So Sue Me

First blog in this series

Ground rules for the discussion

Okay, so I admit I’m going for the low hanging fruit. These are also what the major anti-GMO organizations spend a lot of time on, so I’m going for what is out there. The statements I want to address this time are the ones like these,

Monsanto “has sued more than 400 farmers over the last 13 years.”

“Biotech Goliath Monsanto is well-known for its litigious tendencies among farmers, having sued hundreds of them over the years to the tune of over 23 million dollars.”

In its report, called Seed Giants vs US Farmers, the Center for Food Safety said it had tracked numerous law suits that Monsanto had brought against farmers and found some 142 patent infringement suits against 410 farmers and 56 small businesses in more than 27 states. In total the firm has won more than $23m from its targets, the report said.”

This is a really easy one because the data is not refuted. If you go to Monsanto’s own statement you find they say they have filed 145 cases. What they also say, and what I have never seen in any other article, is that only 9 cases have gone through to full trial. They also mention they have over 275,000 customers. Most of them apparently understand what they are buying and do not have a problem with it.

If you put “Monsanto sues farmers” into a search engine, you will get a large number of hits, but notice that the majority are about farmers attempting to sue Monsanto. They sue for the protection to not be sued and they sue for contamination of their organic fields. These cases are usually thrown out.I have never heard of an instance of anything other than isolated fields being contaminated up to 1 or 2 percent by GMO varieties. It is eradicated by simply plowing it under.

In Monsanto’s own statement on this issue they state:

It has never been, nor will it be Monsanto policy to exercise its patent rights where trace amounts of our patented seed or traits are present in farmer's fields as a result of inadvertent means.

When they do win a case, the evidence shows that the farmer knew what they were doing and knew they were attempting to scam the system. In the recent case of Bowman vs Monsanto, the farmer purchased GMO seed via a loophole in the law. The seed he purchased was intended for feed, but he suspected it would contain herbicide resistant GMO seed. He continued this practice for 8 years and cross bred plants that had the traits he wanted.

The Monsanto statement also includes declarations that should be framing this debate.

The vast majority of farmers understand and appreciate our research and are willing to pay for our inventions and the value they provide.

This statement gives anyone the opportunity to respond. It is a falsifiable statement. If it is not true, it should be possible to show that it is not true. I have seen nothing but hand waving to refute it.

Percy Schmeiser’s case is a little more cut and dry, but you wouldn’t know that from any of his attempts at self-promotion. If you watch just about any anti-GMO documentary, like Genetic Roulette, you will likely hear of his case. What you won’t hear are the findings during the court trail that he discovered a small patch of RoundUp Ready Canola that had found its way onto his land and he directed a farmhand to harvest it and save the seeds separately. He then used that seed to increase the amount of herbicide resistant Canola in his fields. When he got caught, he claimed ignorance. Really?

This is publicly available information, given under oath and kept in official government records. There is no excuse for not including it when retelling this story or for not being aware of it. Anyone who tells the story or any story about Monsanto being out to get farmers and enforce patents on all farmers and all of nature should be held in very high suspicion. If their source is one of those documentaries, they can be forgiven, once.

Evaluating Cancerous Rats

Principles that I will be using in this discussion.

The GMO debate brings up a lot of issues and strong feelings. It is after all about what we put in our bodies. Unfortunately, how we debate in the 21^st century has become unhealthy. Media presents everything as a two sided argument with no resolution. I hope to avoid that type of presentation.

Intelligence is more than just what we can keep in our heads. As a collection of people, social animals that we are, we have expanded our minds through written language. We are all as smart as the accumulation of knowledge that we inherited. Ignorance then becomes not what we are capable of knowing, but what we have access to. For most scientific information, that means you need to be at least enrolled in a university of some kind or that you pay for access to scientific journals. This makes most of us pretty ignorant.

