I think this is best suited to GD.
samclem wrote:
<nitpick>
This link is not to “Skeptic”, which as a brand-name word by itself is usually shorthand for Skeptic Magazine, but to The Skeptic’s Dictionary, more properly abbreviated as “Skepdic,” with a “d”.
</nitpick>
Despite my primary focus on qualitative inquiry, I guess I would qualify as a plebian sort of biostatistician (forestry stuff). Hey, we’ve even got our own textbook!
Sokal, R. R. and F. J. Rohlf. 1995. Biometry: The Principles and Practice of Statistics in Biological Research 3rd edition. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company.
In reference to some of the charges leveled against Rachel Carson and Silent Spring, I’d agree that Carson had no love for chemical companies. However, others in this thread were correct in pointing out that Carson was very disturbed at the near universal application of pesticides. And in this respect, she was concerned with the welfare of all biological critters including both humans and all other living things. I particularly like Carson’s use of an Albert Schweitzer quote, “Man can hardly even recognize the devils of his own creation,” suggesting of course that where intentional impacts to the environment are concerned rarely are we able to predict and confine specific consequences.
Jorge wrote:
Though reduced to a parenthetical in Jorge’s post, this is a point worth pondering.
Seems to me that any gains from widespread use of DDT would be short-term, lasting only until mosquitoes evolved a tolerance for the chemical. Meanwhile, the losses from using DDT could be long-term and irreversible, in the form of extinction of raptors (and possibly other species as well). Any cost-benefit analysis, it seems to me, should take into account the permanence of the results.
Have there been any studies of the ability of mosquitoes to develop DDT resistance?
I took a look at Junkscience and it does look as if it is in lockstep with the Bush administration in regards to the environment and other topics.
Many. Just do a Google search on DDT resistance mosquitoes and you’ll get thousands of sites. Mosquitoes certainly do develop resistance to DDT, however there are several factors that have to be considered.
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Any pesticide currently available will eventually be rendered less useful through insects gaining resistance. This isn’t unique to DDT.
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DDT acts in three ways. It repels mosquitoes from dwellings so they never enter, it overstimulates those exposed causing them to flee and essentially incapacitating them, and it kills. Resistance can only develop to the lethality effect, and the other two benefits will remain. These effects may actually be more useful in malaria control than killing.
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Insects gain resistance to DDT less rapidly than they do to organophosphates, carnbamates or pyrethroids.
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Several types of mosquito are now resistant to everything bar DDT and other organochlorines.
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Even if mosquitoes do become resistant hundreds of millions of lives will be saved in the meantime. It’s hard to imagine what sort of benefit could justify that amount of suffering. Or do we just do nothing until we find an insecticide that has no soide effects. As much as I like birds I wouldn’t trade my child’s life for one or a whole species for that matter, and few other parents would.
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DDT has numerous advantages over other insecticides, including extremely low human toxicity, long residual effect and ecomomy. The last is vitally important since most malarial areas are third world and simply could not afford to use anything other than DDT.
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DDT resistance has been largely attributed to agricultural chemical use, not to use in domestic situations.
Quoth Reality Chuck
I don’t see it as being a Troll at all. Far from being an oversimplification the OP summarises the situation remarkably well. Exactly which parts of the OP do you dispute? That WHO has brought pressure to bear to discontinue Organochlorine use? That the conclusions of ‘Silent Spring’ are flawed? That there has been a massive recent upsurge in malaria cases attributable to discontinuation of organochlorine treatments?
Large scale, indiscriminate spraying for mosquito control was widespread for many years. In my own home town it was common in urban areas up until the early 1970’s. What others were less careful than mosquito controllers? Cite?
Except that there never was a blanket ban. The super-industrialised USA, whence Carson’s wisdom sprung, still reserves the right to utilise organochlorines for malaria control. AFAIK only American corporations manufacture the stuff.
No they wouldn’t. Organochlorines are the only substances known that will retain their effectiveness in malaria control forever. See above. Do you have a cite for this.
RealityChuck -
I have better things to do than troll.
I wanted to know if anyone had any info on the original research Carson used to write Silent Spring (which has been used as a cudgel since to force bans on DDT) vs The effect on human lives of those bans. My interest in this comes from two different areas. In 1979, I was in a high school class called “Crisis in the Environment” which was basically a semester long study of Silent Spring. The teacher considered the book to be fact-based and championed Carson as the savior of the environment. Since then, I haven’t seen a thing about DDT except rehashes of her book. (Until this posting on Fox News) The second trigger was that during the 90’s I lived in the family homestead next door to a man who used DDT for pest control from a stash of rusty cans well into the late 80’s when he finally ran out. During the entire time I lived there, I never saw a mosquito in his yard or any other insects that I remember. It was spooky how quiet his yard was. When my house had $40k in termite damage, his was pristine. That was years after he had run out. Obviously, this stuff has some staying power. But what about the original science behind the book? Was it flawed as Fox news seemed to indicate or is the declaration that it was flawed just junk science? That’s what I want to know. Yes the subject line is provocative - people read the threads with provocative subjects - but I don’t think the original post qualifies as trolling. This thread has given me a lot of info to digest. I thank everyone for the input.
