Interview: Why Evolution is True with Jerry Coyne

Following on from my last two guest posts—The Insanity of Biotech by biochemist Paul Little, and Why I’m Through with Organic Farming by farmer Mike Bendzela—is this Q&A with evolutionary biologist Jerry A. Coyne who wrote the marvelous book, Why Evolution is True, and writes (extremely frequently) on his blog of the same name.

Evolution is one of those touchy subjects in the public sphere now (mainly in America) and I devote a chapter to debunking some of the more common myths surrounding the most important theory of the last 200 years in S3: Science, Statistics and Skepticism. But, given that I’m not an evolutionary biologist, I decided to steal some credibility from Jerry A. Coyne with this interview. Enjoy the read, and I hope that you, like me, learn something new.

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Fourat: Hi Jerry, It’s nice to meet you.

Jerry: Likewise.

F: I’ve been following your blog for some time now, ever since I got there by reading your post about religion and societal dysfunction, and I’ve been reading ever since. I find it great that someone from academia actually speaks with such candor. I feel it’s sorely missed in other parts of the academic sphere.

J: I’m old, so I have nothing to lose.

F: Fair enough. I just finished reading your book last christmas, Why Evolution is True. I actually thought I knew quite a lot about evolution until I read your book, and then I realized how much I didn’t know.

J: Well, I guess that’s good, not your ignorance, but the fact you learned something.

F: So, the main thing that I’ve noticed really with science is that people have a huge misconception about what it really is. They don’t know how scientists work, they don’t know why scientists are confident in facts and theories. So, if someone were to ask you the question; why do scientists believe—or understand—certain things that the public doesn’t really get. How would you respond?

J: Well, the public is fairly confident with most of the results of science. The things that they don’t get are the things they are opposed to on philosophical or religious grounds like evolution or cosmology. They get medicine; I mean, a lot of medicine is based on scientific research. So, I think, that to the extent they don’t understand science, they don’t understand that a scientific consensus is more than an opinion. That it actually comes from research, replication, review—that kind of thing. So, in the case of evolution, the most common opposition is that it’s only a theory, which comes from the lack of understanding from what we mean by scientific theory. I’ve often gone back and forth on the idea of whether or not you should give kids education not in science, but in critical thinking, and that would make them more understanding and accepting of science. But, I’ve just recently learned that courses like that don’t seem to work very well, so I don’t know what the solution is.

F: Is there any empirical data to suggest that courses like that don’t work very well.

J: Yeah, well, I saw some post on a website the other day that mentioned that, but I didn’t take note of the link. I know that one of my friends teaches a class in science vs. pseudoscience, which he finds extremely successful, so, I don’t think in principle those courses should not be successful. Everyone says this is the kind of course we need, but I’m not aware there are many such courses.

F: That might be something that needs to be looked at. So, in evolution, as in all sciences, there actually are debates between scientists on the details, and, of course, outsiders usually conflate these debates as saying the theory is crisis, but its not. What are the parts of evolution that are being debated between scientists; not that as evolution occurred, but how it occurred.

J: Well, there are lots. The part that everyone agrees on, let me underline in the beginning, is that evolution happened, it took billions of years, the Earth is 4.6 billion years old, and life has been here for at least 3.5 billion; that there is common ancestry of all forms of life because there is a branching bush of life, and that, in terms of the adaptive character of life was produced by the process of natural selection. So, those are the bedrock foundational principles of modern evolutionary theory, and those have not been called into question.

But, even Darwin was wrong on some of his predictions. He got genetics wrong, so it’s been evolving ever since, and we know a lot of things now. We know, for example, that birds evolved from dinosaurs, which Darwin didn’t know. We have a pretty good idea of the relatedness of living things and where they fit into the tree of life. The things that are being argued about are, does selection work in groups or individuals? That’s a big thing that E.O Wilson thinks group selection is the best explanation for human sociality. I came down on the individual selection side of that, but it’s still an unresolved debate.

A big one is how did life start. Many people don’t consider that a part of evolutionary biology, they consider evolutionary biology what happens once you get a replicator, but abiogenesis is a big unknown right now. We know life started once, we know roughly when it started, we don’t know the precise mechanism and we may never know, but at least we can approximate it.

There are questions about why there is sex, I mean, there is a profound disadvantage to having sexual reproduction. You lose half your genes if you mate with someone else as opposed to producing yourself. There are a lot of theories and some suggestions but no general consensus, but since sex is ubiquitous, then, explaining that would be really a good thing to do. Sexual selection and how it works, why males are ornamented and females are not; we have an idea of the basis of that because males don’t invest as much in their progeny, but it’s very hard to test those theories. There’s controversy about that. Actually, I wouldn’t call it controversy, since there aren’t people mad at each other.

F: Academic debate…

J: Yes, it’s academic debate. It’s not really acrimonious or anything. And, of course, one of the biggies is the evolution of consciousness, which is something that has eluded us, but I don’t think it will forever. Evolutionary psychology, how much of our present behaviour is caused by selection pressures that operated on our ancestors, so those are all debated questions that are unresolved. All these, in principle could either be solved or we could make substantial progress in.

F: So, in my book, I am trying to dispel a few of the myths of evolution. There are many facts in evolutionary science that are twisted and interpreted this way and that to support the Intelligent Design hypothesis and creationism, but what facts can’t be twisted or interpreted.

J: That’s a good question. Creationists are like theologians—in fact, they are connected through religion. There is nothing, there is no observation, I think that theologians or creationists cannot interpret through the lens of some kind of design. Never the less, there are things that they have trouble with, and, one of those, as I point out in my book, is the evidence of biogeography. It’s very, very hard to interpret that as creationist, and I still have not seen a definitive creationist interpretation of the kind of evidence that Darwin discovered of the distribution of plants and animals. I mean, why are we finding fossil marsupials in Australia; because they actually evolved in Europe or N. America and went through S. America to Australia. They happened to get there, and that’s why Australia has so many marsupials. The prediction was that they had to get to Australia somehow and, based on what we knew, Australia was connected to S. America through Antarctica, so the prediction was if marsupials transited from S. America to Australia, and sure enough, they found fossil marsupials in Antarctica not that long ago.

F: That’s amazing.

J: Yes, it’s a very predictive theory. There is no other theory, especially not one based on a creator unless you posit a creator who created things to make it look as if animals had moved and evolved, i.e., a trickster creator.

F: That doesn’t seem very omni-benevolent.

J: Yes, the other evidence is some of the fossil record, the finding of the intermediate whales. When I was in grad school, we knew that reptiles had ancestors to mammals—which, by the way creationists don’t address. And now we have an even better fossil record because we know that birds evolved from dinosaurs. So we have dinosaurs that can’t fly just at the right time, after the dinosaurs are already there and before we have modern birds. Same thing with whales, we see this whole intermediate group of whales about 45 million years ago, we have their ancestors and this whole series of animals losing their hind limbs, having their nostrils moved on top of the head, developing flippers, losing their ears, and not only do we have the fossil sequence, but it occurs in exactly the right time. The things with less hind-limbs occur more recently, so it’s hard to deal with that. Creationists just blather, but the fossil record is clear; the finding of dead genes is another. Why, in our genome, do we have all this DNA that doesn’t code for anything? Because they were once active genes that have been rendered inactive by mutation. I don’t know, I suppose if you were a creationist, you could say it happened during the fall. But if you posit a scientific explanation of biology, which even creationists are wont to do, and that’s what intelligent design is all about, trying to be scientific, then, you really come up empty trying to explain why a designer would act in such a way that exactly mimics evolution. So, you know, those are the big things, the fossil record, dead genes, and biogeography are things that creationists have an extremely tough time with.

F: It’s funny, before I read your book, it had been some time since school and evolution in science class. I kept hearing this claim, there are no transitional fossils, the missing links are not there. While I still of course believed and understood evolution, as soon as I read your book, I realized that the fossils actually are there, it’s not so much as their not dealing with them, they’re just denying that they exist in the first place, hoping that they will eventually go away. If they shout loud enough, people will just assume it, as happened to me though I still got evolution. It’s just fact-denying.

J: Yes, creationists tend to not listen, because if they would listen, they’d give up creationism and become evolutionary biologists, so they maintain creationism, and remember, this is all religiously based. If you have a religious opposition to evolution, it’s only two ways to go: you maintain it, where you have to dispel every bit of evidence that science comes up with, or you try to harmonize it like the accommodationists do. And that’s been very successful with many people. So, in terms of the fossils, if you have any interest in learning for yourself, there is a lot of stuff. My book is just the start, Donald Prothero’s book, Evolution: The Fossils Say Yes is magnificent. But, I mean, the fact is most people don’t want to investigate that. They either don’t have an interest in science, or they don’t listen to the scientists, they listen to their preacher, or they’re blind. Remember that, at least in America, 64% of Americans say if science came up with a fact that contradicted one of the tenets of their faith, they would reject that fact and keep their faith. So with that kind of attitude, would progress can you make?

F: Yes, I saw your statistics recently where you show that only 16% of Americans accept purposeless evolution by natural selection. Where do you think this is going to go in the future, do you think it’s going to get better?

J: There’s been an uptick to about 20% in the last decade in the naturalistic worldview. But, given that it starts so low, it’s not much of an actual percentage increase, it’s a couple of percent, but it’s only going to increase as fast as religion goes away. My view is that, you can educate people until their blue in the face about evolution; that’s what I tried to do in my book. You can lead them to the facts, but you can’t make them drink, and the reason is because they’ve already drunk at the well of religion. So, that’s why I’ve become more atheistic about religion in my old age, because I think that’s the thing that needs to go away before people start accepting evolution. Every creationist in the world is motivated by religion. I only know of one out of hundreds of thousands that is an atheistic creationist. So it’s always from religion, and religion gives these blinkers that stop you from receiving the facts. I think that acceptance of evolution is only going to increase in our country, the US, as fast as religion goes away. That’s why the US is so resistant to evolution, and why countries like France, England, and Scandinavia accept it a lot more—because they’re less religious.

F: And it seems to be in the last ten years that the none’s are the fastest growing demographic in America, so it would seem to be that acceptance of evolution should get better.

J: But it’s going to take a while because it will take a while for religion to loosen its grip. Certainly, not in my lifetime. It took a couple of hundred years in Europe, but because its happened in Europe, I’m confident because A: We know its happened, B: Those societies are fine, they’re not dysfunctional, in fact, they are better than American society, and C: I just see this march, from Stephen Pinker’s book, to increasing secularization and enlightenment in the world, and eventually, we won’t need religion anymore. I think it’ll happen.

F: Is that the Better Angels of our Nature?

J: Yes, he doesn’t talk much about the rise of atheism, but he shows that there has been an increase in morality. That’s his thesis. An increase in morality and rationality, the latter probably causing the former. And, with an increase in rationality comes a decrease in religion, which is profoundly anti-rational. I think it’s going to happen, though we might not be around to see it.

F: Well, I hope I am!

J: Well, if that happens, then we won’t have a problem with creationism anymore.

