.
I guess an alternative would be to ban all GMs as per Greenpeace’s wishes but I suspect that would be a little like closing down all hospitals to thwart anti-biotic resistant superbugs.
Finally, holocaust denier accusation footnotes and intemperate expletives in an otherwise civil discourse about GM make you appear weird and unhinged. Can we keep things elegant and sophisticated?
January 27, 2014 at 11:16 pm
Your point is wrong, Captain Moonlight. Concerns about the environmental effects of GM do not involve simply claims about the inherent goodness/badness of GM but also about the systemic effects that arise from their use. This is similar to the debate about DDT, which had several arms: one was that it was just bad (for e.g. birds); another was that its overuse would lead to the development of resistance. The latter isn’t about inherent qualities.
The study you criticize (about effects on monarch butterflies) is another example of this. It’s not saying GM crops are inherently bad, but that they have bad effects that should be considered. I think in suggesting claims of inherent goodness/badness you are constructing a straw environmentalist.
My two quotes don’t “merely” make an oft-repeated claim: they identify specific aspects of a crop system involving roundup ready that make these effects a greater concern. They clearly state that Roundup Ready crops should be seen as an investment.
I think any substance that can lead to resistance should require a prescription (like antibiotics). I think we will see some kind of similar effect in the future with anti-bacterial handwashes.
Does Greenpeace want to “ban all GMs”? Here is the statement of belief from their European website:
I didn’t compare anyone to a holocaust denier. Where did I do that?
January 27, 2014 at 11:24 pm
“I didn’t compare anyone to a holocaust denier. Where did I do that?”
“My last comment appears to have gone into moderation and disappeared, possibly because I pointed out that Helen Demidenko is a holocaust denier. I don’t understand why left-wing bloggers insist on defending Helen Dale.”
Putting a fellow blogger in legal jeopardy by posting defamatory comments about a third party who also happens to be a lawyer is a little gauche, don’t you think?
January 27, 2014 at 11:27 pm
“The study you criticize (about effects on monarch butterflies) is another example of this. ”
I didn’t criticise the study, I pointed out that it had been debunked.
January 27, 2014 at 11:55 pm
I think it would be slightly strange if a pro-free speech libertarian blogger sued someone in another country for hosting a comment pointing out that she wrote a denialist book that created a firestorm of criticism so intense that she cites it as one of the reasons she moved to Britain. I also mentioned that she’s a plagiarist. I guess she’ll be suing wikipedia about that, too?
I pointed out that the study hasn’t been debunked, its results weren’t replicated. The issue was taken seriously enough to warrant formation of a research committee, allocation of grant funds, and two subsequent research papers. Has the paper been retracted, and if so why?
January 28, 2014 at 3:56 am
So, by your standards, am i unfair in describing Abbott as anti-science for announcing yet another inquiry into the long-discredited claims about the health risks of wind farms? What term would you prefer I used for this kind of thing?
January 28, 2014 at 7:53 am
“I pointed out that the study hasn’t been debunked”
It was a small lab study and it was debunked by the half dozen studies presented at the PNAS, as well as the subsequent risk assessment. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC59819/
Debunked studies don’t get retracted by journals- that isn’t how it works.
January 28, 2014 at 8:43 am
“This is why I find it so strange that John Quiggin buys Monsanto’s propaganda about GM crops saving the world’s poor.”
It is a terrible debating tactic to mischievously put words into the mouths of others. Please be a gentleman.
Monsanto’s generic PR hyperbole about the future of GM is a relatively uninteresting side-issue, much like my local pizza shop’s claim to make the best pizza in Australia. It is also no more propagandistic than the fantastic claims made by the organic food industry.
Vaccinations are not 100% effective and they occasionally kill children but this doesn’t warrant antivaxers spreading antivax lies and destroying labs. GMs will not stop starvation in North Korea but that doesn’t excuse Greenpeace’s anti-science vandalism and lies.
Greenpeace does many good things but it is currently trashing its reputation. It is also losing the battle, as more GM crops continue to be improved by more countries. Just this week Bangladesh joined the list of GM crop countries 🙂
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/afp/140124/bangladesh-releases-first-gm-food
January 28, 2014 at 11:08 am
”I’m simply pointing out that the environmental movement is right more often than it is wrong.”
No. You’re saying it, not pointing it out. Saying “They were right about X, Y and Z but wrong on A and B. Therefore they are generally right” is pointing it out because there is actual pointing to the evidence involved. Excluding the instances of error makes it just an interesting factoid.
Let me give you an example. I’m generally right. I manage to feed myself successfully on most days. I almost always get my shoes on the right feet. I get to work while barely ever getting lost. When we assess the choices I make in life I’d suggest I’m right 90% of the time (as long as we define choices so widely as to render most of them trivial).
Given that I’ve proven I’m mostly right across a topic of Everything, I invoke reliance on that here. Therefore I’m right on this too.
Doesn’t convince you? Me either.
But more importantly, the frequency of previous correctness is irrelevant to whether someone is reliable on the next scientific call. Let me give you an example, Einstein was a really smart guy who (I’m told) said, on quantum mechanics that “God does not play dice with the universe”. Despite being right a large number of times previously, he was wrong on that. And the fact he examined the evidence, saw what the evidence said and then said “I reject it” makes him anti-science on this topic.
”But none of this stuff is new and none of it has anything to do with the technological limitations in agriculture.”
The problem we’re having here is different ideas of what “new” is. The food revolution that happened over the last century is new when compared to the millennia of starvation that precedes it. GM food is the latest wave of that food revolution.
And focusing on Roundup GM foods is to cherry pick a type of GM. How about we discuss golden rice instead? Are Greenpeace worried that high levels of vitamin A will crossbred into the wider food supply? Should we say “Greenpeace were right on air quality, so their likely to be right when opposing this blindness averting breakthrough?”
January 28, 2014 at 11:42 am
John asks:
John, “by your standards”? You mean use the scientific process of seeing whether a person fits a functioning definition? If we’re going to do this in a pro-science way we need to first set a definition and then see how Abbott fits it, rather than just ad hoc smearing anyone who disagrees with us on certain issues as “anti-science.” Let’s try this definition. Someone is anti-science if:
1. they have no qualifications in a scientific discipline
2. they lack significant work experience in a scientific field and/or publications in a peer-reviewed scientific journal
3. they deny at least one widely-accepted scientific fact such as the greenhouse effect, that vaccination prevents illness, or evolution and/or
4. they cling to a common, well-debunked myth about basic science such as that wind power causes illness, electricity lines cause cancer, etc.
and for their public actions,
5. they promote or implement policies that can be judged to impede the progress of science or scientific exploration in at least some areas OR
6. they promote anti-scientific ideas about core scientific beliefs and/or they harrass and intimidate scientists
Under this definition I think Abbott would probably cut it, but Watts might not (he actually has a genuine peer-reviewed publication). You’d have to revise the definition when talking about whole movements or organizations, do as you see fit. I would exclude campaigners or individuals acting on explicitly safety grounds. So e.g. an anti-vaxxer who accepts that vaccination prevents disease but cites scientific evidence (such as the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System) as evidence that it is unsafe; a denialist who accepts warming but is still unconvinced that it is dangerous; or people (like Greenpeace) who accept the science of genetic manipulation but think it is unsafe. These people are making risk-benefit assessments, and reasonable people can disagree about the relative risks. People who do this but continue to cite widely debunked myths (the vax-autism link, or “CO2 is plant food”) should be considered not to be actually seriously engaging in risk-benefit assessment. My judgment of Greenpeace is that they are doing a risk-benefit assessment, not necessarily in a way I would agree with.
