A single paper published last month purports to reveal the common denominator behind cancer, diabetes, heart disease, liver disease, inflammatory bowel disease, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Crohn’s, Lou Gehrig’s, multiple sclerosis, infertility, kidney problems, depression, autism, schizophrenia, osteopenia, cachexia, zinc deficiency, obesity and anorexia nervosa.
The root of these ills, the paper implies, is glyphosate, one of the most commonly used herbicides in agriculture.
But there’s a problem with this facile explanation. The paper is considered deeply flawed by the scientific community. It is a collection of data citing 286 sources that appeared in a pay-to-publish physics journal and was written by a computer science expert from MIT and an independent researcher who investigates industrial polluters.
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It’s bad science. And bad science is worse than no science.
Monsanto, inventor of glyphosate, responded to the paper with the expected dispatch and denial.
The surprising response came from scientists who were outraged by the paper’s flaws. They said it made unsupported conclusions, stretched the bounds of credibility in attributing such a wide range of illnesses to one cause, and was an example of pseudoscience in which hypotheses are merely claims without adequate verification.
“This may be one of the first times that people who understood what bad science it was began to call out everyone from GM Watch and Rodale Press to the Environmental Working Group for publicizing a report that may make them feel good in the short term but will only hurt their cause in the long term,” wrote Glynn Young of Monsanto.
“The paper is by two authors with dubious credentials and is such a mash up of pseudoscience and gibberish that actual scientists have been unable to make sense of it,” wrote Keith Kloor of Discover magazine.
In these times when both truth and lies can be disseminated at lightning speed through social media, it becomes ever more important to think critically about information.
In terms of environment and food, people are actively seeking more information than ever before. Excellent.
However, the onus is on every information consumer to consider the source and gauge the material on its true merits.
The above noted paper is only the most recent example of information torqued and tweeted to the detriment of fact.
Little more than a year ago, controversy over use of lean finely textured beef in the United States — the much maligned “pink slime” — caused processing plant closures and job losses in the thousands. The science behind the product was sound and remains so, but its loss in food has raised costs and reduced food recovery from every beef carcass.
Joe Roybal of Beef Magazine quotes Iowa State University professor James Dickson as saying fears of controversy similar to that of pink slime could stifle innovation in the meat sector.
If that fear is also felt in other sectors, as is likely the case, it’s a sobering thought. How ironic that a growing thirst for knowledge could choke its actual pursuit and application.
Consumer backlash has become in-stant, while recovery from damage due to misinformation can take months, years, perhaps even millennia.
The sheer volume of information is also an impediment. Witness the ongoing debate over antibiotic use or misuse in human medicine and livestock production. Medical sources blame the livestock industry, while livestock sources say over-prescription in human medicine is the culprit.
Grains of truth might well be found in every example cited here. To produce pearls of wisdom, however, those grains have to be given the pressure of critical thought.