F: I look forward to that day. But, take me back to this atheist creationist. How does that compute?

J: There’s only one that I know of and that’s David Berlinski. Oh, there’s Thomas Nagel. He’s not an creationist—he just published a book—but he’s a philosopher in New York. I don’t think he’s an creationist but he embues evolution with some teleology and the book is execrable. I’ve read a part of it now and it’s been reviewed by evolutionists very negatively. So, I wouldn’t call him an atheist creationist, he’s an atheist; I’d call him an atheist teleologist because he doesn’t believe that there is necessary supernatural origin of things. So there is a few of them, but anybody who knows about activist creationism throughout the world, not only in the English speaking world but in Islamic countries like Turkey, knows it always come from religion. They just don’t like materialism.

F: It seems to me his thesis is that because science and natural selection by random mutation hasn’t yet understood consciousness, that evolution must be wrong. It seems to be a very short-sighted viewpoint.

J: That’s the god of the gaps argument. I mean, consciousness is the hard problem, but, everything we are learning about neuroscience tells us the mind is the brain and consciousness is part of the mind. The mind is what the brain does, as Steve Pinker put it, and consciousness is part of what the brain does. You can eliminate consciousness—I had a sinus operation a couple of years ago that got rid of my consciousness by putting a mask over my face, and they bought it back. Clearly, it’s a materialistic process and once we know that, we can start figuring out how it works and how it evolved. That’s going to be a long time to come but to say that because we don’t understand it now, is just the god of the gaps argument. Who was it, Robert Engelson who said “What we know is science, our ignorance is god.” We’re ignorant about consciousness, but look at the whole history of things that used to be impugned to god when we didn’t understand it. Newton thought that god pushed the planets around, kept them in their orbit. Before there was Darwin, God made the animals and plants, because we couldn’t conceive of how that could happen otherwise. So the best view when faced with a problem like consciousness is not to say there must be god, or there must be some teleological force that we don’t understand, it’s to say let’s work on it for a hundred years and see what we get. I’m absolutely confident that within the century, we’re not only going to know how consciousness works, we’ll be able to reproduce it, maybe in artificial intelligence.

F: That will be amazing. I know some futurists think your prediction is wildly conservative. Some say as soon as 20 years.

J: I doubt that. Neuroscience is a very, very difficult endeavour, and consciousness is a very slippery phenomenon.

F: It’s amazing that people haven’t caught on to the fact that when we don’t understand something, you don’t say something else did it, you just wait a little while longer for someone to discover it. If critical thinking classes ever come out on a wide-scale, this should be the main thesis, if you don’t understand something, don’t make up your mind beforehand.

J: Yes, and you certainly don’t say that God did. I just read a book by Carl Giebersan who is an evangelical Christian who paired up with Francis Collins, the most powerful scientist in America and head of the National Institute of Health, they wrote a book about reconciling Christianity and evolution, and in there they caution against this God of the Gaps argument. They say, look folks, don’t just say that God is ignorance, because science has made such progress, and then, in the last sections of the book, they use the fact that we don’t understand how human morality got there, and the fine-tuning of the Universe, those annoying physical principles, as evidence for God; so they violated their own dictum.

F: Cognitive dissonance.

J: Yes. I mean, if you’re going to find evidence for God, it’s not good to do it by saying we don’t understand something, therefore God did it. You need to give positive evidence for God, and not negative evidence. I’m just reading a book on that now by a philosopher called Philipse, God in the Age of Science. It’s probably next to Hoffman’s book, Critique of Philosophy and Religion. This is the best book on refuting religion that I’ve seen in the last couple of years, he is a Dutch Philosopher and it’s extremely thorough. He says what I just said, that you can’t find God in the gaps and you need to assert positive evidence for God and what is that positive evidence; and then he shows than there isn’t any.

F: I’ll put that on my reading list. [I still haven’t read it, it’s a $62 book!]

J: It’s a tough slog, but it’s well repays your effort.

F: You obviously deal with creationism quite often. I even watched a documentary featuring yourself, which took 5 creationists through California showing them all the evidence for evolution, so, what is your favourite argument against evolution that has no value?

J: The flood, I suppose. If you can explain the flood, then you have to be a creationist. That’s so easy to dismount, but you can see from that video that you can’t even make any headway with a real creationist. That was my part in that program was to argue with the creationist about the flood, but you know, four out of the five of them wouldn’t bend.

F: And one of them cried…

J: Yeah, I taught a class in the University of Maryland on evolution vs creationism. On Monday, I would lecture as an evolutionist on things like radiometric dating; then, on Wednesday I’d come on, and because I knew the literature so well, I’d argue as a creationist, and tell them “Everything I told you on Monday was completely wrong, Here’s the facts.” And the students would be completely confused. And on Friday we’d sit down and discuss them. You know, they would be confused but the thing that really turned their minds around eventually was flood geology, because it’s so ludicrous to think that the sorting of animals and plants in the fossil record is due to a flood incident. To think that there wouldn’t be a few humans washed down into the Cambrian; why the whales stay on top with the other mammals instead of at the bottom with the fishes. It didn’t make any sense, so at that point the students started realizing that this is all a put-up job by religion and at the end of the class, a lot of the creationists had come around to evolution because of that argument, but none of them had gone the other way, so I was quite pleased with that.

F: That’s amazing, it just goes to show you can educate people, and that evolution is falsifiable. I keep hearing that Karl Popper quote that evolution is not falsifiable, so therefore bladdy blah blah.

J: Yes, Popper changed his mind on that. Eventually, later on, he come around to realizing that evolution was falsifiable. And, I have a list in a talk I gave of 10-15 things that would falsify evolution, so, it’s definitely falsifiable; there’s lots of observations that could show it to be wrong; we just haven’t seen any. That’s why I say it’s true in the scientific meaning of the word.

F: What are some of those things that might falsify it?

J: The first one is fossils in the Cambrian, lack of genetic variation, and any adaptation in one species that evolved for the use of another species. There’s a whole list of them. You could make these observations but they haven’t been made. Evolution is true in the scientific sense in that it’s accepted so wildly and there is no contradictory evidence, so you have to be perverse to reject it. That’s Stephen J. Gould’s notion of scientific truth.

F: Has there ever been an argument against evolution that stumped for longer than a few minutes?

J: Well, there have been facts, no arguments because I’m familiar with them, but when I started out my career, there were all these facts that creationists, like Dwayne Gibs, would throw at you, and, because, as a scientist you have one field, you’re not an expert in physics, so you couldn’t easily answer them. But, they were never obviously convincing. One of them found a living snail whose shell was dated at 15,000 years ago, so how can you trust radiometric dating; it’s crap was the implication there. But I found out that the snail had been eating limestone, and the limestone incorporated itself into the shell and the date come from the ancient material that it incorporated into its body. Nowadays, there’s nothing that I can hear that stumps me for more than a few minutes. That’s what the internet is great for. There’s all these websites with refutations of creationist arguments in them.

F: Yes, but few people actually check those websites. More people end up on a theologian’s website or a creationist website than a science website.

J: Yeah, maybe.

F: Well, thank you very much for your time. I do have one last question however. Where do you get all the time to write? You write blog posts every single day.

J: I do it between 6am and 8am. I get up about 5am, which I normally do anyway. Get to work by 6am, then I have a strict regiment where I write from 6am to 8am, all the post for the day, and I’ll just post them. Occasionally, something will strike me and I’ll take a few minutes to write a post and put it out. I got to do my day job as well so, doing a blog, or website, has opened a lot of doors for me, I’ve gotten a lot of people, gotten a lot of invitations through writing that blog that I haven’t got through academia, and it gives me a chance to work out my ideas on religion and stuff. I have a very good group of commenters who criticize me, they’re very smart. I’m glad I do it, it just makes life a little bit hairy.

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All in all, I hope you learnt a little about evolution, why it’s true, and if you still have doubts, make sure to check out Jerry’s book, which is a very informative and easily laid out read. He goes in detail (thankfully, entertainingly) on the evidence for evolution and why that evidence can only be interpreted in one way: evolution is true. Thanks for reading.

P.S. I’ll still be giving out free copies of Random Rationality to anyone who emails me his or her S3: Science, Statistics and Skepticism receipt, until my next post as I’ll be going back to my regular postings. Don’t ask me when my next post will be, could be tomorrow, next week, or next month. It’s as random as the subjects I cover, so if you want both books for a buck, get S3 now. What do you have to lose? At the very worst, you’ll learn some science.

Guest Post: Why I’m Through with Organic Farming

Following on from my last guest post, The Insanity of Biotech by biochemist Paul Little, Mike Bendzela is the author of this guest post. These guest posts have been tangentially exploring similar subjects I have in my book, but in different directions; and this post explores organic farming. In S3: Science, Statistics and Skepticism, I lightheartedly tackle the naturalistic fallacy and use some bad (and funny) statistics that purposefully confuse correlation with causation, intending to teach a lesson. As I was writing the book, Mike Bendzela reached out to me with his organic story that sprouts off from that Correlation chapter, and it is a supremely informative read. (A bit long, well worth it, and you’re used to long articles from me anyway.)

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Why I’m Through with Organic Farming

by Mike Bendzela of Dow Farm Enterprise

“It’s not what goes into your mouth that defiles you;

you are defiled by the words that come out of your mouth.”

– Jesus of Nazareth

For twenty-five years I was a self-styled organic gardener. I say “self-styled” because I didn’t need certification as I wasn’t marketing produce. And by “organic” I mean “too lazy and cheap to buy fertilizers and pesticides.” So I maintained a perennial compost heap and harvested the produce the insects didn’t eat. We ate the leftovers.

Then there was the cheating: The first year that I grew potatoes, I had zero Colorado potato beetles. The second year, I had a jar full. The third year, I had a continent’s worth and had to nuke them with Rotenone dust. I decided to stop growing potatoes for a while.

“But,” the organic people would say, “Rotenone is an organically-approved pesticide.” [Fourat: Fun fact, rotenone is just as toxic as DDT.]

Which leads directly to my point:

The older I get, the more I like food, the more I hate bullshit.

A season in hell

In July of 2010 four of us started Dow Farm, named after the ancestral owners of the land we farm. We would be a small market farm and CSA, the trendy “Community Supported Agriculture,” but we’d just call it a subscription club. Save the Syllables.

I was still working at an organic farm, learning the central pleasures and evils of farming at a scale larger than gardening. Helping to run Dow Farm would mean having to quit this summer job that I really liked and probably taking a significant hit in the wallet for a while.

Would we be certified or not? Certification is a three-year process, the materials are more expensive, and the methods are more labor-intensive. These stresses of organic certification come on top of a central fact of life for Maine farmers: The weather around here is just awful.

The crap we had to endure in 2011 just to get plants into the ground six weeks late meant that if we were going to limit our options to “organically-approved” ones, the reasons had better be good. I decided the best way to research the value of gaining certification was to go to the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association (MOFGA) website, and read the “fact sheets” and the manual.