This is much better than just saying “X person who disagrees with me is anti-science.” Otherwise you find yourself being in the strange position of agreeing with someone’s scientific assessment of a range of issues (e.g. as in Greenpeace and you) but claiming that they are anti-science. In this case given the wide range of agreement – and given they don’t dispute the basic genetic science – they could equally well accuse you of being anti-science. Or, another way of putting it: you need to distinguish between people who are genuinely scared of or opposed to certain aspects of the modern scientific revolution, and those who have a differing interpretation of the literature. Many people in science have bad interpretations of the literature, it doesn’t make them anti-science.
January 28, 2014 at 11:52 am
Captain Moonlight, I think the phrase you’re looking for is “Not falsified.” A small laboratory experiment is not “debunked” when larger studies disprove the hypothesis.
I am not putting words into John Quiggin’s mouth. He said on his blog
He clearly thinks that GM crops are going to help with the world’s food problems and that anti-GM activists don’t seriously believe their anti-corporate rhetoric. He later described this rhetoric as “bogus” and gave some useless example of an attack on some CSIRO (non-corporate?) crops as evidence. I am hoping that John is going to walk back from this flagrant misrepresentation of the environmental movement and in future posts will take seriously the potential environmental risks from GM crops.
You may think that Monsanto’s hyperbole is a side-issue, but it’s central to their push for licensing of these foods and a lot of their supporters make this claim. As I showed, John appears to support this claim. And it is important, because there is a big difference in purpose between “we need to deploy this crop to solve world hunger” and “we need to deploy this crop to increase our profits.” These may not be mutually incompatible, but if the former isn’t true and there are methods to achieve the former that might not do the latter, you need to question the propaganda of those who might suffer. Especially if you are inheriting a political tradition that has been aware (apparently!) of the politics of food distribution since the potato famine.
Finally, nice trick there conflating Greenpeace (again) with antivaxxers. Greenpeace doesn’t destroy vaccination labs, but your sentence structure is carefully designed to elide the difference. And you might want to ask youreself how much of the environmental legislation protecting your food and water arose from vandalism, not to mention a great many of your basic political rights up to and including the 40 hour week and universal suffrage.
January 28, 2014 at 11:57 am
Paul, consider two villagers in the middle ages: one assumes the sun will rise tomorrow because it has every other day of his life; the other spends time every night preparing a contingency plan for the sun not rising the following day. Which of these is employing a logical fallacy, and which is the idiot? Arguments from “that’s a fallacy” are mostly themselves fallacious.
You’re right about the selection bias in my statement, but until someone can come up with a balancing list of ways in which the environmental movement was wrong I’m happy to let it sit there as a predictive model.
Here I’m citing examples of mal-distribution going back to the potato famine. I’m happy to define that as “not new,” YMMV. And I think you need to defend the claim that “GM food is the latest wave of that food revolution,” especially since quite a few GM crops are feedstock (inevitably inequitable in the modern world) or non-food items (such as cotton).
I’m afraid I haven’t got any knowledge of the golden rice issue. When I’m not working like a robot, I’ll look into it …
January 28, 2014 at 5:40 pm
According to the FAO:
250 million children are at risk of VAD,
250-500,000 go blind each year due to VAD, and
and one million die each year due to VAD.
The FAO laments that:
“Policy and regulatory development regarding agricultural biotechnologies needs to balance both risks and benefits for the poor. More emphasis and activity have been focused on developing policies and regulations related to preventing risks arising from GMOs than to facilitating the use of agricultural biotechnologies for the benefit of poor rural producers. ”
Click to access optpriore.pdf
The Golden Rice Project blames anti-GM activists including Greenpeace the the inordinate delay in the release of Golden Rice, which could be a major tool in reducing VAD in the rice growing parts of the world.
The WHO says “… public health could benefit enormously from the potential of biotechnology, for example, from an increase in the nutrient content of foods …”
http://www.who.int/foodsafety/publications/biotech/20questions/en/
When Golden Rice goes into production, which may happen as early as this year in the Philippines, we’ll soon see if it contributes to a decline in VAD and the resultant death and disease.
If it does, Greenpeace and its allies will quite rightly be accused of having played God with the lives of children in a manner that will make the sins of the anti-vaxers look like a burp at a church picnic.
January 28, 2014 at 9:00 pm
”Arguments from “that’s a fallacy” are mostly themselves fallacious.”
”You’re right about the selection bias in my statement”
So you’ve got a selection bias underlying your argument, but I’m wrong because I use the word “fallacy” instead of saying “you’re talking out your ass”?
OK. I can correct that.
You have cherry picked examples without bothering to look for conflicting data. Your argument holds no more water than someone who says the current US temperature disproves global warming based on a temperature sample of yesterday on their porch. You have made a bad argument and you should feel bad.
Easily found false predictions:
• Australian cities urgently needing desalination plants in 2007 – Tim Flannery
• “In 1970, Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, predicted that by 1995 somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals would be extinct.” – Reason.com (not buying a subscription, but
• Malthus
The nature of most of the predictions makes them difficult to falsify (which, generally speaking is bad science as I understand it based on reading why creationism sucks). By their nature they are open ended predictions and a failure of them to happen yet doesn’t make them false. Just perennial bullshit.
I’m also trying to avoid AGW predictions with dates attached to them they didn’t occur as it’s like to derail discussion. But there are enough of those out there because it’s a big world and predictions are tricky, especially when about the future [1].
”And I think you need to defend the claim that “GM food is the latest wave of that food revolution,””
Golden rice: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice
I tried to summarise why it’s awesome, but Captain Moonlight has done a better job. I’ll just note that VAD means Vitamin A Deficiency (because I wouldn’t have known that without reading Wikipedia).
I’ll also note that the rice has free licenses for non-commercial usage and farmers can keep and replant the seeds (so all anti-corporate arguments are bullshit for it).
”Let’s try this definition. Someone is anti-science if: [garbage definition of anti-science follows]”
Let’s see. A 3 second google reveals the definition to be:
“Antiscience is a position that rejects science and the scientific method. People holding antiscientific views do not accept that science is an objective method, as it purports to be, or that it generates universal knowledge. …”
it’s a Wikipedia definition, so if you’re unhappy with crowdsourcing it [2] you could try looking at the definition of science then imagining not doing that:
”the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.”
In case tailoring definitions to use them as a Take That on Tony Abbot is consuming too much of your time to read these, both approaches highlight the adherence to the scientific methodology as a key element. That means the number of degree and publications have less to do with your outcome than the amount of lint you’ve got in your belly button. It also follows that people can be anti-science on one topic and pro-science on others. i.e. Just like with everything else, hypocrisy abounds. (For example, the self-serving definitions found higher up this page.) This also means you can’t call someone anti-science in general, only on a particular topic [3].
This comes to the heart of the definition John Q, Cap’n and I are all using. Dishonesty is a rejection of the scientific method to instead promote whatever your religious beliefs demand (be it creationism, anti-AGW or bio-engineering scares).
