Mike, I first became a skeptic of published science when I did a paper on DDT circa 1973. I found there was no scientific evidence for banning DDT which was at that time the safest, cheapest (important!), and most effective pesticide we had come up with. The following is from memory, but I can probably find the original. The things I found surprised me and sometimes shocked me.
The most egregious piece was in the LA Times, headlined "DDT linked to Infertility". That should frighten the proles. They were reporting on a presentation given to the American Cancer Society by two scientists - I believe from Seattle. Their conclusions were drawn from experiments they did on rats. I looked at their paper. On the second third, and fourth day of some rat neonates' lives, they fed one million times the average expected human exposure of DDT into the rats. Nothing happened. However, when the rats reached the equivalent human age of 40, tumors were found in the rats (can't remember whether all of them - or some of them. In any event, they were tumors not cancers. This led to the "DDT linked to infertility" headline. There was a postscript. A biologist in San Jose, California, wrote to me and said, "You are too conservative, Mr. Pollard. They didn't feed the rats. They injected them." (I missed this - it just simply didn't occur to me they would inject the DDT. I'm not sure that this appeared in their paper.) This "scientific paper" can be compared to US Health studies of DDT workers at the Montrose Chemical plant in Torrance, CA, who had been exposed to about 400 times the average exposure of DDT (remember DDT in mother's milk?) over as long as 20 years. One of their conclusions - as these workers had more children than average, DDT just might be a fertility drug. Also, there hadn't been a single case of cancer when statistically there should have been. Could it be that DDT was a cancer inhibitor? It was left hanging, but I recall that a scientist in Pennsylvania ran with this for a while but ended his experiments (that appeared to confirm US Health) because it would lead to nowhere as the chemical had been banned by a combination of politicians and environmentalists. Among the consequences - millions of deaths from malaria in Africa and elsewhere. Also, big profits for the chemical companies as cheap DDT was replaced by rather dangerous chemicals that cost 3 times as much as DDT and had to be applied 4 ties through the growing season. Here again is the medical article on Medical Lies. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-med ical-science/8269/ My skepticism about Anthropogenic Global Warming was fueled when the first Assessment Report of the IPCC was doctored to remove all dissent. This was not inadequate experimentation, but a deliberate swindle. That was in 1990 and of course the IPCC has changed since then. Hasn't it? Harry ****************************** Henry George School of Los Angeles Box 655 Tujunga CA 91042 (818) 352-4141 ****************************** -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer Sent: Tuesday, March 15, 2011 11:56 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] Re: FW: [Ottawadissenters] 3/15/11 - the truth wears off Arthur wrote: > Forwarding this interesting piece. > >> In today's excerpt - the truth wears off: Further editorial on this piece along with comments from readers here: http://ksjtracker.mit.edu/2010/12/10/new-yorker-are-humans-the-problem-with- the-scientific-method/ A point made there: "The scientific method is flawed because initial results are modified, elaborated or thrown out altogether over time." But that's exactly why the scientific method is a success. This tired argument is made often by antievolutionists, and it's essentially criticizing science because it's not fundamentalist religion with revealed, unchanging truth. And we have to consider the dominance of profit motive in contemporary science, especially pharmacological research: We'll make $500,000,000 if we can make a case, or get some people with unimpeachable credentials to make a case, that our patented molecule cures cancer, makes crazy people manageable or keep you looking nubile past menopause. We'll make ten times that if we can manufacture it and distribute it world-wide in 40 ton lots within a year, before anybody rocks the boat. My words, not those of the author, but you get the idea. Corporate managers don't *care* about science or truth, only about engendering and exploiting belief, however dubious the putative facts may be. Worse, once someone is actually *collecting* the gigabuck revenue stream from a product, vast sums of money can be devoted to putting out fires, viz. to bolstering the preferred "truth" and stamping out heresy. I learned such statistics as I know by tracking my wife through her courses when she went back in mid-career for an advanced degree. Interesting stuff but the "truth emerges from that formulaic 95%" struck me as religious dogma right off, especially as it was applied to social and clinical situations where the underlying mechanisms -- mechanisms at the molecular or neurological level -- remain Terra incognita. This is where and when I learned about "physics envy" in the umm... "softer" sciences. Statistics done on, say, 10^25 molecules can tell us something meaningful about the distribution of kinetic energy of individual molecules given an average temperature. An anti-psychotic drug trial on 1500 patients (order of 10^3 stunningly complex organisms) is a whole 'nother can of worms. Another snippet from the above-referenced article: UPDATE: Not sure what "weak coupling ratio for neutron decay" means, I sent by email to a theoretical physicist prominent in public discussion and who has his eye on large issues, Arizona State U's Lawrence Krauss, the graf [sic] in the New Yorker on that and gravity measurements. Here is a slightly amended rendition of his reply: "The physics references are [deposit scatological bovine expletive here] .... the neutron data have fallen, reflecting under-estimation of errors, but the lower lifetime doesn't change anything having to do with the model of the neutron, which is well understood and robust .... And as for discrepancies with gravity, the deep borehole stuff is interesting but highly suspect. Moreover, all theories conflict with some experiments, because not all experiments are right." / LMK ObFutreWork: Lots of jobs for people with skill in melifluously and euphoniously persuading other people of the truth of things that we wish were true. - Mike Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~. _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