I found the philosophy of the organics movement to be a barrel raft covered in loose planks. In trying to justify their beliefs, they pile on the claims (planks), each of which rests on a different assumption (barrel). And when one claim is questioned, they simply jump to another plank on the raft and try to hold it all together. Sadly, for the investigator, dismantling a raft of claims requires a crew of rebuttals.

It took awhile for all those planks to be yanked away from me, one by one, and for the barrels to disperse and sink.

The origins of the “organic” vs. “chemical” false dichotomy

In the early 19^th century, “Vitalism” reigned. This was the belief that certain materials could only be produced through a mysterious “vital force” in living organisms; hence, “organic” substances were those derived from organisms and their products. Then a German scientist, Fredrick Wöhler, synthesized urea, a component of urine, in a laboratory without having to pee in a bottle. Goodbye Vitalism.

These “mysterious” materials turned out to be the results not of a vital force but of the properties of good old carbon. So the term “organic” came to describe the chemicals based around the carbon atom.

The organic farmers parted ways with the organic chemists around the turn of the century, with “organic” gaining positive connotations and “chemical” negative ones. This commenced with the German mystic Rudolph Steiner and his “Anthroposophic” movement, which includes “biodynamic” farming, a school that believes the farm should be seen as a “holistic” organism that needs to be balanced with various astrological forces. Some ways of achieving this “balance” include shunning “synthetic chemicals” and burying manure-stuffed cow’s horns to focus cosmic energy into the earth.

Today we have the government-sanctioned term “organic” to describe a veritable Leviticus of “Allowed” and “Prohibited” practices that are put into place to ensure that a farm is, well, organic. The term now conflicts with the scientific, chemical definition in just about every way.

For example: a chemically organic, naturally-occurring pesticide produced in Kenya, pyrethrum, is declared “organic” even though it decimates bees, but a likewise chemically organic pesticide native to the North America, nicotine sulfate, is not “organic.”

A synthetically produced, chemically organic fungicide, Captan, is declared not “organic,” but the synthetically produced, chemically inorganic fungicide copper sulfate is declared “organic.”

Go figure. Nowadays, if someone asks if our food is “organic,” I say, “Sure, it’s carbon-based.”

Mother Nature, Bad Parent

Not only are absurdities uttered with a straight face, contradictions are simply codified as “standards.” A central fault of organics is the Naturalistic Fallacy, the belief that substances derived from nature are better than those created by humans. Well, sometimes, anyway. Maybe not.

The USDA’s National Organics Program, which began with an Act of Congress in 1990, articulates the fallacy this way:

“As a general rule, all natural (non-synthetic) substances are allowed in organic production and all synthetic substances are prohibited. The National List of Allowed Synthetic and Prohibited Non-Synthetic Substances, a section in the regulations, contains the specific exceptions to the rule.” [emphasis mine]

In other words, natural substances are OK, unless they’re not OK; and synthetic substances are not OK, unless they’re OK. One can only stand in wonder at how high the manure has been piled in this case, all the way up to the United States Department of Agriculture, in fact.

“Allowed Synthetics” are rationalized this way:

(1) The substance cannot be produced from a natural source and there are no organic substitutes

(2) The substance’s manufacture, use, and disposal do not have adverse effects on the environment and are done in a manner compatible with organic handling….

In other words: Mother Nature doesn’t always provide us the protection we need to farm successfully. In fact, She regularly supplies pestilence, disease and infection. If you’re an orchardist, the fungi are your mortal enemy and you have to spray fungicides or your orchard is doomed. So please just be careful with that copper sulfate, which can accumulate in the soil and cause organ damage if ingested.

How about if all farmers agree to use any substance, natural or synthetic, in a way that minimizes adverse effects on health and the environment? In other words, follow the doggone label.

“Teh pesticides!”

Something I read on MOFGA’s website, a “Pesticides Quiz,” really bothered me:

“The EPA performs toxicity tests on pesticides prior to registration.

False: Toxicity tests are performed neither by the EPA nor by independent laboratories contracting with the EPA. Pesticide manufacturers provide the data that the EPA bases its judgments on. There is an inherent conflict of interest between EPA’s need for unbiased data and the manufacturers’ need for data that show their products are not hazardous.”

How does a lay person check out such a claim? I Googled “Pesticides” and “Maine” and got Maine Board of Pesticides Control as the top hit. I called the number there and got Dr. Lebelle Hicks, Toxicologist. Dr. Hicks seems delighted to have a real citizen asking her questions.

Summarizing her reply to the scary MOFGA claim: It is true only as far as it goes. But it’s not the EPA’s job to test the compounds that manufacturers wish to market; that would mean taxpayers paying for the testing of products that the corporations will profit from. It is the EPA’s job to set the tolerances for residues and to review the data submitted by the manufacturers according to strict guidelines. Laboratories contracting with the manufacturers perform such tests.

This conversation came sometime after a discombobulating experience I had while working at the organic farm: I was required to attend a workshop upcountry to be certified . . . as a pesticides handler.

So a group of us drove up to MOFGA’s fairground, where the MBPC’s Gary Fish, Manager of Pesticide Programs, gave us a PowerPoint on how to read pesticide labels and how to follow what’s written on them. Calling this an instance of “cognitive dissonance” is putting it mildly. It’s true:Organic farmers use pesticides and they have to follow the same laws as non-organic farmers. No amount of special pleading (“But they’re natural!”) negates this fact.

At Dr. Hicks’ advice, I eventually studied for and received a private pesticides applicator license in Maine. This year, in spite of the weather, we have had the best apples, ever.

“GMOs? OMG!”

From MOFGA’s manual:

Genetic engineering (recombinant DNA technology) is a synthetic process designed to control nature at the molecular level, with the potential for unforeseen consequences. As such, it is not compatible with the principles of organic agriculture (either production or handling). Genetically engineered/modified organisms (GEO/GMOs) and products produced by or through the use of genetic engineering are prohibited.

This prohibition is articulated by the NOP as well:

A variety of methods to genetically modify organisms or influence their growth and development by means that are not possible under natural conditions or processes and are not considered compatible with organic production.

Question: As one of the partners of Dow Farm daily injects himself with insulin that is produced through recombinant DNA technology, does this mean he can never consider himself an “organic” farmer? (Not that he cares at this point.)

The idea that “the principles of organic agriculture” do not “control nature at the molecular level” and do not have “the potential for unforeseen consequences” is a classic instance of the one who judges the gene splice in another’s eye while not seeing the cloned apple tree lodged in one’s own eye.

The anti-GMO crowd simply cannot separate their loathing for a specific corporation, Monsanto, from the science of recombinant DNA technology. Presumably, because “Monsatan” is Bad, the papaya farmers of Hawaii should cut down their groves of trees engineered to resist ring spot virus, beta-carotene-fortified Golden Rice should continue to be withheld from children who will go blind from Vitamin A deficiency, and GE vaccines should be flushed down the toilet.

Plant pathologist Pamela C. Ronald and organic farmer R. W. Adamchak, have done an admirable job in their book “Tomorrow’s Table” arguing that the aims of genetic engineering and organic farming are not necessary at odds. They believe the two can coexist.

However, such a prospect brings to mind the words “snowball” and “hell.”

If it quacks, it’s probably organic

In the Fall of 2000, I got to experience a weekend at the Common Ground Fair, MOFGA’s agricultural event, as a helper at some friends’ farmers market booth. People drive in from all over New England to eat organic spelt crepes, experience organic aromatherapy, and buy twenty-dollar-a-pound organic seed garlic.

MOFGA had just moved to their beautiful new digs in Unity, Maine, and it was enjoyable roaming the grounds between shifts to watch fields being plowed with teams of horses; to gawk at produce and price tags; and to hear lectures on how bio-dynamic beekeepers care for the “bee soul.” Hilariously, coffee vendors not permitted on the fairgrounds hang around outside the gates like ticket scalpers. They do a brisk business pre-caffeinating fair goers addicted to this 100% natural substance.

I caught sight of something called The Whole Life Tent. Entering, I was amazed to find myself surrounded by Reflexologists, Naturopathic Doctors, Homeopaths, Reiki practitioners, and other “modalities” by which one may become “moral, united, integrated, and balanced.” I was unsure what any of this had to do with agriculture.

To my dismay, I realized that what the panoply of fried dough, stuffed animals, and monster trucks is to Maine’s largest commercial fair, the Fryeburg Fair, the whole raft of alternative medical scams is to the Common Ground Fair—a necessary evil to get non-agricultural types to attend. Only much later, when I opened the manuals, did I discover that this disorder is not limited to the fair grounds.

Both MOFGA and the NOP make it clear that livestock must not be subject to the “routine use of synthetic medications.” Antibiotics cannot be used “for any reason.” And yet:

“Producers are prohibited from withholding treatment from a sick or injured animal; however, animals treated with a prohibited medication may not be sold as organic.”

So an animal treated with appropriate medications is thereby rendered unclean.

OK, whatever. There are other ways of treating your animals that pass “organic” muster, according to “Raising Organic Livestock in Maine: MOFGA Accepted Health Practices, Products and Ingredients.” In case of mastitis, for instance, you could have the cow take “garlic internally, 1 or 2 whole bulbs twice a day” or put “dilute garlic in vulva” (using Nitrile gloves made in Thailand, one hopes). Then there are the “Homeopathic remedies, Bryonia, Phytolacca,” and other letters of the alphabet.

However, you must not use Bag Balm for any reason whatsoever.

“Go organic”: slander a farmer

At Maine’s Agricultural Trades Show in Augusta in January, we got to mingle with other farmers, big and small, and to attend workshops on combating pests and Internet marketing.

In the Exhibition Hall, I found myself standing behind two young women in wool grilling a commercial apple orchardist about his spraying practices. He was trying to explain to them that he kept both “organic” and “conventional” plots and that the “organic” trees actually needed to be sprayed more often because of the transitory nature of “organic” pesticides. This increased his costs in both chemicals and fuel, which was reflected in the price of his apples. The women then sidled off to another booth. I asked him if they “got it.” He issued a flat “No.”

I had just published an editorial on the remarkable irony that MOFGA, the group that itself defined the sharp divide between “organic” and “conventional” farmers, was complaining about feeling excluded from an event at the show. This event, called “Convergence = Sustainability,”was billed as “bringing all farmers together to talk about common issues.” It was apparently not enough that an entire day of the show was called “MOFGA day.” They seemed to want “conversion,” not mere “convergence.”

In response to the Convergence = Sustainability flap, MOFGA published an editorial with the following contemptible passage:

Why would organic growers and consumers want to converge with conventional agriculture, as the title of a Maine Agricultural Trades Show session, held in January, suggested? Craving the Organophosphate-Arsenic-Laced Special for dinner?

There seems to be no limit to the calumnies organics advocates will heap on non-certified farmers. Maine’s organic guru Eliot Coleman derides non-organic farmers as “chemical farmers” who supposedly believe that “nature is inadequate.” He rehashes the 19^th fallacy of “chemical” versus “biological,” dismissing the whole agricultural discipline of plant pathology as “plant-negative.”