If someone’s just wrong, then that’s what the (scientific) process is there for. Monarch butterflies may or may not be affected, but reasonable people working in good faith can disagree and investigate. The instant you say “I must be right despite no evidence (or evidence that points the other way)” then you’ve left the scientific method behind and entered the land of religion.
My final point on this would be that three commentators from at least two sources (assuming Captain comes via Crooked Timber) and the Wikipedia editors appear to share a working definition of anti-science; while you’re ranting on your lonesome about publication frequency and peer review quality. Maybe you need to accept that there is a broadly accepted definition that you just don’t like? Then you should get over it.
[1] This isn’t as stupid an insight as you might think if you consider predictions about unknown outcomes that haven’t been reported yet. It always irritates me when people quote it as a joke rather than a meaningful statement that happens to also be very funny on first glance.
[2] Though where else can you get word definitions if not a crowd of people who use it?
[3] Though you are welcome to call people who are anti-science at all crazy, even when they subsequently talk sense on another topic. (Don’t do this around people with real mental problems. Unless you a sociopath, then go nuts.)
January 29, 2014 at 12:43 am
Captain Moonlight:
In one comment you tell me that Monsanto’s hyperbole about feeding the world is largely a PR sideshow and not to be taken seriously. In the next comment you tell me about this terrible form of malnutrition that only Monsanto’s technology can solve, and anyone who opposes it is responsible for deaths on a terrible scale.
Can you see how a disinterested observer might conclude you don’t really believe one of these two things?
January 29, 2014 at 1:16 am
Paul, my little probabilistic statement didn’t talk about predicting dates and facts, it talked about broad concepts that the environmental movement was right about. Are you going to seriously try and tell me that Australia doesn’t face ongoing water problems? Do you think given what you’re witnessing this summer, and the inherent threat of a switch to el nino in the next few years, that Tim Flannery isn’t going to be shown right? Do you think his claim can be falsified at this stage?
I will repeat: I wasn’t making an argument. I was simply observing what I think is a fact about the environmental movement’s record. Do you have more than two points on which it was wrong? [This is a quite unreasonable demand given that proving people in the past were wrong is much much harder than proving people in the past were right]
Your definitions of antiscience are fine but they’re not useful. The first sentence is tautological (a person who is antiscience rejects science! Wow! what does that mean?) The second sentence is extremely hard to prove in practical cases. If someone isn’t doing science then it’s basically impossible to show that they are rejecting science, and almost no one who John Quiggin has claimed is anti-science would ever say that they “do not accept that science is an objective method.”
I should point out that it isn’t me who is looking for a Take That on Tony Abbott: John Quiggin is. I’m simply pointing out that ad hoc smearing someone as anti-science is not going to do that (do you see what I’m doing here? I’m defending Tony Abbott). There is no way on God’s green earth that Tony Abbott thinks science is not an objective method, or that it does not generate universal knowledge. Neither does Watts, neither do Greenpeace. But Abbott abolished the science ministry and called climate change crap, Watts hosts a website that will publish any shit so long as it denies basic scientific principles, and Greenpeace oppose GM crops. If you care about whether these people are anti-science beyond its value as a cheap epiphet, you need a slightly better definition than “so and so thinks something they would never say and that is impossible to prove.” I have proposed a practical method for identifying whether or not people fit your definition – because you can’t prove it directly. I really don’t care, incidentally – I think the whole business is a cheap slur and you’re better off arguing on the basis of the merits of people’s positions – but John really seems to want to slur anyone who disagrees with him.
I’m happy also to have definitions of anti-science on specific issues: Tony Abbott is anti-science on climate change, Greenpeace is anti-science on GM crops but not climate change. But if you do this I think you might as well just say “I think Tony Abbott is wrong about climate change.” Why bother with the extra bollocks? But anyway John isn’t doing this: he’s using individual actions by people (Abbott) or organizations (Greenpeace) as proof that they are anti-science. This seems to me like a general slur.
Actually I’m really pissed about the accusation of “Take That on Abbott” and “self-serving definitions.” I think it’s really fucking clear that I don’t like the deployment of “anti-science” as an epiphet, I don’t think it’s rational and I don’t like its application, and that I was offering John the opportunity to come up with a more rigorous approach to this if he really cares about it. I’m not interested in claiming Abbott is anti-science, John is: I’m interested in pointing out that John’s original ad hoc use of the term doesn’t cover anyone, let alone Tony Abbott, and that in deploying his rhetorical question he shows what a bullshit concept it is. So don’t accuse me of trying to do a “Take That” on Tony Abbott. I think you need to take another look at that comment. And I think you need to drop the idea that John Q and the Cap’n are using a “definition” because they’re not – they’re using an insult as if it was a meaningful term.
Fuck, I can’t believe I’m defending Tony Abbott and Tony Watts from John Q.
The scientific process does not exist to prove if someone is wrong or not, it exists to explain the natural world. Newton was wrong for his entire life, but the methods didn’t exist to do better. The process you describe about Monarch butterflies (“reasonable people working in good faith …”) is IMO a) nothing to do with science b) exactly what happened and c) no proof that Greenpeace is anti-science. And it would be a crapton easier to prove c) if someone, anyone would come up with a method for showing people are anti-science other than assertion about people you disagree with, which is currently all John Q and Captain Moonlight have got.
My final point (of this comment, because it’s the internet) would be: yes, wikipedia’s definition of anti-science is entirely cool but it’s also useless. John Q wants to be able to say that real people in the real world are anti-science based on their actions. There is a huge gulf between that task and the wikipedia definition. You need a functioning set of criteria to make that link. I proposed one – not because I want to prove Tony Abbott is anti-science but because John raised the point and I think it’s a great way to prove that his original use of the term is meaningless – and no one else seems to be willing to propose a better one. Tony Abbott is not going to come out and say that he believes science is not an objective method for discovering universal truths. So either a) stop claiming he thinks this or b) present a method for proving it or c) come up with a more practical definition of anti-science. But if you can’t prove WUWT is anti-science, then you’ve got no hope of proving it for Greenpeace, in which case all you’re really doing is using “anti-science” as an empty insult, like “fascist”. Which is shallow and stupid. But hey, this is the internet, so …
January 29, 2014 at 6:09 am
“Can you see how a disinterested observer might conclude you don’t really believe one of these two things?”
A disinterested observer might conclude that you’re a little foolish since Golden Rice has nothing to do with Monsanto. Blame this apparently evil, nature defying man. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingo_Potrykus
Greenpeace want to ban the application of the fruits of biotechnology based on the most ridiculous arguments that include, as we have seen, a raft of lies and airy-fairy claims about biotechnology being “unnatural”.
Yes, Virginia, Greenpeace is a crazy cuckoo anti-science organisation that once did some good work. I’m surprised Lord Monckton the 3rd Viscount of Brenchley doesn’t join up. They’d make a handsome couple.
January 29, 2014 at 9:53 am
”I’m really pissed about the accusation of “Take That on Abbott” and “self-serving definitions.””
Hmm. I apologise. We appear to have been talking past each other for the last couple of posts. Your definition was a bit of a strawman (noting that John Q hasn’t replied with a better one), but that triggered me to focus on the definition and disagree with my own point.