That is not as bad as I make it sound because there are efforts to make that knowledge public, but I wanted to make the point that there is a barrier. There is currently debate about how to fix this situation, but for now, the information that I would really like to use to make my determination about GMOs is behind “pay walls”. Go looking for actual peer-reviewed science and you will find out what those are.

I’m getting to the question of how I have determined that GMOs are not as bad as NaturalNews.com and The Organic Consumers Association say they are. First an analogy. I can’t know everything. I can’t be an expert in all fields. But I can evaluate experts in other fields. It is as if I saw a woman standing high up on a roof. I can’t see how she got there, but there she is. She then directs me around to the back of the building and I see a series of ladders. I have no interest in climbing those ladders but I understand ladders. I can now see how she got there.

The opposite of this analogy would be someone who says they can get to the top of that roof but they aren’t going to tell me how. This is much more common.

Debates can carry a lot of information. It is actually a debating technique to overwhelm your opponent with many arguments and then accuse of them not addressing all of them in detail. Debates have time constraints so this technique proves nothing other than the one using the technique is a windbag. Fortunately today we have the Internet, and if we have time, we can find answers to many of those arguments easier than in the past. This may seem overwhelming, but there is a way to go about it.

Most of us probably won’t be in formal debates, but even discussions with friends and colleagues have time constraints, not to mention social constraints. Sometimes, when someone says, “there are just too many questions”, you have to accept that they are uncomfortable with GMOs and you aren’t going to change their mind at that time. You can exit that discussion without conceding that “too many questions” means they are right, it just means that they have questions.

Here’s an example of how to go about finding answers to all these questions:

When I was starting to doubt my negative assessment of GMOs, I saw this horrific picture

Of mice that had been fed GMO corn. That should make you wonder about what you’re putting in your body, right? And the accompanyingarticles had more horrible stuff to say about it.

1 Rats died prematurely

2 Rats had organ failure

3 Rats got tumors.

A couple things popped for me right away however. First, they didn’t just feed the rats GMO corn, they fed them Roundup. These two are tightly bound because the corn is designed to be resistant to Roundup, so farmers can use that Monsanto product to kill weeds, not corn. The problem here is, what are they really testing? In big bold letters at the bottom of the article it says, “GMOs are toxic!” Does this study prove that?

Fortunately this article gives us enough details about the study that we can go looking for ourselves. Often, Facebook posts or emails only show the deformed rats and a few select quotes from the researchers and not much else. The article also has a comments section. These can get pretty heated pretty fast and quickly go off topic, but sometimes they give you just what you need. One of the comments, interestingly not the article itself, links you to the study, and articles like this are definitely not going to link you to any discussion of how well the study was done. 

But let’s not even bother with being too technical here. Mother Earth News has printed many anti-GMO articles. They are all about organic farming. Let’s see what they have to say. 

1.        The sample size per group was too small to draw conclusions.
2.        The strain of rat used is highly prone to developing mammary tumors.
3.        The authors did not release all of the data from the study. (They say they will publish it later)

That last one concerns me the most. This is the most common problem I see in cases like this. The most extreme case being a sentence that says “studies show” and no further links or information about the study or studies. More complicated examples are studies that are actually reviews of other studies. They can be quite lengthy and contain no real data, only summaries and cherry picked conclusions from sources that are difficult to track down and verify.

Worse than those though, NPR included a comment from another European scientist about Seralini, one of the authors of the study. He said that Seralini has published poor studies in the past, attempting to discredit GMOs. At this point, I could continue to research the other work of Seralini or I could drop this particular line. If you have never looked into this issue before, I could understand your wanting to continue, but since I have spent quite a bit of time with it and have not found anything convincing, I’m done for now.

This Forbes article goes into greater detail about Seralini and problems with the study.