Members of the Organic Consumers Association also employ the derisive term “chemical farmers” in their screeds. They even come right out and say that local foods not “organically-produced” are unsafe and that consumers should shun their local farmer who is not certified organic. Their modus operandi is to frighten people into buying organic.

“Non-organic farmers and feedlot operators are literally poisoning us and our children…”

The belief armor of such ideologues is so strong that the concept of “dose” doesn’t penetrate. Organic devotees endow “pesticide residues” with seemingly supernatural powers of corruption while simply ignoring the fact that our diets are full of poisons. To them it doesn’t matter, as Bruce N. Ames and Lois S. Gold have shown, that “99.99% of the pesticides humans ingest are natural.”

It doesn’t matter that fungicides protect us from one of the most potent carcinogens known, aflatoxins produced by molds; what matters are the hypothetical effects of micro-grams of fungicides found on apples, as promulgated by such organizations as the execrable Environmental Working Group.

It doesn’t matter that another potent carcinogen, benzo(a)pyrene, is ubiquitous in cooked foods. Instead of considering, by twisted “organic” logic, that this morning’s hot coffee and toast is a cancer cocktail crossing her placental barrier, a pregnant mother propagandized into being afraid of non-organic food will strap her babies into car seats and drive miles to avoid “chemical” farmers and their products.

Surviving the end of oil, organically

The last plank of the organic barrel raft to be removed unceremoniously from my grasp was the “sustainability” claim. In spite of what I knew were absurdities in the organic movement, I still believed that organic farming would be the only option left to us in a “post peak oil world.” Oil-based farming was clearly unsustainable; as oil becomes rarer and more expensive, we will have to find more sustainable ways to farm, and organic is waiting in the wings to save the day.

I accepted that peak oil was imminent, if not here already, and that this would mean the disappearance of “industrial,” “petroleum-based” agriculture, along with the wholesale decline in the accoutrements of contemporary civilization (i. e. well-stocked supermarkets). But having followed the alleged End of Oil for almost a decade now, I’ve amended my position to “maybe,” even “I don’t know.”

The peak oil “collapse,” always just around the corner, never seems to happen. This doesn’t mean “peak oil is a myth”; rather, it means the catastrophic effects have been over-sold, sort of like the media-hyped “comet of the century” Kohoutek in the 1970s, which fizzled out.

Besides, it doesn’t follow from the decline of oil that organic farming will rise. Organic foods have always been more expensive to produce, even in a regime of low oil prices, than supposedly “oil-based” foods. Organic farmers have fuel bills, too, and they are virtually addicted to plastics, so in the predicted expensive oil future, organic prices will continue to outpace conventional prices.

It doesn’t even follow that organic methods are more “sustainable” than “conventional” ones. My deconversion from this last plank of belief has been preserved for posterity in an exchange with Robert Carroll of the Skeptics Dictionary, under his entry on “organic (food and farming).” He says:

“…the problems we will face will probably be exacerbated if we went totally organic. Think of how much more land we would have to use to feed the world’s population. Where is this land going to come from? Clear-cutting rainforests?

…organic farming could feed the world if population stopped or receded, but that is unlikely to happen any time soon. Conventional farming of genetically modified crops may be the only hope for feeding the billions more that are likely to be added to world population within the next 50 years.”

The alleged “sustainability” of organics for a “post oil future” is an instance of an ideologically-based movement co-opting a genuine issue (“peak oil”) and casting it in apocalyptic terms in order to make salvationist claims for itself.

The end of the matter

In the end, there is nothing particularly wrong with the methods sanctified as “organic”—the food produced is as good as any other food—but it turns out that just about every other utterance that issues from the organic movement and its acolytes is an absurdity, a contradiction, a misrepresentation, a slander, or a fib.

I phrase the Jesus quote at the beginning this way:

“It’s not what goes into your pie holes that’s the problem. It’s what comes out of your pie holes that’s the problem.”

So if you currently buy your fresh produce from your local organic farmer and you really like it, continue to do so. Just tell them to cut the crap, along with their prices.

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All in all, a fantastically, informative read. Just as we should be wary of Big Ag, Big Pharma, and Big Government when they assert, by fiat, that so-so equals bladdy-blah, so should it be of Big Organic when they assert their methods use no pesticides, less-intensive pesticides, is automatically better because it’s au naturale (wild almonds anyone? They contain cyanide), or, any other contradictory occurrences. I believe Rob Hart has said it best: “The world has changed. We don’t live anything like our ancestors. We don’t work like them, talk like them, think like them, travel like them, or fight like them. Why on earth would we want to eat like them.”

Thanks for the guest post Mike. And don’t forget, if you buy S3: Science, Statistics and Skepticism, I’ll give you Random Rationality: Expanded free (which cost 3 times as much). Just email me your receipt (you’ll find my email at my author website). Thanks for reading.

Guest Post: The Insanity of Biotech

In my fervor to have my science book, S3: Science, Statistics and Skepticism, reviewed by scientists (so I wouldn’t make a fool of myself), I reached out to Paul Little, a biochemist by trade. In our ensuing exchange, he offered to write me a guest post: The Insanity of Biotech. Here it is verbatim, you’ll find it very illuminating.

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The Insanity of Biotech

Paul Little of Little eBook Reviews

In 1990(ish) I saw a film in the career department of my school that was simply called “Pharmaceutical”. It was a true piece of propaganda that I could not possible see through at the time. Men (and some women) in white lab coats drew chemical structures on the board and ‘designed’ the next new great drug. “Let’s just try putting a phenyl group here…” This is the biggest single driving quotation that I recall. There was simplicity in those few words. It seemed so trivial; all I need to do was learn to draw chemical structures and make bold suggestions and the world will be mine! Of course, from one end to the other it is nonsense. Chemistry is not as easily tamed as a humble white board. The word “just” is so misplaced when one considers the implications on a molecular level. How is it possible to persuade 6.022 x 1017 molecules (we often work on the millimolar scale) to dance to one’s tune? You cannot is the answer, they are not thought driven and they do not have what it takes to be persuaded. They follow the energy and do what chaos dictates: you get a mess, is what I am saying.

It took another eight years of chemistry training to be fully cognizant of the fact that molecules are more like cats than like dogs. You cannot train them, but you can make it seem like they are doing what you want by making the conditions right so that what they want is what you want, or will accept!

So “just” putting a phenyl group there can be a very lengthy exercise and need not ever actually happen!

Let us describe now the pharmaceutical development process: imagine for a minute that you are a molecule and you are eaten by a human, what do you see and where do you go? Imagine that you are supposed to make your way to a single receptor that sits on a particular cell type in a specific organ and you are to do one job, get out, do not get caught. It all sounds very ‘Mission Impossible’ and somehow it is. The human body is a magnificently complex place and there are huge challenges for Doctor Molecule wherever he goes. The good Doctor can get stuck in fat, or never make it out of the stomach, be chewed up by the liver or rapidly sent out to the bladder. Of course the other side to the story is Mister Chemical. All drugs are chemicals, all life is organized chemistry, but for the sake of this metaphor Mister Chemical could attack the body, or disrupt it balance, do more harm than good and even kill the body if enough friends are present. The pharmaceutical development process is the long road from the lab bench to the bed side where hundreds of studies are undertaken to assess the good qualities of Doctor Molecule and the bad qualities of Mister Chemical. If the balance is right and there is separation between the good side and the darker impulses than clinical trials begin and the lucky few will get permission to be marketed.

This few, this lucky few, this pharmacopoeia is the result of a huge effort. It is estimated that 95-97 % of all projects will end in failure, 80% or more of all medicinal chemists (the cat herders) will never work on a project that leads to a marketed drug. Some time ago it was often quoted that 10000 compounds were synthesized for each drug that is marketed. That number had grown substantially since the development of new synthetic techniques. Try to imagine 10000 struggles to “just” put a phenyl group there. Try to consider the huge amount of data that is published each day that goes into the hundreds of scientific journals covering every aspect of this crazy world. All of the data combined is used to make the best possible guesses as to which phenyl group should go where and what disease should be treated in which way. It is a mind-boggling pit of insanity to dive into and expect that one will succeed.

So why do we do it? The answer is the same as the lottery: to win, because the rewards of success greatly outweigh the insanity of the small chance of attaining that success. For some of us it is also the “because it is there” drive to do something unusual and to potentially make a big difference in people’s lives.

The biotech industry is the modern answer to the problem of this insanity, insofar as biotech is meant to mean small, highly focused companies with a very small number of projects. The point being that the individual drive of the people to make the individual projects a success is supposed to develop them faster, give them a higher chance of success or to fail faster and be cheaper doing so.

Why do I do this insane job of biotech? The answer is because I can. Somehow the last dozen years in this industry have given me the skills to understand that working for five to ten years on a project that can fail tomorrow is OK  The uncertainty is substantial, but when it works the benefits are enormous. Biotech is a business, and the only business I know that has to invest so much money, for so long without any certainty at all of any form of success. Which success stories should I quote to end this piece, to show that biotech has a benefit through the madness: it could be many: insulin for diabetics, cancer therapies that increase life expectancy, treatments for HIV infection, a whole pharmacopoeia of remedies that I hope that you will never need but is designed to be there in case you do.

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Very enlightening, and Little’s field shows just how flexible, malleable, and amiable scientists need to be to accommodate to the changing nature of chemical science. Without chemistry, we wouldn’t have vaccines, medicine, fuel, and many other necessary, sometimes life-saving, products that make our lives easier. Thanks Paul, for being a scientist, and being generous enough to read my book, review it, and guest posting to my site.

You can check out Paul’s website, Little Book Reviews, where he reviews books. Additionally, my book, S3: Science, Statistics and Skepticism was just released on Kindle and you can buy it for $0.99. It’s sitting at #13 and #22 for the Nonfiction “Science Reference” and “Science and Math reference” sections. (Help me reach #1, pretty please.) And, don’t forget, if you buy it and email me your receipt, I’ll send you Random Rationality: Expanded free. (My email address can be found on my author website here.)

Thanks for reading.

S3: Science, Statistics and Skepticism

I have just released my second book, S3: Science, Statistics and Skepticism. It goes for $0.99 on Amazon. Here’s the blurb:

“Does Homeopathy work? Are GMOs dangerous? Is climate change really happening, or is it a hoax as claimed by many? This book will help you navigate the twisted shores of pseudoscientific territory and cut through the nonsense to find the good science.

I’m Fourat, and I think good, peer-reviewed, replicable science should be the pride of humanity. Yet, for some reason it’s not. Join me on this mini-adventure as I help you navigate the confusing, jargon-filled, and treacherous arena of science and the outfits trying to coat themselves in its respectable veneer. By the end of this book, they won’t be able to hide their nonsense from you any longer.

Learn why homeopathy is wrong, climate change is happening, vaccines are safe, western medicine is doing us just fine, why evolution is true, among a few others. Find out what makes good science good, and pseudoscience pseudo. The success of science should be one of humanity’s proudest achievements, but, somehow it isn’t. Explore the bad and the good on this little journey, and have fun while you’re at it.”

