hi all. One of the tenets of a skeptical mind is to be open to re-evaluating ones premises but to trust the scientific foundations upon which knowledge is built. I agree with this. Individual scientific studies do not produce knowledge (but can be cherry-picked to give the appearance that they do). Knowledge emerges once multiple studies conducted by multiple people in slightly different conditions provide a scattering of data and a general picture presents itself. Science under ideal conditions would proceed in this way, and perhaps it did at various points in history. However in the modern world, there are problems with this approach. Because the authenticity of GMO studies are a hot-button issue right now, Ill use them as an example. The majority of studies conducted on commercialized GMOs certainly points to their safety. It is an easy cheap shot for an anti-GMO activist to simply say: biased corporate science. But this label is unlikely to be taken seriously by most skeptics, who would say something like: yes, perhaps the odd study is biased, but when you get hundreds of studies all indicating the same basic thing, then it is unwise to call this a biased picture. The reply is surely correct. But what it misses is the fact that the bias does not always lie in how the study was conducted or what information was omitted in the results, but more frequently in the basic assumptions behind the construction of the study in the first place. In the case of GMOs, most of the safety studies have gone into assessing the safety for ingestion but there are many other ways that GMOs could be risky other than in terms of consumption. GMOs could be unsafe for ecological reasons, or through their cumulative impacts even though safety studies are conducted in isolation. GMOs could be unsafe because they promote a certain way of looking at and treating other species which educates our children that other species are there for us to manipulate. GMOs could also be unsafe because once we get to a stage where thousands of different kinds of them are released into the environment every year, that peaceful grandeur that one feels by getting away from humans for awhile to somewhere natural might well be pinched away. GMOs could also be unsafe because they set the precedent for our becoming comfortable with engineering humans, which many geneticists themselves are eagerly anticipating and actively lobbying for. This might be unsafe not because the engineered children are unhealthy but because they have unhealthy effects on society: for example, only rich people would likely have the funds to enhance their kids DNA, biologically sedimenting what is already an unjust class division. Secondly, safety is established through seeing how phenomena behaves against a model. Proof of safety is therefore only as good as the models we use. Of course, our modelling capacity for some fields is much stronger than it is for others, in direct relation not only to the complexity of the system studied but to what degree of funding the field has access to. Our understanding of ecology is significantly less than our understanding of human digestion. When we conduct a study to establish the ecological safety of a GMO we are using quite primitive models to make the assessment. We may well get a bell curve scattered around some general picture but that picture itself is much more likely to be an epistemological construct not a reliable representation of the actual phenomena at hand. Our understanding of the medium and long term effects on our way of thinking and our social systems is even less developed. But that does not mean that these effects are not real nor that they need not be publicly discussed and/or studied.
Posted on: Sat, 11 Oct 2014 22:08:17 +0000
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