Category: Science

Daily Pundit comments on a New York Sun article on the DDT panic that’s lead to millions of perfectly preventable malaria deaths. Here’s the part that he quotes:

[Pseudo]-science can be fatal. It’s estimated that since the ban of the insecticide DDT, more than 50 million people have died of malaria. A young aspiring journalist from the Bulls Head section of Staten Island is one of the latest victims. Akilah Amapindi, 23, contracted the disease while working as a radio intern in southern Africa.

… DDT was not a carcinogen. It did not harm humans. Indeed, it could be ingested. It was one of the most effective killers of disease-bearing mosquitoes.

Dr. Paul Müller, its inventor, was honored with the Nobel Prize in 1948.When it was introduced in Sri Lanka, cases of malaria dropped from 3 million in 1946 to just 29 in 1964. Five years after the DDT ban, the death rate had climbed back to more than a half-million a year.

I was still a teenager when “Silent Spring”was published,and all I knew at the time was that it was about bugs, so my interest level was nonexistent. But Rachel Carson has been lauded over the years as the matriarch of today’s militant environment movement.What is interesting to note is that many legitimate scientists have always condemned her book as a tissue of cleverly told lies designed to exclude any argument that challenged Carson’s conclusions.

J.Gordon Edwards was a professor of entomology at San Jose State University who testified in defense of DDT at hearings before the ban. He wrote an editorial in 1992 for 21st Century Science and Technology Magazine that was called “The Lies of Rachel Carson.” In it he pinpointed all of Carson’s deliberate obfuscations and faulty research, from the very beginning of “Silent Spring” to its end.

… Perhaps the best explanation for why junk scientists have so much success in promoting their hokum theories is that there are so many “intellectual morons” in the world of academia. An author, Daniel Flynn, in his latest nonfiction work, “Intellectual Morons — How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas,” coined that term.

The malaria scandal is a great example of people who mean well doing bad things because they’re too swept-up in the feeling of righteousness.

UPDATE: Commenters point out that Rachel Carson has arguably killed more people than Stalin. See the DDT FAQ here and this comment:

Communism did kill, Courtois and his fellow historians demonstrate, with ruthless efficiency: 25 million in Russia during the Bolshevik and Stalinist eras, perhaps 65 million in China under the eyes of Mao Zedong, 2 million in Cambodia, millions more Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America–an astonishingly high toll of victims. This freely expressed penchant for homicide, Courtois maintains, was no accident, but an integral trait of a philosophy, and a practical politics, that promised to erase class distinctions by erasing classes and the living humans that populated them.

Carson will soon catch up with Mao, the biggest mass killer of all time.

Partisan hack Paul Krugman attacks the president and the neo-cons on Intelligent Design today:

I’d like to nominate Irving Kristol, the neoconservative former editor of The Public Interest, as the father of “intelligent design.”

Duh, it’s not going to convince anyone, even with Panda’s Thumb drooling all over it.

Krugman is probably the least credible columnist writing in America today. The Lying in Ponds website has consistently ranked him number 1 or 2 on their objective partisanship scale. Any column he writes that mentions Bush or the Republicans in connection with any subject at all is properly understood simply as unprincipled political bashing, because that’s the dude’s raison d’etre.

So Krugman beating up on Bush over ID isn’t helpful to those of us who oppose ID. Similarly, Dawkins is getting carried away with his political partisanship, attacking Bush constantly even though he’s not an American. He went so far as to say that all Bush voters are “stupid”. And his work in the ID wars has lately become more and more soft.

The people best situated to attack Bush on ID are those who generally support him on the war, the economy, school choice, and that whole set of issues. And there’s been no shortage of attacks from this sector of the political spectrum (center and right) on the suggestion that ID be taught in biology classes. See Krauthammer for a good example:

Evolution is one of the most powerful and elegant theories in all of human science and the bedrock of all modern biology. Schönborn’s proclamation that it cannot exist unguided–that it is driven by an intelligent designer pushing and pulling and planning and shaping the process along the way–is a perfectly legitimate statement of faith. If he and the Evangelicals just stopped there and asked that intelligent design be included in a religion curriculum, I would support them. The scandal is to teach this as science–to pretend, as does Schönborn, that his statement of faith is a defense of science. “The Catholic Church,” he says, “will again defend human reason” against “scientific theories that try to explain away the appearance of design as the result of ‘chance and necessity,'” which “are not scientific at all.” Well, if you believe that science is reason and that reason begins with recognizing the existence of an immanent providence, then this is science. But, of course, it is not. This is faith disguised as science. Science begins not with first principles but with observation and experimentation.