Here’s the link one more time, and if you do buy it, and like it, or not, please consider leaving a review. Either way, it helps. Either by helping me write a better book next time, or helping me sell more books this time. Over the next week or two, I’ll be putting up a guest post from a biochemist and then a Q&A with an evolutionary biologist, both of which complement a few of the subjects I tackle in the book. Stay tuned.

And, lastly, thank you to my subscribers. For the life of me, I don’t know why you all listen to me, but apparently some of you do and that makes me happy. Thanks for reading, commenting, and sharing. You guys are awesome. Special thanks to John Zande who runs a marvelous blog writing sketches on atheism for his enormous help in proof-reading the first crappy drafts of S3. Many thanks go to Ryan Culpeper, who writes on history and religion with alarming clarity, for providing an early review. Also, Rhys Chellew, who writes on everything under the sun, for fact-checking the science and correcting me in multiple arenas; I don’t think I’ve ever met a mind that works so fast and knows so much. And to the enigmatic physicist David Yerle who, in a sense, peer-reviewed my book and set me straight on a few occasions too. Of course, where would I be without thanking my awesome girlfriend who, at critical moments, boosts my confidence to continue writing on tough days, thanks love! And again, thanks to all my readers. Though I don’t say it enough, I really do appreciate that you’re here.

P.S. If you buy S3, and email me your receipt (which you can find on the contact section of my author website), I’ll give you Random Rationality: Expanded (which actually costs more, but hey, I couldn’t think of a good reason why I shouldn’t).

What is the Future of Pseudoscience?

“We live in an age of information, it is said again and again. But that doesn’t mean we live in an age of good information” ~ Rebecca Rosen

The above quote nicely sums up where we are right now. We need better ways of analyzing the veracity and integrity of the multitudes of information we meet with everyday in greater quantity. Skeptical readers perusing the Internet try, and often fail—not that it’s a bad thing, it only shows their human—to separate the good information from the bad information; the good science from the bad science; and the meaningful statistics from the meaningless statistics. This paradigm, of needing to verify and to fact-check everything, is going to change soon. Some time ago, I had the clever little thought—I don’t have many so I have to cherish them—that one day soon, someone will invent, or create, the Universal Fact Checker (UFC), most likely, as a browser plugin (an app for your browser that performs a task). Recently, something similar has been created, but I’ll get to explaining that shortly. First, I want to explain what I think the UFC will be. I envision it as an artificial intelligence (AI) that scours what you read informing you of dubious, false, or outdated claims, providing instant fact-checking on the spot—just as Fact Check does for US politicians; just like medicine does to snakes oilmen; and what science does to non-science. The key difference being is that it is with you at all times at the point of contact, as you absorb new information. You will not have to seek it out, or even to remember to seek it out, it will just be there karate-chopping bullshit in the face, like Penn & Teller, but, always there. Let’s face it, how many of us spot-check everything we learn? Not a single one of us. There simply isn’t enough time to do so even if you wanted to, and even if you had to. In such scenarios that we are in almost every day, the logical solution is not to accept it as fate, but to invent a technology that alleviates the problem—inability to check and retain every piece of information provided to us—and performs the necessary tasks orders of magnitude better than we could.

How Might It Work?

Picture this: imagine you’re reading some pseudoscientist’s take on autism, intelligent design, theistic evolution, quantum healing, or whatever other woo you can shake a scientific stick at, but never makes it goes away (as not everyone will read it, or even have the scientific training to understand it) but, as you browse and absorb, your trusty little UFC scours ahead, subjecting every word, statistic, number, sentence, and paragraph on the page against empirical, peer-reviewed science and academic works highlighting the paragraphs that profess false certainties or provide dubious claims. In other words, MMA’ing the hell out of pseudoscience (I had to put a bad pun in somewhere). Only the strongest claims—evidence-based claims—will survive; what we would otherwise call good science; which is, what we would otherwise call—for lack of a better word—the truth.

Consider an example: (1) A website details the increase in autism rates in the last several decades (true). (2) It then goes on to say vaccines contain thimerosal (partially true). (3) It, then, continues on to say that since thimerosal contains the neurotoxin mercury (true), comes to the conclusion: (4) vaccines cause autism (false). So, how might the UFC access such a claim?

(1) The first section, after having been UFC-assessed, remains untouched because there really has been an uptick in autism rates. Though, if you happen to hover your mouse over it, you will be informed that much of the uptick has been due to a redefinition of autism, and, doctors becoming more aware of autism, thereby, increasingly diagnosing it instead of the condition going unseen or misdiagnosed. So, it is quite likely that the uptick in autism rates is not really an uptick at all, but merely, properly accounting for it for the first time, though still comparing it to the previous underestimated counts. (Of course, it will also tell you that it is a hypothesis, the leading hypothesis, but still not decidedly proven, yet far in advance of any other leading hypothesis.)

(2) The second section being somewhat factually based, is highlighted in orange. As a curious observer you, again, hover your mouse over the highlighted paragraph and a side-bar appears informing you that thimerosal was removed from vaccines by the summer of 2001, excepting the flu and tetanus shots. So, the statement, being as it is a generalization, has tried to lull you into a false certainty—and in this case, failed. You become slightly more suspicious of everything else the article professes to know.

(3) You move on to the third section, and notice that, it too, is highlighted in orange, with a sidebar informing you that methyl-mercury is a neurotoxin, but it (methyl-mercury) is not found in those few vaccines that still contain thimerosal (or any vaccine that ever contained thimerosal), as mercury in thimerosal is bound as an organic ethyl-mercury; it thereby being rendered impotent and easily filtered out by your kidneys, and, therefore, cannot be a neurotoxin. Your suspicions continue to increase.

(4) The fourth section, you’ve now noticed, is highlighted in red as the conclusion does not follow the logic deductively, but rather, inductively, and even then, in a series of inductive leaps with no evidential threads to support the leap from one to the next, so it’s closer to say that they are purely imaginative leaps. The sidebar will inform you that studies looking for any causal thread, which have cumulatively looked at millions of children, have found not even a simple correlative example between thimerosal (or vaccines in general) and autism, or any other disorder. It will tell you that in studies that looked at vaccinated and non-vaccinated kids, they have the same rates of autism, but overall, vaccinated kids get less sick. You now close the webpage and never visit the website again.

Ramifications

Now, wouldn’t that be a sight. Every creationist, anti-vaxxer, homeopathic, quantum healing, feng-shui, talking-to-the-dead website would be littered in orange and red paragraphs. The websites of the Thinking Mom’s Revolution; of Joe Mercola; of Natural News; of Age of Autism; of Reasonable Faith; of Answers in Genesis would become virtual ghost-towns, almost overnight (well, so the theory goes). They will cry foul, they will bitch, they will whine, and complain about being censored, and that it is all a conspiracy to keep the truth from you, because of course, only they have it. Some will listen, I hope most don’t. It will be true, their future babble about censorship, that is. But it will be censorship by good science, and since good science is what nature has regarded as true, it will be censorship by nature, or as I prefer to call it, the universe. (When people refer to nature, they refer to the insignificant speck of dust that is the Earth, but the Universe is where the action is at.) Michael Specter said it best in his book Denialism: “What can be understood and reliably repeated by experiment is what nature regarded as true.” Indeed, there will be a conspiracy, there will be censorship, but, it will be imposed by nature, and therein shall we find the truth.

I’ve meant to write this post for some months, but never got around to it. I finally did so after reading two interesting articles in close succession: one in The Atlantic by Rebecca Rosen, Is It Journalism, or Just a Repackaged Press Release? Here’s a Tool to Help You Find Out, and the other on the open-source science journal PLOS ONE titled, Text Mining Effectively Scores and Ranks the Literature for Improving Chemical-Gene-Disease Curation at the Comparative Toxicogenomics Database. (I highly recommend you read both before continuing, but if you don’t have time to read the articles, I will summarize—inadequately I might add, so read them.)

The first is a tool, named Churnalism, and it has been created to identify plagiarism in the media. It will allow users to submit or post articles and have the language checked against press releases, Fortune 500 companies, and government sources. This will help the would-be reader separate the wheat from the chaff, the original from the copied, and the reportage from the self-congratulatory, and subjective, press release. You’ll have front-row seats as the reportage, reporters, blogs, and online media without integrity fall to the wayside. In short, it is a simple way to instantly check the integrity of those whom we trust with reporting the truth. This tool has the potential to cull those with false pretenses. (You can even install it as a browser plugin so it automatically identifies those articles that have plagiarized. Just as I hope the UFC will do one day—hopefully soon.)

The second is yet another tool created to serve a specific need performing a different, though equally important, task (at least for scientists, though if it helps them, it helps us all). There are thousands of scientific studies being published every day. (The open database, PubMed, alone publishes a new study every minute, and there is, perhaps, 50 million studies published somewhere.) No scientist can keep up with it, though it doesn’t stop them from trying. But, an inordinate amount of time is wasted weeding out non-relevant studies. If scientists could find a reliable way to accurately and quickly accomplish that task, it would, well, free up more time for them to do more science. So, a few scientists created a sophisticated algorithm that read through 15,000 papers going back to 1926 on metal toxicology and, using inputted indicators of article relevancy, novel data content, interaction yield rate, mean average precision, and biological and toxicological interpretability (you don’t need to know what these means) was able to, 85% of the time, rank the studies accurately in their relevance so that precious research time (and PHD students) could be focused towards those studies most conducive to their ends. Now, that is cool! (Also useful, but cool invariably comes first.)

What’s Next?

As I made the case earlier, this seems to be the beginnings of the left-hook out of left-field that pseudo-scientists will receive, and, hopefully, a lot sooner than many expect. These two programs, pieces of information technology, will not sit around unused and stagnant; others will take it, play with it, evolve it, and twist it to new purposes, and I hope one of those gifted folks turns it full-force towards the elimination of pseudoscience. Nothing is more relevant today than removing the influence of pseudoscientific jibber-jabber from the discourse we should be having on vaccines, nutrition, more importantly climate change and biotechnology, and perhaps even economics and politics. I can see no barriers to its implementation (aside from cost, which, as I’ll explain in a few paragraphs, is only a short-term problem).