That may sound like giving up, but it is scientifically sound. Even if I were a researcher of food safety. One study should not bring an end to decades of work. There are other studies, including feeding rats GMO corn, and they have not had results similar to these. Repeating experiments is one of the most important rules of the scientific method. When one repetition has different results, that should lead to questions and to more experimenting but it definitely does not lead to a conclusion. If you accept the results of the French study but don’t accept the results of other studies, then you're making a conclusion then looking for data to support it, that’s the opposite of science.

Earlier studies:

European study from 2005

Comments on the ban Austria

Summary or European scientist's opinion

The Mother Jones article starts out with some history that has much to do about why this controversy rages on. In the ‘80s, the FDA gave GMOs “generally regarded as safe” status. This was based more on analysis of the chemical nature of the process rather than any actual testing. That is, they could see no reason why they could be toxic, so they saw no reason to require extensive testing. Also, with the patents in place, independent research is difficult. So, we, the consumers of these products became the test.

But even if we can’t trust our governments or our corporations that is not an excuse for bad science. Bad science just discredits the real concerns that we do have. They may not have the emotional appeal, but if there are political concerns, let’s focus on them and not try to frighten people with pictures of sick rats.

If this really is the problem, let’s focus on that, not make unsubstantiated claims.

Summer Series - Starting Principles

I’m going to attempt another series. It’s summer which is usually slow blogging time and this will require a little more research than usual so it might unfold slowly. It’s not so much about religion as it is “truth discovery”. Before I introduce it, I want to lay down some ground rules for myself. You can police me as you like and keep me honest.

These are some key philosophical points I discovered after asking the questions of how do we know what we know and why do we think the way we think.

  

Principle of Charity

 This is generally accepted among philosophers and was employed widely by politicians a few decades ago. Since the advent of talk radio and then 24-hour news channels it is less well known. The idea is, unless you have very good reasons, assume whomever you are listening to is not crazy. At least on the first run through, give their idea as much credibility as you can stand. Even if you strongly disagree with the person do not immediately jump to the conclusion that they are evil or insane for taking their position.

  

Evidence

David Hume said, “A weaker evidence can never destroy a stronger.” Makes sense, but as Hume found, his own advice was difficult to follow. We all complain about the constantly changing “results of the latest study.” It would be great if “latest” was equal to “stronger” and it often is, but not always. Hume was the ultimate skeptic and said, philosophically speaking, we can’t prove anything. It’s too difficult to live like that but we should always keep in mind that our senses can fool us, we might learn something tomorrow that changes what we know today, that most everyone we know knows something we don’t, and we don’t have it all figured out.

Falsification

This is a major part of modern thinking that quickly fell into our background knowledge because it is so obvious. But it took some of the great minds of the 20^th century to formulate it rigorously. It is attributed to Karl Popper. He changed common sense thinking from truth being based on proof to saying that a theory is scientific if we know what would disprove it. Nothing can be completely proven. We can only increase our certainty until it is considered as a proven fact. For something to be science you must be able to design an experiment that will give you data that will lead to more or less certainty about it. If you can’t do that, it’s just an idea.

Another way to look at this is to consider your favorite difficult Uncle or somebody in your circle of friends who can’t be argued with. Most of know someone who has a pet theory or is constantly coming up with new ones and never seems to listen to reason. No matter what evidence you present they have a way of deflecting it. If your evidence is strong, they will fall back on a theory of how that evidence was constructed to cover-up the actual truth. How they know that truth is a mystery.

Objections?

If you are uncomfortable with these principles, to borrow from Steve Novella, if you don’t like science, which part is it you don’t like? If you live in a country with a constitution, which is most of the world, do you not like the idea of “innocent until proven guilty?” There is unevenness in how that is enforced, but it is at its core a scientific principle. Because of scientific thinking, people can no longer accuse you of witchcraft and burn you at the stake, they have to have evidence and they have to prove their case.