And see any of the RINO blogs (Balloon Juice, Ace of Spades, Roger Simon, Jeff Jarvis, Protein Wisdom, Don Surber, etc.)

The fact is that politics by its very nature is the enemy of science, and neither side of the political spectrum has been immune to the abuse of science in the pursuit of its agenda. The junk social science that’s been churned out of left-leaning universities is a scandal of major proportions, much bigger than funny games with climatology or the work of the tiny little Disco Institute club.

Let me suggest that people who want to take on the cause of fighting ID would do well to check their other partisan beliefs at the door, lest they be confused for Unprincipled Krugmans. Similarly, religious people who want to spread their gospel would do well to stay out of science classrooms, because (as Krauthammer explains:)

To teach faith as science is to undermine the very idea of science, which is the acquisition of new knowledge through hypothesis, experimentation and evidence. To teach it as science is to encourage the supercilious caricature of America as a nation in the thrall of religious authority. To teach it as science is to discredit the welcome recent advances in permitting the public expression of religion. Faith can and should be proclaimed from every mountaintop and city square. But it has no place in science class. To impose it on the teaching of evolution is not just to invite ridicule but to earn it.

Criticisms of Christianity from snake-handling Buddhists carry no weight, and criticisms of evolution from those who reject science wholesale are similarly ephemeral.

The right is nutty about the new-fangled creationism called “Intelligent Design.” This is because religious people, some of them nuts, are an important part of the coalition, and nobody wants to offend them. So The New Republic did a survey, with some glee, exposing he creationism “wedge issue” for the entertainment of the left. This is fair game, because the whole creationist side is nutty. But turnabout is also fair play, so Todd Zywicki played a similar game with Evolutionary Psychology that made the knee-jerk left cry “foul,” mainly in the person P. Z. Myers, the idiot savant biologist who’s trapped firmly in the intellectual straight-jacket of radical feminism that will admit that no difference between men and women can be anything but the product of patriarchal oppression.

Here’s a bit from Zywicki:

As a policy question, there is one difference between religiously-motivated science on the left and the right may or may not be relevant. This is that the right’s program is to add new (dubious) ideas to the educational system (i.e., add intelligent design to the teaching of evolutionary theory) whereas the left’s goal is to censor and exclude investigation of certain (potentially explanatory) scientific hypotheses from the educational system. As a policy question, my sense is that most people ascribe to something like a “free marketplace of ideas” conceptualization of education, meaning that they would prefer to err on the side of including erroneous ideas if they are also countered by better ideas, rather than the exclusion of potentially true ideas. I personally would have no problem with excluding ID and including EP, but then I think that these investigations should be questions of science, not religion.

And a lame attempt at rejoinder from the Rainman, Myers:

And what a silly question! “Are there biological differences between the sexes?” I do agree that if any liberal pundit says no, he or she is as much an idiot as those conservatives who claim evolution didn’t occur. As for evolutionary psychology, I’m a biologist, and I’m in the camp that says it’s a load of poorly done hokum, so I’ll forgive Paul Krugman if he should think EP is junk; I’ll be less pleased if he says he agrees with it, but since EP does have many proponents in academe and is taught at places like Harvard, I’ll just have to roll my eyes and be understanding.

I love this sort of thing.

Anthropologists can finally begin the study of Kennewick Man:

A coalition of four tribes — the Umatilla, Yakama, Colville and Nez Perce — claimed the bones were covered by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act and belonged to the tribes.

U.S. District Judge John Jelderks and the appeals court, however, ruled the tribes could prove no direct link to the bones and the act did not apply.

The tribes have appealed the most recent 9th Circuit ruling, but attorneys involved in the case and Jelderks’ office said a decision still is pending. Calls to tribal officials were not immediately returned.

Legislation remains under consideration in Congress that would allow federally recognized tribes to claim ancient remains even if they cannot prove a link to a current tribe.

But trouble looms – the legislation, carried by the idiot McCain – will effectively put a stop to further examination of America’s past.

See Progressive Reaction for more on K-man.

This action alert is especially important.

H/t to reader Ruth and blogger Moira Breen.

Venture capital is so marvelous it can turn crap into gold:

A new Tukwila company has scored $8 million in financing to turn cow manure and trash into usable energy.

Prometheus Energy Co., which has kept a low profile for the past two years, is developing a new technology that transforms the methane gas produced at landfills, cow pastures and coal mines into a substitute for diesel fuel.

“What we do is take pollution and turn it into energy,” explained Daniel Clarkson, vice president of government and legal affairs at the startup. “We take waste gases … and through a freezing process turn that into liquid natural gas.”

In India they power stoves with methane from cow shit, but this process is much more exotic.

Thanks to reader Ruth for the tip.