I’m sure, by now, that most people know about IBM’s Watson beating two human opponents (the two best human opponents I might add) in Jeopardy; a game based on the nuance of human language. Watson, an AI, was able to deconstruct the language, understand grammar and syntax in the context of a question, and probabilistically match it to information it ascertained from Wikipedia. (That is, it wasn’t trained to play the game and had to figure out the answers all on its own in a similar manner to how our brains work.) Watch this video to see just how formidable Watson is (4-minutes long). You’ll even see most of the time that when Watson is beaten to the punch that he had the correct answer as well. Watson is now being trained as a medical assistant, and will be most instrumental in analyzing the totality of medical research and new studies coming out every day that a doctor could not hope to keep up with, and helping said doctor in correctly diagnosing patients reducing errors and cost, increasing health, and improving lives along the way. Watson, the fact checker, could be, in a few years, capable of the reasoning in our vaccine example above, if not already. And if IBM is this far, then other companies aren’t far behind. In fact, Ray Kurzweil, the futurist, is working to fully develop a personal, super-intelligent, and always online virtual assistant at Google that can read and understand the semantic content of the web at large. At that point, it will be possible that you’ll no longer have to search for stuff. You’ll just ask questions instead and empirically relevant, sound answers will be displayed. (Perhaps, this explains why Google is moving into hardware: Google Glass, self-driving cars, and the takeover of Motorola. No search results when you ask a question, but that is merely uninformed speculation.)

Benefits

Instead of searching for when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, where you may have several moon-landing-was-a-hoax results on the first page, you’ll only get the real, empirical answer: July 20th, 1969 alongside a photo of him, you know, actually standing on the moon.

Instead of spending long hours trying to research vaccine safety, where, as a non-medical professional, you can’t tell who’s giving you sound advice and who isn’t; and where, subsequently, a lot of good information is mixed, and lost in, a mountain of bad information, you’ll simply ask: “Is the DPT vaccine safe for my child?” The unambiguous answer will be yes, linking to the multitude of peer-reviewed studies (and only peer-reviewed) on the subject as well as, perhaps, explaining the pro’s and con’s of the quality of the studies, their methodology, any biases, statistical significance, and so forth. It will do this, perhaps, while also showing you the statistical advantage and risk-benefit analysis of not vaccinating your child, so that you may make your decision within the full context of available information bypassing your human heuristics that often ignores several important factors in valuing and acting on information.

Instead of having to filter through creationist babble about when and how the Universe was created, instead, you’ll ask “When and how did the Universe come into being?” The answer will be: “13.82 billion years ago. This data was ascertained with help from the Kepler and Hubble space telescopes, from WMAP, experiments in particle accelerators etc etc etc, and the best-supported hypothesis of creation at this time is a quantum energy fluctuation that instantiated itself into a system of net-energy zero that then forced negative space to expand to compensate for the positive energy instantiation, so that the system (Universe) remained at net zero energy.” (Of course, the super-intelligent machine will find a way to say this, or whatever the correct answer is, if it has changed or been refined, in a far more precise and succinct way than I have.)

But, where will these answers come from? From empirical, peer-reviewed research of course. From the hard and soft sciences, from academia, from open-source journals, and the avalanche of historic data just sitting around drawers waiting to be digitized, analyzed, and parsed through.

While the scenario I provided above—the autism example—is probably not going to happen for some years; for it takes an immense amount of computation and advanced algorithms. While these exist, they are supremely expensive, and considering that the UFC would be most useful as a free plugin—just as I have the churnalism plugin in my Chrome browser that automatically warns me if plagiarism is found—there is, as yet, no profit motive. (However, the profit motive is only necessary when the technologies are expensive. As they get cheaper, it will no longer be necessary.) But, because technology, particularly information technology (IT), is so awesome, it’s only a matter of time before it becomes cheap enough. (As IT’s price-performance per constant-dollar roughly doubles every year like clockwork. Therefore, in 10 years, the technology will be 1000 times more powerful while costing the same, adjusted for inflation, as now.) It’s only a matter of time before it is cheap enough.

Bye-Bye Pseudoscience

Mark the calendar friends, Churnalism and the Science Text-Miner are only the first step. When the UFC arrives, it will come out of the gate swinging. At first, it will be simple, but it will iterate quickly and quicker until it encroaches upon, enveloping and suffocating, all the fields of pseudoscience, and real science will win. How could good science not win? It offers unlimited expansion, untold benefits, improves our lives in a very real way, and—again, for lack of a better word—has the good manners of being true. Pseudoscience appeals only to our vanity and ego and little more, it can only win in an environment where it is not selected against, such as the current (and past) environment where only a small percentage of the population are scientifically trained, but as soon as the tools of skepticism become available to one and all, it will be relegated to the dustbin of history, a future bedtime story told to kids who understand that having bad, non, or no science is as scary as the bogey monster now is to many… (If you doubt the sincerity of that statement, as I’m sure many will, then I invite you to move back to the Rift Valley in Africa and live without the benefits that observation, replication, and innovation have bought us, and which have resulted in the tools of our survival and eventual ascendancy. Those tools, which have bought us prolonged healthy life, increased food production, clean water, reduced infant and maternal mortality, and this webpage did not come easy. Billions worked, and died, for them so that we may be where we are now. See how long you last without shelter, tools, binoculars, night-vision, vaccines, weaponry, clothes, wheels, and, most importantly, fire.)

Timeframe

Impossible to say, but, it is only a matter of time. There is nothing forbidding it, our AI’s today are quite powerful, and information technology is getting cheaper predictably, every single year, so, it follows that our AI will only become more powerful, exponentially so. It is only a matter of time. When it does come, either next year, in five years, or in ten, hilarity will ensue, but more importantly, good science will finally and fully claim its status in the game of thrones played for with truth-claims for millennia  Nothing will unseat it thereafter; well, nothing without a regress to the past. Lives will be improved and prosper; economies will grow and become more efficient; and, for good and all, better knowledge will have a selective advantage, and false knowledge will, for the first time in 200,000 long, agonizing, and painful years, have a selective disadvantage. Good riddance! The byproduct of our dear UFC will be, that, our minds will almost seem to perform as if on steroids. That is something I’d sign up for in an instant.

“Science is not a democratic process. Scientists don’t line up and say ‘gee,’ we really like this theory, let’s all vote for it. That’s not how it works. What we do in science is we find what explanations work.” ~ Eugenie C. Scott (Biologist)

 

The Bible & Science

Not at variance with any proven scientific fact. Not one I tell you, not even one. And, did you hear? They knew things they could’ve only known by divine revelation. Such examples surely include the following: insects have four legs (Leviticus 11:20-23), donkeys can talk (Numbers 22:28), and men can live in fish (not whales mind you, a fish) for three days. (Now, you can laugh.)

What Book Would You Take on an Island?

So, for some reason, I’ve been thinking about what book I would take to a desert island to keep me company. (There might not be much rationality in this post, but at least it’s random, and a refreshing break from biotech posts.)  Also, by one single book, I really mean one single object, so if it’s two, three, or four books bundled into one paperback, that still counts; or it could be a volleyball with a face on it.

So…which book would I take? Obviously, all non-fiction is automatically excluded. Who the hell cares about relativistic, non-simultaneous space-time, or that nothing is really something, or that there may be 11 dimensions, or that you’re an evolved ape when you’re stranded on, what is most likely, your tomb. As much as I love knowledge for the sake of knowledge; on an island, it would be quite futile. The book can only be fiction.

Up until recently, my favourite fiction book was Lord of the Rings, and that’s a good 1,200 or so pages. It’s a fantastic read and features an easy black and white divide between good and evil, so no need to do much thinking, but it might be tiring to reread time and time again. There is only so many times I can read an entire paragraph devoted to the intricate detail of the Witch King’s crown.

George Orwell’s 1984 is a magnificent read, but it is also a supremely depressing read, and since being on an island all alone would be depressing enough, 1984 would only make it worse. Sorry Orwell, 1984 is out.

Homer’s The Odyssey is a marvelous book full of trickery, deceit, gods, sex, and adventure. It twists, it turns, and comes back on itself in many delightful and fun ways. This book is definitely a top contender. The same can be said of the Iliad, and the Iliad has the benefit of not me not having finished it yet. (A friend gave me a copy of this many years ago, but I lost it, and every few months, I remember that tragic loss.) I can only imagine that both poems are combined somewhere in a single paperback, so these Greek adventures are front-runners.

George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire is, in my opinion, the best fiction I’ve ever read. Problem is, it’s five books long (over 4,000 pages) so it probably violates some single-book physics [ 😦 ]. Even then, taking one, whichever it maybe, would only leave you frustrated at the end, even if you could fit all 5 into a single paperback, you’re still missing books 6 and 7, which will be ready who knows when. (But then, you may just write books 6 and 7 of your own accord since you wouldn’t have anything better to do. So, can’t decide if this is a bad or good thing. Probably still bad.)

Then there are the classics I haven’t yet read: The Count of Monte Cristo; Ulysses; War and Peace; The Great Gatsby; Fahrenheit 451; Brave New World; Beowulf; and many a book I’m sure I’ve neglected to mention or forgot about. How to choose a book you haven’t read yet when there is no chance of recompense once stranded? Will I enjoy The Count of Monte Cristo with its swashbuckling adventure or the mythological Beowulf more? That’s a question I need answered before I choose. I’ve never been a very good chooser, but there is a solution, if you are willing to bend the rules just a wee bit.

The solution is simple: a Kindle sprayed with liquipel (water-proofing the Kindle completely if I have to swim to the island) inside a solar-powered case so I never run out of battery. (As long as they are fitted together before departure, they are all–technically–one holdable object.) This approach does have some problems. A Kindle won’t last forever, but it will last long enough. In 2009, I bought the 2nd Gen Kindle, and here in 2013, it having travelled through (and survived) Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Rome, and now find itself, still going strong, in New Delhi. That’s a pretty formidable 4 years and still it’s chugs along. The odds of me surviving 4 years on a desert island are slim-to-none, but, at least I’ll be happily entertained within the confines of my mental universe.

It seems that my problem solved. I’ll put all the books I want, and all those I may ever want, and even more that I’ve never heard of, and if I ever get rescued from that island, I just may become a literary reviewer.

But–because I’m sure a few people are disappointed–if I did really have to choose one singular book. I’d pick Homer’s poems: The Iliad and The Odyssey. Happy? Tell me yours, or would you cheat like me?

Pre-Vaccine vs Post-Vaccine

Credit: Graphic by Leon Farrant and data by the Centre for Disease Control (CDC)

GMOs are Unnatural? And Other Thoughts on Biotech

My last three posts have been about GMOs. I took a bit of flak for it—I even got some thank you’s and well done’s, mainly from scientists and farmers. In copping the negative flak however, the consensus seemed to be that genetically engineered foods and GMO technology are unnatural, therefore bad, and this is usually wrapped up in the guise of the naturalistic fallacy (anything natural is better than anything manmade). I find this naturalistic argument rather short-sighted, and a non-sequitur (conclusion does not follow from the logic). (I’m not saying that its wrong to eat organic foods, merely that the argument doesn’t stand up to scrutiny in the way it is presented. If you want to take what nature offers, then have at it without need of rationalizing it.) I also find that the stated goals of many an activist organization would, almost without question, lead to outcomes in-conducive to the stated environmentalism that those who hold the argument adhere to. Let me detail why I think so, as well as get into a dissection of biotechnology, nature, evolution, and a few others subjects (I got a bit carried away and before I knew it, this post was almost 5,000 words).