My point was anti-science is a case by case call made on individual actions/beliefs, not people. That’d seem to align with your argument. I can also appreciate your statement that using it broadly is similar to calling someone “fascist”. You may recall I’m a person who disagrees with calling AGW sceptics “deniers” because of the needless antagonism that gives rise to.
I’d prepared more on this point, but it’d seem pointless to rant on on (what I think is) a point of agreement.
”John really seems to want to slur anyone who disagrees with him.”
I can’t comment on that because I don’t read Crooked Timber. In the absence of a response from John Q and my own indifference towards reading his writing I guess I can just take your word for it.
If it makes you feel any better, I’m vastly relieved to find myself no longer having to defend John Q (my right wing nutcase credentials are safe!). But your defence of Tony A is on the record and I’m sure I’ll find some way to bring it up in the future 🙂
January 29, 2014 at 11:00 am
Epic misdirection, Captain Moonlight. You’ve been caught out contradicting yourself in two consecutive comments just hours apart, and you think you’ve got a gotcha because I don’t know who developed golden rice? Try to answer a substantive point, please.
On Golden Rice, a few points:
1. Total DALYs attributable to Vitamin A Deficiency have been decreasing since 1990, from 14 per 100,000 in 1990 to 12 per 100,000 in 2010. In South East Asia they have dropped from 15 to 11 per 100,000 and in China from 11 to 5 per 100,000. This indicates that existing interventions have been working to reduce this problem, and Golden Rice is not necessarily essential to the battle.
2. The WHO lists breastfeeding, vitamin supplementation and improved food security through home gardens as the main effective interventions in its reference page on VAD. These are exactly the same interventions recommended by Greenpeace as alternatives to Golden Rice. Is the WHO anti-science? Do you think promotion of breastfeeding and improvements in food security for vulnerable rural families are a waste of time? Would you recommend to resource-poor countries in Africa, Asia and latin America that they switch efforts from low-cost interventions such as fortified sugar and breastfeeding (one of the most effective health promotion interventions on the planet, incidentally) to distributing Golden Rice? If you think these efforts should continue, do you think it’s possible that Golden Rice’s much-vaunted miracle properties might only have a small additive effect.
3. There is a big gap between laboratory-observed effectiveness of interventions and their practical implementation. Greenpeace cites a study that showed a single serve of Golden Rice a day would provide half a child’s daily vitamin A intake, which is very good, but that does not translate into program effectiveness. This article outlines some of the requirements for a successful program and should make it fairly clear that a functioning biological mechanism is not enough. For example, Golden Rice will almost certainly not work in Guatemala, where VAD is an issue, because rice is not a staple; it might work in the Philippines but the Philippines already has a range of fortified foods in place, so it’s likely that the addition of Golden Rice will not show improvements in the field that are observed in the laboratory. Furthermore, if breastfeeding is inadequate, no amount of Golden Rice or fortification will prevent the problem. Rolling out a Golden Rice program in a country with poor breastfeeding will show limited benefits, and in e.g. Guatemala only 50% of women practice exclusive breastfeeding in the first 6 months, and only about 35% in China and the Philippines (see this article). In these countries by 12 months children will already be vulnerable to VAD, long before rice enters their diet as a staple.
4. Even if Golden Rice is proved to be effective, it may not be proven to be cost-effective, and all this apoplexy about how anti-science Greenpeace is may come to naught: the countries that need it might choose not to use it for cost reasons. Given the WHO doesn’t mention it and it hasn’t got past field trials, and considering the amounts of money invested in it, this seems quite likely. Do you think it might be a good idea for the people crying “anti-science” to first do a calculation to show just how much the rice has to cost in order to be a cost-effective competitor with fortified sugar, butter or MSG? I haven’t seen any such calculations. Why not? Can you do one?
5. If other countries require trials before allowing Golden Rice into the country, then crop contamination is a serious concern for farmers marketing rice to those countries. Countries which market rice – such as Japan, Thailand, Australia and China – will likely be very uncomfortable about allowing a new strain into the country, and farmers need to be assured that there won’t be crop contamination if this is an issue. Furthermore, countries which require GM foods (or, for that matter, foods with betacarotene supplementation) to go through any form of regulatory approval will be risky markets for these rice farmers.
6. For rice farmers from poor countries, it’s not enough to meet the crop-contamination standards of their target markets: they need to be able to show that they meet those standards, and the target market needs to be confident of the regulatory processes. This can lead to blanket bans on imports from certain countries (as happens with e.g. certain types of prawns to Australia or meat to Japan) as soon as any farmer shows evidence of contamination. Do you think that these concerns should be addressed before marketing this kind of rice to poor farmers in countries with weak regulatory systems and unsophisticated farming techniques?
7. The study I cited above was found to have ethical problems and the lead author was suspended from human research. It appears that the lead author was dishonest. According to the definition of anti-science preferred by you, Paul and John Q, this makes the researcher “anti-science.” So here we have it: GM crop researchers are anti-science. Are you willing to recognize that your definition is useless?
It is not “anti-science” to recognize that food security and nutritional deficiencies are more complicated than the proponents of GM foods claim. It is in fact very realistic, scientific and sensible to recognize that. Please try and address these points before you accuse Greenpeace of being the next Hitler.
January 29, 2014 at 1:06 pm
“You’ve been caught out contradicting yourself in two consecutive comments just hours apart…”
Nope. Nuance and comprehension are not your strong points. You still haven’t grasped the idea that Greenpeace wants to ban the fruits of biotechnology.
“This indicates that existing interventions have been working to reduce this problem, and Golden Rice is not necessarily essential to the battle.”
No it doesn’t. One million dead kids each year represents a total failure. That figure is as bad today as it was 5 years ago. The falling per capita VAD rate in certain countries probably owes more to economic growth than the largely non-existent programs.
“Is the WHO anti-science? ”
The WHO says as per my above link:
“… public health could benefit enormously from the potential of biotechnology, for example, from an increase in the nutrient content of foods …”
The WHO also doesn’t subscribe to the unscientific idea that natural and unnatural represent a meaningful distinction. The WHO also doesn’t send thugs into labs and trial fields to destroy properly constituted scientific work.
” … do you think it’s possible that Golden Rice’s much-vaunted miracle properties might only have a small additive effect.”
We’ll have a definitive answer to that question by the end of the decade. The Golden Rice Project doesn’t talk of miracles, that would be you inventing facts again.
“Even if Golden Rice is proved to be effective, it may not be proven to be cost-effective ….”
You beclown yourself.
Golden Rice will prove no more expensive to cultivate that the same rice variety without the gene modification and we already know that this typically outperforms traditional varieties, many of which are crap. Golden Rice is also free of royalties provided the farmer who sows it earns no more than $US10,000. This limit will ensure small farmers aren’t driven out by large agribusiness concerns, which is the type of measure that Greenpeace usually applauds.
” Do you think that these concerns should be addressed before marketing this kind of rice to poor farmers in countries with weak regulatory systems and unsophisticated farming techniques?”
According to the Golden Rice Project website:
“PhilRice is preparing a submission to the regulatory authority of the Philippines in 2013, which could lead to initial releases to farmers in 2014. And the work doesn’t stop there. If the first hurdles are taken successfully, then Golden Rice will be heading towards China, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Vietnam. In those countries national programs are already involved in laying out the necessary groundwork.”
“It is not “anti-science” to recognize that food security and nutritional deficiencies are more complicated than the proponents of GM foods claim.”