BTW - Guinastasia, Much of my family is buried in Tarentum, just up the river from Springdale. The rest live in Cheswick.
I wasn’t saying it to be nasty, just that Rachel Carson was very influential in the environmental movement.
I remember my great-aunt telling me what Pittsburgh used to be like. Icky. You would go outside for a few minutes-and your white clothes would be soot gray!
Rachel Carson didn’t kill anybody. She lobbied for the ban of a chemical that was wiping out bird life in North America. Thus she stopped several extinctions, but only indirectly, by convincing those in power to adopt new policies.
It is absurd to blame her for “millions of deaths”. Those people died of malaria, which is simply an infectious disease. They were not murdered. They were not executed. No war machine ended their lives. They simply got sick & died, which is a natural, normal process.
The folly here is trying to make moral comparisons, and thence moral decisions, on the single criterion of “number of human lives ended.” This is a dubious criterion anyway. All of those who died of malaria would have died of something anyway: starvation, or cholera, or tuberculosis, or hepatitis, or leprosy, or any of several infectious diseases; of ethnic violence, or crime, or heart disease, or cancer, or old age.
Those 75 million Indians a year would have died had DDT never been invented. Even after it was sprayed, most of then died anyway–of something else. The absence of DDT, being the natural state of the world, is hardly cause for alarm. The presence of DDT is cause for alarm, not because of what it does to man, but what it does to birds and amphibians. At current population levels, the lives of 75 million human beings are replaceable. The lives of even 800 bald eagles may not be.
Rachel Carson didn’t kill anybody. She saved lives, entire species in fact. But even if she had gone to India and killed 150 million people herself, it would still be less evil than what DDT was doing to bird populations. The use of non-degradable pesticides is wrong, not because of their effects on human beings, but because of their effect on birds.
DDT was banned because it kills birds? This is a dubious criterion anyway. All of those who died because of DDT would have died of something anyway: starvation, or any of several infectious diseases; of interspecies violence (predation), or heart disease, or cancer, or old age, or whatever else kills birds.
:rolleyes:
That is the most frightening and morally bankrupt argument I have ever heard, and also one of the least logical.
People are going to die of something anyway so we shouldn’t do anything to extend human life and minimise suffering that may endanger animals. WTF?
By that argument we should presumably outlaw fossil fuels, all forms of agriculture, medicines, nuclear fuels, polymers, the wearing of clothes and God knows what else. All these things exist solely to extend human life and make us happier, and all are contributing, and in all likelihood have contributed, to the extinction of other species. What a load of rot. What sort of logic or morality places a few thousand animals higher than a few million humans?
This is the followed with “the lives of a few people are replaceable”. I hate to break this to you but you can no more replace someone’s wife or child than you can replace a species. Every civilised society on Earth seeks to preserve human life and reserves the highest penalties for murderers because of the implicit knowledge that it is impossible to replace a human life. A human life may be traded, it may be bought, sold or extinguished but it may never be replaced.
Of course the really sick thing is that the argument doesn’t even extend to it’s own logical conclusion. All those birds and amphibians would also have died of something else. The species’ in question will become extinct from some other cause. How the hell is preserving a species for 10000 years more logical, or even more moral, than preserving human life for 70 years?
I suspect that the absence of DDT from your world would suddenly become a much greater cause for alarm if you lived in a swamp in Bangladesh and the malaria season was approaching. I imagine it would be a cause for outright panic if you contracted the disease and your child was forced to live in the same building with you while you were so incapacitated by the infection as to be powerless to prevent him being bitten by the same mosquitoes that had fed off you. The absence of these things suddenly become important to the people whose lives depend on them. But it’s a little easy to forget that as I sit at my computer in my brick house in perfect health.
IMHO your ethics are truly twisted.
Cynical1 wrote:
I suspect the latter.
I’m no scientist, but I do have eyes. When I was a kid, bald eagles were extinct, or virtually so, in the lower 48 states. The comeback they have made since DDT was banned is nothing short of astonishing. Is there a causal connection between the ban and the comeback? Not being a scientist, I can’t say, but the timing sure is suggestive.
Also, it’s not that DDT kills birds. Instead, it prevents them from reproducing, a much more effective method of driving a species to extinction. Malaria, on the other hand, may or may not kill its victims, and if its victims do die, they may or may not perish prior to the point in their lives at which they have produced offspring. In other words, malaria is no threat to extinguish the human species. Cold calculus, to be sure. I leave to others the debate over whether a human life is more valuable than an entire species of animals. That is ultimately a religious debate.
spoke- I agree that there are more bald eagles but is there cause and effect? When were eagles first listed as a protected species? Is that protection responsible for thier comeback?