GM in Nature

Let’s take the basic premise: nature makes stuff better than we do—arguably the root of the organic movement. Starting at the beginning: some 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago, there existed a single-celled replicator that is the common ancestor of everything alive today. Harken back to the thought that recombinant rDNA technology is unnatural, which would mean that nature doesn’t do it. For, if genomic modification was unnatural, then we could confidently say that we wouldn’t be here. Since nothing could have evolved from that original replicator. It would just be replicators ad infinitum, one after the undifferentiated other. Nothing would change, because random changes and mutations would not occur. Even the original replicator would not have evolved so we wouldn’t have gotten that far. Nature is the original Engineer. (If you’re wondering why I capitalized engineer, then you haven’t watched Prometheus. Yes, I know I’m a nerd.) In order to go from that replicator to a 100-trillion celled human being, nature had to employ genomic engineering, albeit by accident. The only difference between nature’s style and our own is that nature’s is directionless and purposeless—there is no end goal in mind; whatever happens, happens. For every animal that exists, for every animal that was born, for every animal that lived out its short life, there were billions that met untimely, and quite likely, painful ends. Of all the species that ever existed, 99.9% are today extinct. Nature is not the benign process we think her to be, and though it is very easy to say that mother nature should be our guiding light (or spirit, or mother), but I submit to you that the 1.7 billion people who died of natural infectious diseases in the 20th century alone would not agree (if they could disagree, that is), or the 1.97 billion people who died of non-communicable diseases. If we were to compare our own body count: all the wars, crime, subjugation, and intolerance of mankind, to natures, we’d find that she more than trebled our own count, which stands at some 980 million people. Surely, nature does put us to shame with her 3.67 billion death tolls. Be that as it may: it follows that we are here because of the natural process of genomic modification and there is nothing inherently unnatural in the process. Mutations happen: either nature makes them happen with no thought to the outcome, or we control for them with genetic engineering.

Nature Does It Best

Let’s again take the basic premise that nature makes stuff best. From that first replicator, and then every step along the way, nature haphazardly selected for organisms preferentially selecting for those with beneficial mutations (allowing them better success in passing on their genes), selecting against those with detrimental mutations, and being ambivalent towards those with benign mutations until, eventually, in the Rift Valley some few million years ago, primates began evolving intelligence along with the spectacularly lucky coincidence of an opposable thumb. These two lucky outcomes allowed their descendants to manipulate their environment with an ever-increasing degree of control using said, gifted intelligence. (One theory is that intelligence evolved as a courtship device; watch this video by Jason Silva for a 90-second primer.) Therefore, our intelligence and the manipulation of our environment are thus given to us by Mother Nature…arguably to have it used. Every animal on this blue-green dot we call Earth uses to its advantage every trick and tool nature endowed it with. (After all, those that don’t often do not pass on their genes.) To categorically state that nature makes stuff better than we do so that we should bow down to her wisdom is to willingly ignore that nature made us the way we are to do what it is we do, which is the propagation our genes using our selective advantage (intelligence and environmental manipulation). It follows then, that, everything we do is, concordantly, natural. (Unless of course, you believe you have free will, which you don’t.) We are made by nature, therefore everything we do is natural and, therefore, everything we are doing now is the best possible solution because it is natural. As you can see, this line of reasoning (natural > human-made) is a slippery slope and is, plain and simply, ill defined. The distinction between nature, human culture and technology is an arbitrary distinction. We do the things that we do now because of our naturally endowed capacity. But, another way to put it is that after 3.8 billion years, an animal (Homo sapiens) evolved its own evolvability (technology) thus continuing the process of selection in the process superseding natural selection becoming the dominant selection process. We are the first species that does not live entirely within the constraints of natural selection, but that does not mean we don’t live in a selection process, just that we override natures and institute our own. In time, we rely less and less on natural selection and more on environments of our own choosing—but it is so because nature made it so. Ants make anthills, beavers make dams, birds make nests, and Homo sapiens make technology, and it’s all natural. (Note: I’m not saying we need to colonize the Earth and have everything submit to our mighty republic. Yes, I just finished watching Spartacus.) Only that within our domain, we have already done so to our own advantage, and there is nothing wrong with this—it is natural even.

Selection

Remember that evolution happens regardless of whether we rework it to our advantage—biotech crops—or leave nature be.

• Evolution is natural selection by random mutation
• Pre-Industrial (i.e., organic) agriculture is artificial selection by random mutation
• Conventional agriculture is artificial selection by accelerated random mutation
• GM agriculture is artificial selection by purposeful mutation

The changes are changes in degree, not in kind. To label one unnatural is to label them all unnatural. It is evolution, continued. Something has to fulfil both the selection process and the mutation process in evolution. It’s either nature, which has neither direction nor purpose, and evidenced by her 3.67 billion person death toll in the 20th century from just 2 categories, has neither your health or longevity in mind; or we fulfil the selection process, which nature gives us the ability to so.

While the result of recombinant rDNA technology may be labelled unnatural (merely because it doesn’t exist in nature, not because it can’t). The same cannot be said of the technology that produces such food. We are co-opting nature’s methods to make food, not playing God. (You may dispute the fact that I said that it could exist in nature by saying that a fish gene could never wind up in a tomato, but you’d be wrong. Your genome is the combined genome four times over of the amphioxus fish-like marine chordate. A 1cm little fish’s genome mistakenly copied twice over on itself has resulted in every land animal today, and you. If nature can turn a little fish into you, then why is it so distasteful that we put cross-species genes where we need them? Uncertainty may be the first thing that comes to your mind, but nature had no idea what she was doing either.)

The Point

There is a movement to demonize GM technology and even conventional agriculture, with the wish to return to the agricultural past. Organic agriculture is fine, there’s nothing wrong with it, but we can’t feed the world with it. Remember Paul R. Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb? It stated in 1968 that in the 70s and 80s, mass famines would ensue as we wouldn’t be able to make enough food, and any efforts to avert such a disaster are a waste of time and should be scrapped. (Thomas Malthus said much the same thing in 1798.) Ehrlich wrote, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” Why didn’t the predictions of mass starvation and disaster come to pass? Well, they would have if we listened to him and did nothing. Instead we developed the technologies that allowed us to increase yield to a stupendous degree.

Context

Since 1961, we’ve increased yield by 300% using only 12% more land. How? We used technology to make drastically increase yield and avert the predicted disaster of Ehrlich and many others. Said differently, if we kept farming organically, mass famine would have ensued. Without such yield increases thanks to plant science, we would have had to use two Latin America’s of arable land to compensate, or, more likely, the predicted mass starvation would have occurred. If in the 1960s when the world population was less than 3 billion people, the propagation of organic farming as the sole agricultural method would have resulted in disaster, how it will help us now when we are 7 billion people and on the way to 9-10 billion people? The majority of that increase in yield has come from plain ol’ conventional agriculture, but now our yields are coming up against a glass wall for that type of plant science, and GE foods are the next process to take us forward to surmount the coming set of problems. And, while we still have a starving billion today, it is not because we can’t create the food, but we can’t get it to them. The solution to world hunger is for those most afflicted by it to be able to grow their own food, instead of relying on food aid and handouts as band aids applied to a broken bone. Organic farming will not suffice for Sub-Saharan Africa; they need heat-tolerant and drought-resistant strains. (They already don’t have any biotechnology or conventional agriculture, ergo, organic farming, which is what remains, has failed them.)

Future Problems

In the next 40 years, we need to double yield without an increase in land usage—in fact we’ll need to decrease land usage (agriculture is one of the biggest contributors to climate change). We will not accomplish this by going back to low-input agriculture—though it won’t go anywhere for those who still want it. I make the case in my book that Vertical Farming (VF) will do the trick. VF certainly is capable, but what if the mass migration from horizontal farming to vertical farming never takes place? The technology was invented in the 50s by the US military and then nobody did anything with it for 60 years. What if that no-usage scenario repeats itself? We cannot afford to stand idly by and hope that everything will go according to plan. We need contingencies and redundancy. One of those is GM agriculture. We have been eating GM food for 20 years: in that time, we’ve spared the environment 438 million kilograms of pesticide use. (Don’t forget, organic farming uses pesticides too, and organic pesticides aren’t automatically better for the environment. Some are thousands of times more toxic.) In 2010, 19.4 billion kgs of CO2 was not released into the atmosphere because of GM technology (the equivalent of 8.6 million cars removed from the roads for a year). Over half of the economic benefits of GM seeds have gone directly to farmers in developing countries helping them rise up out of subsistence farming and poverty. In America, the country that eats the most GM food, cancers over the last 20 years have gone down 20% so the promised health apocalypse that many have warned about were coming have not materialized.

If we want to solve the problem of population growth, we have to realize that living in poverty is what propels the world’s poor to have more children, and food insecurity is a major factor. As Peter Diamandis wrote in Abundance, poor families living in subsistence need at least 3 kids, and they aim for male children. Why three? Well, as distasteful as it sounds; one may die, one will tend to the farm and look after the parents as they age; and the other is sent to get an education to break the cycle and make money enough to hopefully lift them out of poverty. The best solution to breaking out of a life of subsistence is food security. People in Sub-Saharan Africa can’t use organic farming (which, as mentioned earlier, if defined only by lack of conventional tools and biotechnology, then they are already organic, and food insecure).

Potential Benefits

Recently, we passed peak farmland, which unlike peak oil or peak water actually has positive connotations for us, but especially, the environment.

See the blue section in the above graph? That is the actual farmland used since 1961 to get us the aforementioned 300% yield increase. See the upward sloping green section? That’s how much land we would have used if we didn’t use conventional agriculture to create todays food. It is the equivalent landmass of the USA, Canada, and China, and try to imagine the destruction of forestry that that would have entailed. To be an environmentalist is, by definition, to support the conservation of nature. To support the conservation of nature should be, by definition, to support conventional agriculture as it uses less land to grow that food—going forward, this will entail supporting, or at least supporting the possibility of using, GMOs.

If we continue on our current path of increasing yields using science and biotechnology, the authors of the Peak Farmland study conservatively estimate that we could return 146 million hectares to nature by 2060, with high estimates that 256 million hectares could be restored (roughly double the area of the USA, east of the Mississipi). None of this even takes into account the potential land and resource reduction benefits of IV meat (which I detail here), or the coming generation of biotech crops, many of which will have: significantly reduced pesticide use (some using no pesticides at all), reduced nitrogen use (reducing river pollution), increased nutrition along with many other benefits. But, many such seeds are locked away due to the intense furore to GMO use, allowing only those few that the seed giants can afford to push through the regulatory burden. PG Economics noted that if, in 2010, those biotech crops already available were removed from the market, farmers would have had to plant an additional 5.1 million ha of soybeans, 5.6 million ha of corn, 3 million ha of cotton, and 0.35 million ha of canola to keep production steady, equivalent to an additional 8.6% of arable land in the US. Yet, this is what activists would have us do, remove all GM crops, necessitating the further destruction of forestry and nature for human purposes.

So, if we move forward into the future, we’ll give back hundreds of millions of hectares of farmland to nature, and if we move forward with biotechnology, we’ll do likewise.