It is anti-science to keep telling lies, propose an irrational ban on all GM biotechnology, smash up science facilities and field trials and promote the unscientific idea that unnatural and natural represent meaningful categories with different risk values.
Anyway, I’m done here.
I’ll return in two or three years to give you the opportunity to apologise to me if Golden Rice is a success.
January 29, 2014 at 1:58 pm
You’re starting to get spittle-flecked here, Captain Moonlight. I think you need to take a few steps back and rethink your approach, because there is obviously a lot about designing public health interventions that you don’t understand. You obviously also don’t understand how new public health interventions need to be assessed in light of existing programs, or how cost-effectiveness is assessed. Consider this study of “golden mustard” (did you know that there are existing GM products on the market?) to target VAD in India, which found it was less cost-effective than supplementation. As for your claim that any gains in China are due to economic growth – risible. China declared eradication of vitamin A deficiency as a national goal in 1990 and runs a supplementation program across the high-risk areas, as well as experimenting with a wide range of fortification methods, and most of the available research shows that these programs are effective. Furthermore, China is not in the list of UNICEF high-risk countries. It has made progress. Guatemala has also made progress.
You sound like one of those crazed right-wing DDT campaigners who ignores the issue of DDT-resistance in order to demand the reinstatement of wide-scale DDT spraying. You’re ignoring all the considerable evidence about what is being done now, why certain interventions might work, why programs don’t just work straight out of the box, and why these programs don’t work in isolation. You’ve ignored my point about breastfeeding rates holding back the effectiveness of interventions, for example, or the fact that lots of people don’t actually eat rice. You’ve also ignored the article I linked to describing effective programs, and the misconduct of the golden rice researcher. You really sound like someone with an ideological axe to grind, rather than someone willing to consider the evidence.
January 29, 2014 at 2:12 pm
Paul, Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with calling people fascists, but I prefer to do it to a) actual fascists or b) not to use it as an argument by itself. In this case I prefer the phrase “illiterati” or “the dismissives” (as used by Sou at HotWhopper) because it allows a little more leeway about their fundamental beliefs but encapsulates the common problems that they either a) don’t understand anything about the topic or b) have a motivated reason for their position.
The problem as I see it with your anti-science definition is that it is too much of a motherhood statement. I don’t believe for a moment that Watts doesn’t think science is an objective means of discovering truths. His concern primarily seems to be that this objective and beautiful method has been corrupted for ideological reasons. He often argues his dumb points using published scientific literature. I don’t think you can conclude that someone is anti-science if they base their arguments on published literature.
For example, a lot of anti-vaxxers were jumping for joy after Wakefield’s autism paper was published in the Lancet. They now had scientific evidence that vaccines are bad. Is this not proof in itself that a lot of anti-vaxxers believe science offers an objective way of measuring universal truths? Now they had proof they were right! You can’t say people who are using scientific evidence that vaccines are bad are anti-science. YOu can say they’re wrong, or misinterpreting the science, or doing a really bad risk analysis, but you can’t say they’re anti-science (by your definition). It’s an unprovable claim you’re trying to make.
And I don’t believe arguments proceed very far based on unprovable claims.
But I’m happy to help you out with further ammunition for our blog stoushes: I just want to make sure it is noted that *I* defended Tony Abbott and *you* missed it!
January 29, 2014 at 3:10 pm
“You’ve ignored my point about breastfeeding rates holding back the effectiveness of interventions, for example, or the fact that lots of people don’t actually eat rice. ”
Again you beclown yourself.
Golden Rice is going to be rolled out in the countries where rice is the staple foodstuff. The most populous countries worst affected by VAD are India and Bangladesh and both of these have rice as a staple food.
Your breastfeeding point is idiotic and that is why I ignored it. The rollout of Golden Rice is not going to hinder programs that raise the importance of breastfeeding. Moreover, Asian children typically eat rice from a very early age. According to my Vietnamese wife, the poorest Vietnamese children live on almost nothing other than white rice and fish sauce from the time they are weaned and this often happens at a very early age.
My own children were eating rice well before six months of age.
The conclusion to the Golden Mustard study you link to is this:
“Although supplementation is the least costly intervention, our findings also indicate that GM fortification could reduce the VAD disease burden to a substantially greater degree because of its wider reach. Given the difficulties in expanding supplementation to areas without health subcenters, GM fortification of mustard seed is an attractive alternative, and further exploration of this technology is warranted.”
That is the mother of all ringing endorsements.
I’m appalled that you think Golden Rice is the equivalent of DDT.
I can’t for the life of me understand how it is that Golden Rice gets so far up your nose.
January 29, 2014 at 5:54 pm
“You can’t say people who are using scientific evidence that vaccines are bad are anti-science.”
Actually that is the dumbest thing you have said so far. Wakefield was a fraud, he never produced any scientific evidence.
Moreover, the anti-vaxers, Greenpeace and WUWT crowd are anti-science because they regard the scientific process itself as a massive conspiracy involving dark and malevolent forces. For Greenpeace, the dark and malevolent force is The Corporation.
Another thing this trifecta of loons have in common is that they irrationally place a small handful of pet scientists on a pedestal and uncritically accept everything they say, no matter how many times they’ve been debunked in the peer reviewed literature.
January 29, 2014 at 7:13 pm
Captain Moonlight, if golden rice is only being deployed in countries where rice is the staple foodstuff, why do you cite figures on the effects of VAD for the whole world? Don’t you think that’s a bit disingenuous? Vietnam, incidentally, is responsible for only a tiny fraction of DALYs to VAD (12000 out of 800000) and has also seen rapid declines in VAD-related DALYs, from 20 to 13 per 100,000. Rates of exclusive breastfeeding are low in Vietnam, Bangladesh and India, and use of infant formula is common in places in Bangladesh. It could be that supplementation of infant formula could be a more effective tactic than the use of Golden Rice.
If the poorest people in Vietnam are feeding their children nothing but rice and fish sauce from early weaning, then I think you can be confident VAD is very low down the list of Vietnam’s health priorities. And lo and behold! Nutritional deficiencies were responsible for 443 DALYs per 100,000 in 2010, compared to 13 per 100,000 for VAD. Iodine deficiency – easily treated with iodine-fortified salt – accounts for more DALYs than VAD. But you think the Vietnamese government should be focusing resources on its lowest-priority nutritional deficiency through a program with unproven cost-effectiveness? This applies even more so in countries like Bangladesh that still have huge nutrition deficiency-related burden of disease.
You have no evidence that the rollout of Golden Rice will not hinder breastfeeding programs: in limited resource settings, decisions have to be made about which programs to support, and international funders will often not support all programs equally. If you can show Golden Rice is a better option than breastfeeding programs, good plan. Otherwise, not so much.
The conclusion you cite to that article is not “the mother of all ringing enforcements.” It is a series of propositions that needs to be tested, which is what they recommend.
I didn’t say that Golden Rice is the equivalent of DDT, I said that your stance was the equivalent logical position to some of the right-wing loons who promote DDT. This sentence – “I’m appalled that blah blah” – is an absolutely classic example of mendacious argument. You don’t get anywhere with this kind of illogical and outrageous misrepresentation.
Golden Rice doesn’t get up my nose. People advocating single-bullet miracle cures in complete ignorance of the complexity and depth of the problem of nutritional deficiency, without any reference to the literature or any apparent knowledge of public health practice, get up my nose.