Guinastasia - I agree that Pittsburgh was a mess. My grandparents say that when my dad was little he used to call that river the “Tinky river” Did your great-aunt ever tell you about the black snow?
foolsguinea - ?! I appreciate that everyone is entitled to an opinion but WOW. With that reasoning if I were to run you over with my car because I didn’t press the brake when I clearly had the opportunity to, it’s OK because you would have eventually died anyway? Or would it only have been OK if I failed to press the brake because I might have hurt the bald eagle duct taped to the pedal?
disclaimer/No eagles were duct taped in the writing of this thread and the writer does not condone the duct taping eagles. It is merely a lliterary device./disclaimer
It’s a matter of scale.
If 800 birds is the whole species, then any one of them is worth more than a thousand human beings. If everything must perish, then we’re not talking about absolute & inalienable rights here, but relative values. For example, the ability of an entire species to continue for “only” 1 million years has to trump the opportunity for 10 million individuals to prolong their lives by 40 years apiece–or to increase their already enormous population further.
Which is worth more? An emerald or a hunk of quartz? The emerald, simply because it is rarer. Neither has some perfect, ultimate, inalienable value. They both have finite, temporal value. But one has much more. It is the same with living things.
We have to be concerned about the actual results of our actions rather than some arbitrary Kantian rule like “all human life must be preserved in all cases.” I do care about the fate of those that exist, and have to use a realistic calculus to do right by all those who exist. My philosophy is not less moral (than humanist morality) for recognizing & balancing more rights (than merely human rights).
Fools, when did morals enter into it? The OP seemed pretty straightforward to me and said nothing about ethics, morals, or comparison of human to animal life.
I agree, it is folly to make moral comparisons, so why are you?
That’s not what I said. I said it’s folly to make moral decisions based on moral comparisons which are only based on that one criterion. I am a philosophical moralist myself, but see morality as complex, incorporating multiple levels, aspects, & priorities.
I took the OP to be making an implicit moral assumption that where a greater number of people died, a greater crime was committed, no matter how it happened, or what else was involved. I’ve heard this kind of argument many times before, & I consider it simplistic & false. I took the opportunity to object, though my objection will largely fall on deaf ears.
Are you saying that you consider morality to be a lot of nonsense anyway? The political-ethical decision to obliterate malaria is based in a moral and/or aesthetic judgement. Because the action is in fact the expression of an ethic, no protest of “but I’m an antinomian!” can justify the taking of that action.
I guess we could go back and forth on this ad nausem. You see something in the original post that simply isn’t there.
“Are you saying that you consider morality to be a lot of nonsense anyway?” I don’t belive I said a dang thing about morality except that it is irrelevant to the OP. By your reasoning, it would be frighteningly difficult to examine almost aspect any social, medical, economic, legal, or political issue without bringing up hosts of ridiculously complex and irrelevant issues. Your logic would make a huge number of the threads here devolve into absurd sidebars.
And another thing:
This is Great Debates, not General Questions. The OP put forth a question, but was asking for debate.
The basic question has two possible answers, which have both been put forth.
One answer is that more human beings have obviously died from malaria than have obviously died from DDT. This is true.
The other answer is that Rachel Carson herself didn’t kill those people. Malaria was not her invention. I still think this is legitimate.
Then I got into debating what I saw as underlying assumptions of the posters. I disagree with a lot of people about the moral import of those millions of deaths for two reasons.
First, because I see those deaths as part of a bigger picture. There is a certain amount of necessary environmental resistance to the unchecked growth of any species, & we often need to accept high death rates as part of that.
Second, even stipulating that it is immoral for a man to kill his fellow man (though I would say it is not always immoral), it is not wrong for a naturally occuring pathogen to do so. And a naturally occuring disease is not to be treated as morally equivalent to a manufactured poison.
Nor am I morally obligated to prevent the natural deaths of umpteen million people. If we were talking about deaths from pollution or terrorism, then there would be humans to blame. If malaria were introduced by men with the intent to weaken or destroy a given population, of course there would be. But failing to saturate entire regions with a broad-spectrum poison is no crime.
“This is Great Debates, not General Questions. The OP put forth a question, but was asking for debate”
Half true. The OP put it in General Questions, and IMO was looking for a factual-as-possible answer. It was later moved to Great Debates, probably because of the posters who felt they had to grind their axe instead of trying to answer the question.
At any rate, the particular debate you and I having is many miles from “Great”, so without further ado, I will stop posting.
foolsguinea wrote:
Why? Species go extinct all the time. Who decided it was our duty to keep extictions from happening?
And why limit it to birds? What about those poor pests we might drive to extinction with our pesticides? Those poor little anafales mosquitoes deserve our protection too, right?
Which is worth more? A serial killer or a common citizen? The serial killer, simply because it is – um … doesn’t quite follow, does it?