Big Ag

But, are there problems, real problems, with biotechnology that have been covered or up concealed? With the technology, we find no problems that aren’t present in other forms of agriculture. As the National Academy of Science, and many prestigious scientific organizations concluded, the process itself is no more inherently risky than any other method. Biotech crops usually have between 1 and 3 genes altered, but every new generation of organic and conventional crops will have a few different genes in there too. (They are inevitable: a DNA copying error, a passing cosmic ray etc., will, and do, induce genetic mutations. To say there is uncertainty in GMOs is likewise to admitting that there is uncertainty in any new generation of plant or animal. The average human offspring carries about 100-200 mutations, but they are still people. Food with 1-3 added genes is still food.)

On the business side is where we find many that many folks have a priori problems. But these problems are indicative, and suggest the need of, business reform, patent reform and competition, and not the outright banning of the technology (which is just not possible, anyway). This business problem ended up co-mutating into advocacy against GMOs in general instead of where it should actually be directed, lack of competition due to the overbearing regulatory burden on GM crops which was instituted due to the initial advocacy, and round and round the circle we go, as the increased advocacy only exacerbates the problems activists think they are trying to stop. The intense backlash against biotechnology has only cemented the power of those few who first began exploring the field. Even then, the scale of abuse, often levelled at Monsanto, rivals the misinformation that the Catholic Church spouts against condom use on the continent most ravaged by aids, likening condom use to be a greater danger than the ravages of aids. (A sensible approach to Monsanto was detailed by activist Ellen of One Hundred Meals.)

We need to stop pretending that only Big Ag and Monsanto lobbies, undercuts, and undermines democracy; the organic movement spends $2.5 billion a year on advocacy. We need to stop thinking that Monsanto is after world domination: the global GM seed market in 2012 was $14 billion ( that is world domination with 0.0002% of global purchasing power), while organic food sales are $60 billion worldwide. (The total value of those GM crops when harvested is around $65 billion.) We need to know that all farms strive to use the least amount of pesticides required, as it is their biggest expense, and that synthetic chemicals are not a priori worse than organic chemicals, in fact, quite the opposite. In other words, we need to get real, and deal with the facts as they are, not as we want them to be.

For whatever problems we have today, the solution is not to ban it, it is to weigh the risks vs. the rewards and act appropriately. It is to study and to research, and to have reasoned debates among experts on the pros and cons; but above all, keeping in mind the effects on people far and wide around the world. Food security and a heavy disease burden (usually going together) undermine society at every level of its functioning. To fix them is to advance significantly in all other matters of societal dysfunction. Who knows how many Newtons, Einsteins, and Curies we are losing to lack of food, clean water, and education every year while we bicker over functionally equivalent types of food. If you don’t want to eat it, don’t, but don’t stop others from making their own choice. The liberal movement in America and Europe is pro-choice when it comes to matters of female reproduction—and rightfully so! —Yet, move the topic to food, swiftly change to being anti-choice, even though the ramifications for billions of poor people around the world are far worse than for a women in a forced pro-life environment.

But instead of focusing on legitimate problems with the business, competitive, and legal environment, red herrings are thrown this way and that: that organic food is nutritionally superior; a meta-analysis covering 162 studies over a 50-year period says their not, and any nutritional differences are unlikely to have a significant outcome on health. Facts are thrown out stating that organic is environmentally superior to all other forms of farming, despite the fact the answer is far more nuanced. We are told that farmers are using GMOs to lather their fields in Roundup, yet the National Academy of Science wrote, “When adopting GE herbicide-resistant (HR) crops, farmers mainly substituted the herbicide glyphosate for more toxic herbicides.” (A report from the National Research Council even gave an impressive list of GM benefits including: improved soil quality, reduced erosion and reduced insecticide use, but everyone focused instead on the little nuggets of bad news instead of the load of good news.) In using GMOs we use less toxic pesticides, and the result is a net environmental benefit, as glyphosate usually replaces atrazine (a pesticide 200 times more toxic). Instead of learning about real yields on GMO, we get the Union of Concerned Scientists telling us that ‘intrinsic yields’ haven’t increased since the inception of GMO, even though intrinsic yield tells you nothing, but total yield really has increased. But the most destructive effect of this headline-grabbing debate fiasco is as Pamela Ronald, professor of plant pathology at the University of California wrote, “as it now stands, opposition to genetic engineering has driven the technology further into the hands of a few seed companies that can afford it, further encouraging their monopolistic tendencies while leaving it out of reach for those that want to use it for crops with low (or no) profit margins.“

Red herrings are red for a reason, they are meant to distract you, not inform you. We need some green herrings.

Choice

Those of us with the ability to read this post have the luxury of choice when it comes to choosing between organic, conventional, and GM agriculture. (‘Certified Organic’ also means GMO-free, so, we don’t need to go through the hoops of requiring even more labels.) But more than 800 million people who go to bed hungry every night (16 million people of whom will die of hunger this year) will not have that luxury. Half the planet’s population remains malnourished, then the one to two million people (670,000 are under five years of age) who will die from Vitamin A deficiency this year who, in point of fact, will not be thankful to Greenpeace for their 16-year blockade of GM Golden Rice that could save them—they’ll die slow, painful deaths instead, only to be replaced by more kids to replace them, many of whom will die too. To fix that problem—which is not only a moral necessity—reduces the burden of increased population growth. (The response to both of those claims—starvation and vitamin A deficiency deaths—is that we shouldn’t be feeding them unhealthy food instead. Those saying this have clearly never gone without food for longer than a few hours, let alone the few weeks it takes to die of starvation, or the years over which blindness sets in from vitamin A deficiency, which then goes on to kill half those afflicted. And, of course, it assumes that GM food really is less healthy or less nutritious, which it isn’t.) It’s time we got out of our First World bubble.

There is, despite the hysteria, a scientific consensus on the safety and risk profile of GM technology. Almost every scientific organization, from the National Academy of Sciences to the Royal Society thinks it so and 600 peer-reviewed studies back up the claim. Aside from a few deniers, we trust our scientists on climate change, don’t we? They are shouting from the rooftops about the dangers of climate change, and how little time we have left to reverse course. You’d think if there were a comparable danger from biotech, you’d have more than a handful of scientists speaking up. So, why don’t we trust them on biotech?

Norman Borlaug—father of the Green Revolution, who saved one billion lives using plant science—had this to say about the food fight we in the West are squabbling over: “If the naysayers do manage to stop agricultural biotechnology, they might actually precipitate the famines and the crisis of global biodiversity they have been predicting for nearly 40 years.”

While we endlessly bicker and sensationalize, people are dying of starvation. It does no good to deal in hypotheticals such as: if we wasted less food, there’d be enough for everyone (you wouldn’t be able to ship it to them); if more people were charitable, everyone would be ok; if we switched to organic agriculture, we could feed everyone (wrong), along with many others. Despite the fact that many of them are wrong or idealistic, they presume people being rational, informed, and having access to and accepting unadulterated and uncensored good, reliable information. Is that likely to happen anytime soon? The cries of the anti-vaxxers are still putting kids (and society at large) in danger; the chant of the climate-deniers only delays needed progress; but on issues of food security, arguably the most important of all, we’ll all see reason?

Changing People or Inventing Technology—Which is Easier?

Is it easier to change the hearts and minds of billions of people with all their complexities and interrelationships or is it easier to invent new technologies that solve the issues for those affected? The climate movement has struggled to change the hearts and minds of people and politicians for over twenty years and we’ve got very little to show for it. Let’s not continue making the same mistake with food. Changing the consumption habits of one billion westerners—if that is even possible—will take a long time with no certainty of success. Meanwhile, the people dying of starvation will keep dying. The technologies to feed them using less land and cheaper inputs are here and now, they are safe, they are capable, and they are predictable, regardless of how shrill the opposition to them is from well-fed oppositionists who’ve never felt the sensation of hunger. It’s time to deal with the facts, but above all, it is time to value human lives consistent with the evidence and facts we have. The intentions and hearts of the bored, guilted sensibilities of Western activists who grumble at a skipped lunch is in the right place; their proposed solutions and flawed reasoning are not.

They are plenty of problems we face in agriculture. The vehement backlash against biotechnology is distracting from those issues. Biotechnology won’t solve every problem, but they will help substantially. In fact, the co-use of biotech crops alongside organic crops—in what is called a refuge zone—significantly curtail pest resistance. It may be that the bright agricultural future within our grasp uses both systems side by side.

“The next generation of GMOs could boost nutrition, reduce nitrogen fertilizer use, and boost yield, letting us feed the world without chopping down its remaining forest. Indeed, it’s easy to imagine ‘bio-organic’ farms that don’t use synthetic pesticides or fertilizer, but that do use these genetically enhanced seeds.” ~ Keith Kloor (Science Writer)

Whatever is the case, we need to realize that feeding 7 billion, let alone 9 to 10 billion people in the near future, isn’t going to be easy. If it fits on a Facebook photo as a caption, you can rest assured it will solve nothing. This post is 4,600 words long and is barely scratching the surface. Some silly shared photo on Facebook demonizing Monsanto or chemical use not only shows you things out of context, they detract from the conversations we should be having.

[Updated to remove superfluous text]

Random Rationality is Back

The 2nd edition of my e-book, Random Rationality: Expanded – A Rational Guide to an Irrational World has just been released on Kindle for $2.99. Some key features differentiating it from the 1st edition:

• Every chapter has undergone a makeover with a total of 24,000 words added, making it 63,000 words now.
• Corrected several facts – my favourite correction is that the Universe is now 13.82 billion years (though there was no way for me to know the age of the universe in the 1st edition, so this is more of an update). Some other facts I reported were genuinely wrong and I have corrected as many as were bought to my attention and I’ll write a future post on which ones they were if I can find my notes. The ones I remember off the top of my head are that the global debt-to-GDP ratio I quoted was actually representative of only the top 10 western governments (the real updated global figure being about 1.5 to 1 instead of 3.5 to 1).
• The book benefitted from many of my subscribers having a dig at each chapter as I published them all online soliciting constructive criticism (notable contributors include John Zande, RL Culpeper, Allallt who have made the book immensely stronger – thanks to all who participated and helped out)

What hasn’t changed is the format: 22 chapters, 7 sections; 22 divided by 7 is equal to 3.14 crudely equaling Pi (π). Pi is a mathematical constant; mathematics is the language of science; therefore, using simple logic, Random Rationality is the literal word of science. (This will stand until proven otherwise–which you shouldn’t try to do if you are reading this).

As before, the book is not DRM’ed. That means you can read it on as many devices as you want with no restrictions, and share it freely with your friends. Thank you for being a subscriber, reader, or random visitor to my blog. You can buy it here, or smooch it off someone else who has bought it since it’s not DRM’ed. If you leave a review, however honest, then this rambling idiot will love you even more. 

P.S. Since I signed up for the Kindle KDP program, I will be promoting it on certain days for free, so if you’re patient, you may be able to nab it free of charge.