Now, re: Wakefield (your second comment): he was a fraud. This is well-established. But people didn’t know that at the time. At the time he published his article, it was scientific evidence. People concerned about patient safety cited it thinking it was valid evidence. No one knew it was fraud. Do you understand this? This means that people citing that article were defending an anti-vaccination position based on scientific evidence. How can they therefore be anti-science? Or does your new definition of anti-science include “unknowingly using fraudulent scientific research”? Now Wakefield, by your definition, was anti-science. But the people who believed his work? How can they be?
Greenpeace don’t regard the scientific process as a dark conspiracy, and neither does Watts: he sees it as an important part of modern life, and thinks that the climate science part of it has been corrupted. You may recall he ran a two-year long project investigating the quality of weather stations, and published a peer-reviewed article on the results, an article that probably helped scientists to understand how flaws in their temperature stations might affect their climate models. Most of the AGW science blogs seem to give him some credit for this. Watts has many unsavoury public attitudes, but regarding “the scientific process itself as a massive conspiracy involving dark and malevolent forces” is not one of them. Indeed, just recently he managed to make quite a few denialist enemies by coming down strongly in favour of peer review. It’s important to argue about what people actually believe, not what you want them to believe.
For the record, I think Golden Rice seems like an excellent idea. If it can be shown to be effective and cost-effective then it should be rolled out in areas where it can be useful. But first it should be subjected to the appropriate trials and in the case of Golden Rice that means being aware of the risk of cross-pollination/crop contamination and the effect this will have on rice stocks and poor rice farmers in the areas where it is used. I think this approach should be taken to all GM crops until we have adequate evidence that they don’t have unexpected consequences, and where I probably differ from Greenpeace is in the severity and strictness of the evidence required to warrant use. But it appears to me that in some countries GM alternatives to Golden Rice are already being used (e.g. golden mustard). So what is the particular reason you think Golden Rice is so important? And given these countries seem ready to accept GM products, is the delay to implementation of Golden Rice actually entirely Greenpeace’s fault?
January 29, 2014 at 7:33 pm
“Captain Moonlight, if golden rice is only being deployed in countries where rice is the staple foodstuff, why do you cite figures on the effects of VAD for the whole world? Don’t you think that’s a bit disingenuous?”
Hardly. There is nothing preventing other countries coming on board later. Also, with proof of concept other staple foodstuffs could be similarly fortified with biotech.
“You have no evidence that the rollout of Golden Rice will not hinder breastfeeding programs: in limited resource settings, decisions have to be made about which programs to support, and international funders will often not support all programs equally.”
This point is disingenuous. Organisations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are committed to this project. This is new money.
If you have evidence that the bucket of money for breastfeeding will be robbed for to pay for the rollout of Golden Rice, show it.
You also ignore the most obvious and clever point about Golden Rice. That is, once it is rolled out it will no longer rely on charity or government to continue. Farmers will be able to save and plant seeds as they have done for millenia.
On the other hand, food fortification and breastfeeding programs will always rely on recurrent funding.
About the only genuine concern I can think of is loss of biodiversity, but as you are undoubtedly aware, there are now literally hundreds of seedbank organisations attending to that issue, such as this. http://cropgenebank.sgrp.cgiar.org/
January 29, 2014 at 7:40 pm
So now you’re claiming GR won’t be rolled out just where rice is a staple food? Either Greenpeace is stopping the whole world from beenfiting or they’re not. The stats should be reported accordingly.
New money for GR could be used for more cost-effective purposes. And new money doesn’t guarantee that old money will stay where it was. BMGF can be clever about funding systems but it’s entirely possible that governments would withdraw funding for related programs once the new money rolled in. Also, is there any guarantee that once the “self-sustaining” part of the program was in place it would actually reach the people who need it? It could be in demand by middle class people who want to ensure the best outcomes for their children but don’t actually need it, for example. As I said above, it’s not enough to prove an intervention works, you have to prove it will work under field conditions. Golden Rice is nowhere near that stage.
I don’t imagine biodiversity would be an issue, though I guess that there might be some concerns about further reduction in varieties of rice. My concern would be that rice farmers would lose access to markets through contamination.
January 29, 2014 at 7:49 pm
“At the time he published his article, it was scientific evidence. People concerned about patient safety cited it thinking it was valid evidence. No one knew it was fraud. Do you understand this?”
Once again you demonstrate a complete misunderstanding of how science works. Wakefield’s one small study did not overturn what was hitherto known and not a single peak scientific or medical body advised parents to stop vaccinating their children because of it.
“So what is the particular reason you think Golden Rice is so important? ”
I see no point in further idle armchair speculation. We will know if it is “so important” by its success or failure.
BTW, I assume Greenpeace is so keen to stop the rollout of Golden Rice because it fears it will succeed. And Greenpeace should quake with fear, because if Golden Rice succeeds Greenpeace’s credibility will be smashed forever.
January 29, 2014 at 8:05 pm
Completely false. MMR Vaccine rates dropped significantly, primarily because GPs stopped recommending it. The NHS ran annual surveys to find out what proportion of doctors were recommending it. In the recent Measles outbreak, private companies were still offering separate M, M, R vaccines because of safety fears. The recent measles outbreak has been linked to the huge drop in vaccination rates in 1998. The reason these rates dropped is because people believed that study because they saw it as scientific. So you tell me – were these people who responded to scientific reports anti-science?
January 29, 2014 at 8:13 pm
You must learn to read and comprehend.
I referred to peak science and medical bodies not GPs.
On this occasion, said GPs ignored the advice of their peak bodies and, yes, their behaviour was contrary to science.
Now I think I’ll go do something more meaningful that continue this debate. You lost. Got over it.
January 29, 2014 at 11:31 pm
Wow! So 10% of British parents and a non-trivial minority of British doctors are anti-science because they disagreed with Captain Moonlight after they read an article in The Lancet, the world’s premier medical journal. What a useful definition! And so self-effacing!
I wrote this post because I think science is fundamentally and necessarily an elitist process, but it requires the support of ordinary people to function, and the support of ordinary people requires that they be able to engage with and debate scientists. The language and works of science are an arcane and mysterious thing, and enabling ordinary people to engage critically with that mysterious world means that many people are going to misunderstand and make mistakes about the content of science. When I see scientific leftists like John Q disparaging broad swathes of ordinary society as “anti-science” because their interpretation of genetics, environmental science or risk analysis is naive and inferior to his, it makes me think that they are (to the extent that they communicate with ordinary people) alienating ordinary people from the world of science. Whatever John Q might think about the “truth,” a lot of people think that meddling with genetics is dangerous and stupid. Some of their concerns have been shown to be correct with the fullness of time, some not. But almost all (bar a very small fringe) of those people have come to their positions through engagement with science. They may have got it wrong, or exaggerated the wrong ideas, or misunderstood and misinterpreted basic principles, and undoubtedly they have viewed the scientific results through the lens of their own biases and preconceptions – but I have presented ample examples of scientists who have done no better. It is not anti-science to misinterpret and/or misrepresent scientific results. It is part of the messy process of understanding and interpreting fundamentally incredibly complex ideas. Captain Moonlight has made this very obvious through a torturous kind of show-and-tell: while dismally failing to understand any of the fundamental principles of epidemiology or public health, he has waxed lyrical about how stupid everyone who disagrees with him is, and finished on the high note of describing a couple of million British people as anti-science because they read something in The Lancet and changed their risk analysis as a result. To me, those people are robustly pro-science: they heard about a scientific study of patient safety, they recognized that it has been published in Britain’s best medical journal and must therefore be exceptionally trustworthy, and they changed their behavior accordingly. Sure, they were manipulated by arseholes in the Daily Mail and the Times – but that’s hardly their fault. They trusted the scientific process and they assumed – wrongly, apparently, according to Captain Moonlight – the right to make decisions about their children’s lives based on their own understanding of what the science meant to them. To me, this is a failure of the scientific process, exemplified in the behavior of The Lancet‘s editorial board, and not a failure of the ordinary people who Captain Moonlight dismisses as anti-science.