Science led to principles that ended slavery and improved civil rights. Science is the fairest system. It allows to you sell a book that claims you can change the weather with your mind, you just can’t claim it is scientifically proven. It allows you to teach your children that the earth is 10,000 years old, it just asks you not to call it science or to teach it in a science class or call it an alternative scientific theory. It allows you say whatever you want and if you can provide evidence it will accept it as truth.

A Handy reference

Carl Sagan developed some strategies for sniffing out good science and put them in his book The Demon Haunted World. Michael Shermer worked some of those into a shorter list. He calls it the “Baloney DetectionKit." I will be employing this list throughout the series as well.

Why?

Over at The Austin Atheist Experience, there is a long thread dedicated to one guy. What I wouldn’t give to have an internationally known organization dedicate a thread to me. This guy has the opportunity to ask the entire world whatever he wants, and he is using it to play the “why” game like a little kid.

And he is losing the game.

At one point he even calls one of the responses a “book”, and tells the responder he didn’t bother reading it. The response is about 3 short paragraphs long. I admit it is rather long to read the entire thread at this point, but if you were Corey, you would have had these responses come in over a period of days. Alright, I don’t think I need to point out the ridiculousness of this thread.

So why am I blogging about it and why did I add my comments to it? Under normal circumstances, if you determine someone is unreasonable, you ignore them. Exceptions to this are, if it is your boss, and you don’t have good prospects of getting another job soon; if it is your child and they have not learned how to be reasonable yet; if it is someone who is around your children or maybe just your friends and could potentially influence them negatively. Each of these requires a measured response.

Internet threads are carried on by people who think a person like Corey deserves a chance to be heard and a chance to consider other opinions. Also, the internet influences many people, so leaving an unreasonable statement unaddressed gives the impression that it has merit. All of this is a matter of degree and you have to decide for yourself if you are someone who should participate.

What I’d really like to address is how we end up with people like Corey. He apparently has some level education, some free time, and a computer. Where did we go wrong? My personal theory is that we don’t teach the history of science correctly. Mostly we don’t even teach much history past 1776 or so.

When we teach the history of scientific innovation, we teach the heroes, Einstein, Newton, Galileo, that guy who cross bred peanuts. Obviously I should have been paying more attention, but look at a curriculum of any public school and show me where it talks about the tedious work done by grad students sifting through data. Show me the words “peer review” used anywhere.

If you remember science class, you probably remember being given some flasks and a Bunsen burner and told how to do an experiment, and you were told how it should turn out. That’s not scientific investigation, that’s a demonstration of what science has already figured out. What you weren’t told, or at least this wasn’t highlighted, even though it is what science actually is, were the thousands of failed experiments someone did before they proved whatever it is you were learning that day. If it hadn’t been proven yet, it wasn’t being taught. That was real science in the making. That’s what scientists do, not High School kids. If you got to discuss ongoing science in your class, you were lucky.

Corey is really stuck on the word “prove”, so I have to stop and address that. You can skip this paragraph if you are a reasonable person. Math has proofs. They are absolutely proven, WITHIN THE DEFINITION OF MATH. 1 + 1 = 2 because we define those characters that way. Science, history, and just about everything else can only deal with probabilities. You don’t need to understand the entire theory of probability to understand that 99.9% certain is better than a 50/50 chance.

The history of science is full of people who made claims based on sitting in a room and thinking something through. They also did a few experiments, but we generally only teach about the ones that were successful. It is also full of people stealing other people’s ideas. It is full of people manipulating their data and making claims that took years to disprove. It is full of people who were very right about some things and very wrong about other things. None of that matters when you are discussing what science really is.

What’s important is that a major value within science is: question everything. This includes your own work. If you discover something that no one else has, the first thing you do is ask others to check your work. If you don’t ask, they will anyway. If you don’t publish your data and your methods, you shouldn’t be listened to.

Anyone can find flaws with how science is done. The difference between a scientific approach and just about any other approach is that science welcomes those questions. It refines its methods based on that input. Anything else would be unreasonable. Corey.