I would say this is the only good thing about the prolific and disruptive behavior of AGW deniers. They have shown that we truly live in a democracy of ideas where science is concerned: they have not been prevented from making their case, and people who understand AGW continue to fight these people in the battleground of ideas, even though we all know they’re ridiculously and stupidly wrong. We all know that science will be proven right in the end, and although in the case of AGW the risks to the planet are a little bit too extreme, still we engage them in the battleground of ideas and scientific debate rather than through censorship and coercion. I don’t think, though, that the behavior of people like Captain Moonlight and John Q adds anything to this process when they characterize everyone who disagrees with them as anti-science. When they do that, they’re no different to the stereotpyical pissant student activist who calls everyone who disagrees with him a fascist.
But at least the student activist is young enough not to know better.
January 30, 2014 at 9:58 pm
I’ve bowed out for a while, but at least if I read correctly, faustusnotes is now conceding that there’s no difference between anti-GM, antivax and climate denial.
If you don’t like the term “anti-science” for these groups, use another one. Would “faith-based” suit you better? Or, if you want to get more specific, “styles of argument JQ regards as nonsensical and dangerous, particularly when adopted by leftists/environmentalists (since I expect this kind of thing from the right).”
January 31, 2014 at 12:55 am
You don’t read correctly at all, John. I concede that there is no difference between anti-GM, antivax, climate denialists and you or I. These people are not anti-science: they are simply interpreting the science differently to us. They clearly value science, or they wouldn’t be trying to find scientific results that support their point of view. There’s no benefit in dismissing these people as anti-science rather than engaging their point of view, or using more meaningful epiphets. I’ve shown that your use of the term “anti-science” is meaningless and lacks predictive power, and you’re using it on people who both obviously not anti-science, and who agree with you on many core principles. It’s a really counter-productive stance and escalating it to “faith-based” is even worse.
You’re showing a really strong streak of motivated reasoning in this thread: you clearly want people who disagree with you to be defined as anti-science, and you don’t care one whit what their actual views are. This is classic motivated reasoning. I’ve offered you a rational definition of anti-science that might have some actual predictive power, and you haven’t even bothered to engage. The reason is clear: you don’t care for the phrase as an actual method of categorizing people: you want a phrase that you can deploy against anyone who disagrees with you. I really did expect better of you, John, and I’m disappointed at how blase your attitude is. But I guess that means you’ve confirmed everything I wrote in the post about the conservatism and insularity of the scientific left.
Try harder next time.
February 3, 2014 at 9:12 am
Fausty, you’ve used your little podium here to falsely defame someone as a holocaust denier.
Prof Quiggin has whipped your ass yet you stand on a bullant’s nest and claim it as the high moral ground. May I suggest you put away adult things and stick to your childish role playing games.
February 3, 2014 at 1:54 pm
Captain Moonlight, if you want to continue commenting on this blog I suggest you refer to me as ‘faustusnotes’ not ‘fausty.’ Also, referring to the primary purpose of the blog as “childish” isn’t going to win you a lot of influence. It tells my reader(s) a lot about you though.
re: defamation, If you google the person in question, you’ll see that their behavior is recorded in books as a textbook example, and Robert Manne wrote a pretty scathing piece about it, so I don’t think it’s particularly easy to say this is defamation. However, upon reflection I realized that my footnote to this post breaches the privacy policy that I like to hold on this blog, so I’ve deleted half a sentence from the footnote. I think that should satisfy you, though if you try to dispute the first sentence of this paragraph it will become obvious who you’re talking about, so please don’t.
John Quiggin has managed only to exacerbate his previously not-very-useful definition by extending it to “faith-based,” this is not exactly a whipping. Your definition of “anti-science” now includes a sizable minority of the British population, a significant number of doctors, and anyone else who relies on articles published in a scientific journal (the Lancet) to make decisions about health. I think you’ve shown admirably to everyone how useless and completely ad hoc your definition of anti-science is. John Quiggin is welcome to join you in using such a non-discriminative and arbitrary judgment to attack people who were misled by a fraudulent article. I won’t be adding my voice to that chorus.
In the next few days (when I have time to breathe) I’m going to use the example of Golden Rice and the development of an HIV vaccine to explore the issue of assessing research efforts using cost-effectiveness analysis. I hope you’ll stick around to see if you have anything to add to that.
February 3, 2014 at 5:12 pm
Just to be clear, I don’t regard people who were misled by anti-science crooks like Wakefield as being anti-science themselves. And the same goes for climate denial, wind farm infrasound, anti-fluoridation and, coming back to the original point, GM technology. Misrepresenting scientific evidence, defaming and physically attacking scientists, vandalising scientific experiments etc are anti-science: the object, clearly, is to mislead people who don’t have the expertise to assess the scientific evidence themselves.
You are conflating the victims of anti-science propaganda with the propagators.
February 3, 2014 at 5:44 pm
I’m not conflating anyone, John, Captain Moonlight is when he says:
See above. Incidentally, I’m not aware of any time that Greenpeace have physically attacked a scientist working on GM crops. Can you give evidence? For that matter, the defamation claim would also require some evidence, I suspect.
If vandalising scientific experiments is anti-science, does that include e.g. attacks on weapon development facilities? What about eugenics labs? Is there any animal experiment lab that you would consider should be shut down by criminal means if necessary? Are the Sea Shepherds anti-science for attacking the Japanese whaling research program? Note here I don’t mean “are their methods wrong?” I am specifically referring to your point that vandalising scientific experiments is wrong.
What I want to clarify here is: do you think that vandalising scientific experiments makes someone anti-science regardless of the moral and physical content of those experiments? For example, if prisoners are being vivisected for valid scientific reasons, would someone vandalizing that research be “anti-science”?
If misrepresenting scientific evidence is proof that someone is anti-science, then I lead you back again to all the hordes of scientists over history – most obviously and spectacularly, Newton – who you must inevitably claim were also anti-science. Do you think that Isaac Newton, developer of differential calculus, the three laws of motion, the fundamentals of physical optics, and the theory of gravity, was anti-science?
February 3, 2014 at 9:13 pm
Faustus says:
“In the next few days (when I have time to breathe) I’m going to use the example of Golden Rice and the development of an HIV vaccine to explore the issue of assessing research efforts using cost-effectiveness analysis.”
Don’t forget to send the results to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
February 6, 2014 at 7:11 pm
So you’re now saying Japanese whaling and Nazi eugenics are “science”. Don’t you think that, when your argument takes you this way that you have made a wrong turn somewhere?
February 7, 2014 at 12:06 am
Where did I say “Nazi”, John? The Japanese whaling program recently got a paper published in a scientific journal. But by all means, let’s ignore those two. We can focus on vivisection. Is there anything beyond the pale in vivisection? What about weapon development facilities? Anyone who attacks those facilities is anti-science, regardless of the moral content of the research? Please do share. And while you’re at it, I think there were some requests for evidence in my previous comment that you have carefully ignored. It’d be nice if you would answer the questions you’re being asked instead of making up new forms of moral outrage. I want you to tell me if attacks on scientific experiments are anti-science regardless of the moral and physical content of the research being conducted. Can you answer that question honestly for me?
February 7, 2014 at 12:08 am
And I might add (re: Eugenics) that a lot of famous scientists were into eugenics. See e.g. R.A. Fisher. Some of his research on statistics was developed with those aims in mind. So answer me: would attacking laboratory work of his that might lead to new statistical techniques be anti-science? What about the demographic and statistical methods developed for unpleasant purposes in Nazi Germany or colonial India? These ideas led to a lot of developments in modern survey design and population research. Would it be anti-science to attack a colonial registration and management program?
July 16, 2015 at 10:58 am
There’s an article on GM food at Slate.com at the moment that covers Golden Rice: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2015/07/are_gmos_safe_yes_the_case_against_them_is_full_of_fraud_lies_and_errors.html
The article is awash with links (that I haven’t bothered to drill into) that claim to debunk Greenpeace claims on GMOs. The most interesting and relevant part of the story is citing examples of Greenpeace selective opposing or supporting treatments (i.e. adding vitamins into diets) depending on the method used. So vitamins added in pills are good, but added in GM rice are bad. That’s pretty hypocritical, scientifically speaking.
I’d note that you could construct a cost or efficiency argument around the method used, but that actually has bugger all to do with science. The easiest way to work out the efficient way of getting vitamins to someone via pills v rice is to put both into that market place and let the market sort it out. So keep existing programs on pills, then give some minor funding to golden rice and see it’s market penetration. Adjust funding accordingly. Again, the only sciences this relates to are dismal ones.
July 16, 2015 at 11:25 am
I just looked at that article briefly, and it appears to be focused on the food issue, i.e. the claims that GMOs are unsafe to eat. I don’t have any issue with the food safety aspects of GMOs, subject to the caveat that they are put through functioning approval processes. My concern is more with their impact on farmers, their environmental risks, and (in the case of things like golden rice) whether they’re a waste of money. Note that my arguments against golden rice have been founded on the assumption that supplementation (i.e. food products with vitamin A added) are more effective.
I’ve also said here repeatedly that defenders of GMOs like to focus on teh food safety claims because they’re easier to defend than the environmental claims, which are harder and more dependent on the precautionary principle (since we can’t run trials as easily). The claims about the pesticide effects of GMOs are absolutely true, for example, and have led to major research efforts in the US to try and find solutions to the problems they create.
I don’t think, in the golden rice case, that we can leave it to the market to show what is best because a lot of the vitamin A deficiency that is being targeted is in the poor and under-nourished, who don’t necessarily have enough money to support their diet. Supplementation is often a welfare program, not achieved through modification of products on the market, so comparisons with a rice product on the market might not work. It’s better to run a randomized controlled trial, comparing a supplementation program with a market program and a mixture of the two. It’s surprising, but often free supplementation programs are nowhere near as effective as originally expected, either because of confounding socioeconomic and health factors (especially diarrhoea) and diversion – poor people selling their free supplementation in order to get more basic dietary staples. It could be that golden rice plus supplementation would cover the gaps that exist in both programs separately, because when people divert their supplements to get money to buy rice, they end up buying golden rice. But my suspicion is that a much more cost-effective way to tackle Vitamin A Deficiency is to target the major causes of malnutrition – inadequate breastfeeding, diarrhea and unimproved water sources – with supplementation for the very poorest. This will have the benefit of simultaneously targeting protein-energy malnutrition, which is orders of magnitude more serious a problem than vitamin A deficiency.
It’s surprising how much we don’t know about effective strategies to target malnutrition!
July 16, 2015 at 11:56 am
“My concern is more with their impact on farmers, their environmental risks, and (in the case of things like golden rice) whether they’re a waste of money.”
Impact on farmers and environmental risks are covered numerous times in the article. I didn’t ready the studies it linked to, but, assuming they are valid, then the article covers a large number of such complaints. Obviously, I can’t say whether it’s all such complaints absent a master list of concerns.
“The claims about the pesticide effects of GMOs are absolutely true, for example,”
The papaya example covers how the GMO reduces pesticide usage as does the tobacco example. The Bt (tobacco) example actual focuses on pesticides as a topic.
“I don’t think, in the golden rice case, that we can leave it to the market to show what is best”
I can agree that better studies would yield better results. On the other hand, my suggestion of minimal support for Golden Rice was predicated on minimal disruption to the existing programs by simply allowing Golden Rice usage to proceed with minimal support. The worst case scenario is that Golden Rice has a low uptake rate, the minimal support is wasted and no meaningful results are generated. The best case scenario is that Golden Rice uptake is large, the trial provides good data and spending should be shifted to prioritise Golden Rice support over supplementation – but all of that is subject to some test results and the first step is simply allowing the product to go to the market rather than arguing that it should be blocked.
July 16, 2015 at 12:08 pm
Like I said, I didn’t read all the way through the article – and it’s a veritable link mine, which I have no time to follow. I think the point with pesticide resistance is that it needs to be tested in each case. My post has a link to a network of universities in the US that have a whole program devoted to reducing pesticide resistance due to GMOs. It’s definitely an issue, and it’s not a concern that is confined to “anti-GMO” activists – it consumes a lot of agricultural research time and money. It’s good to address these issues during development, not after release.
I think GMO tobacco has a lot of potential, it seems to have a wide range of potential applications in pharmaceutical development (and even fuels!) and definitely should be explored. But the risks of farming antibiotics are huge, I would guess (in terms of resistance).
Regarding golden rice, my main objection to it [now that the risk of vitamin A overdose has been clarified] is that it is a waste of research resources, within a public or global health framework – those resources could be better spent on other issues that are either a bigger burden or more likely to be effective. I have secondary concerns that if it is accepted as a silver bullet it might displace existing, cheaper strategies that are known to be effective. But if private foundations want to burn their money on boutique solutions to small problems, that’s their lookout. I can’t see any other major reasons to oppose it, but I do think there is a qualitative difference between releasing supplementation, and vitamin-supplemented foods, where the vitamins in question can be harmful. Note that vitamin-supplemented foods are a standard part of the public health response though (e.g. iodinized salt) and I absolutely think raising concerns on that matter alone is, in general, bogus.
[I did also write a post on the need to better harmonize these research efforts so that global research funds aren’t wasted, but that’s not specific to GMOs at all].
Also kudos to Slate for not posing that article as an attack on left wing people or just environmentalists!
July 16, 2015 at 8:18 pm
Slate is pretty solidly left wing itself…
July 16, 2015 at 8:21 pm
That’s never stopped left wing hippy punchers from proving their serious credentials by blaming other leftists or environmentalists for random conspiracy theories!
Us slate better than salon? Salon is very poorly written…