POLITICALLY INCORRECT SCIENCE 11

Science journalist, senior editor of the Weekly Standard, and columnist for National Review, Tom Bethell had a paperback book tilted A Politically Incorrect Guide to Science published in November 2005. Bethell grew up in Great Britain and graduated from Oxford University. Some of what follows is taken from his book.

It is interesting that Charles Darwin said his theory of evolution – national selection and the survival of the fittest - was based on the work of Thomas Malthus (1766-1834). Malthus was a free market economist who postulated that worldwide famine would ensue because the population was increasing geometrically and the food supply was increasing arithmetically. He was wrong because his assumptions about these increases were incorrect. This idea was taken to a ridiculous level in the 1960’s by Paul Ehrlich (see my essay Fools, Frauds & Fakes) who said that 65 million Americans would die of starvation by the 1980’s. Sacre´ bleu! What idiocy. If he had meant obesity 20 years later he would have looked less ridiculous. British mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) made the wry comment that the theory of a laissez-faire economist was applied to the animal and vegetable kingdoms and embraced by the left.

The view of many people, both in and out of science, is that if a process or substance, such as radiation, lead, mercury, etc., is toxic then even the minutest amount is detrimental. Linus Pauling who won the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1954 (he was working furiously on the structure of DNA [deoxyribonucleic acid] and might have won the Nobel prize for medicine except he was beaten to the solution by American James Watson and the Brits, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins) was a believer in this Linear No Threshold Theory of toxicity. Pauling and his wife ingested massive quantities, as much as a couple of orders of magnitude more than is recommended, of vitamin C as a preventative for colds and cancer. Although they both lived into their early 90’s (Pauling died at the age of 93 of prostate cancer) millions of other people lived that long or longer without taking supplemental vitamin C. Double blind studies have failed to show any correlation between large doses of vitamin C and prevention of colds and cancer. Because of his tireless advocacy of banning all nuclear testing he won the Nobel Peace prize in 1962. He also won the Lenin Peace Prize in the same year so one can see who was pushing his agenda.

There is a theory called hormesis which holds that while large doses of these materials are toxic, low doses are in fact beneficial.

Johns Hopkins researchers found that Eastern USA shipyard employees who worked on nuclear reactors for ships and submarines were exposed to 10 times the amount of radiation compared to workers who were not exposed yet they had a 25% lower incidence of cancer that the national average.

Radon is a colorless, inert, radioactive gaseous element given off in the radioactive disintegration of radium and is found in the basement of houses all around the country in widely varying amounts. A comprehensive study at the University of Pittsburg yielded an almost inverse relation of radon exposure and lung cancer.

Radiation from uranium bearing rocks and cosmic radiation because of higher elevations in the Rocky Mountain area are greater than in the Mississippi Valley area. However incidences of cancer are measurably lower in the Rocky Mts. than in the Mississippi Valley.

Although it is controversial, there is a Japanese study which indicates that survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on average live longer that Japanese in the same age group of other cities. Certainly there is no clear indication that life spans of H & N survivors have been shortened relative to other Japanese.

It was predicted that the fatalities of Chernobyl would be on the order of 150,000. The New York Times and Washington Post reported that to date 50 deaths are attributable to the Chernobyl nuclear accident (1986). And even if that total is increased owing to the longer term effects of nuclear radiation as a causative agent of cancer the original estimate will not be approached.

Then President Richard Nixon declared war on cancer in 1971 with the prediction that the war would be largely won by 1976. I do not recall there was widespread laughter by the public at that extremely silly forecast. Admittedly Nixon was not someone who inspired merriment – contempt would be more like it. Still how could he or anyone have been so naïve?

Whacko environmentalists like to claim we are all slowly, and in some cases not so slowly, being poisoned by chemicals input into the air, ground, and water by perfidious and profligate man. In fact low levels of chemicals are beneficial to good health. Consider such chemical elements as phosphorus, magnesium, molybdenum, nickel, copper, zinc, chromium, and selenium which are trace elements necessary for good health and contained in many vitamin and mineral supplements. Mercury and lead are also in this category such that while large amounts are toxic, small quantities are essential.

Is global warming occurring and if so is it caused by human activity? The “Greens” and other head cases insist the answers are yes and yes and all dissenters are right wing environmental evil despoilers who should be suppressed. As for myself, I have a few questions. Not only is there a problem of obtaining accurate and representative temperatures now, given the “heat island” effect of cities, lack of proper temperature recording equipment in third world countries, and considering the earth is 2/3 covered with oceans, but comparing these with past proxy temperatures derived from tree rings and ice cores is problematic at best.

The environmentalists estimate that global temperature has increased by 1 ºC over the past 100 years, yet there was a circa 30 year period in the mid century where average temperatures declined and most of the gain is attributed to the first half of the 20th century. If industrialization is the cause then how is this explained?

Vikings settled in Greenland about 1000 A.D. The name was not selected cynically to entice additional settlers, but was an accurate description unlike now where the names of Iceland and Greenland should more descriptively be interchanged. Iceland has the advantage of being centered over a volcanic “hot spot” and therefore has many hot water geysers to promote thermal heating.

The diet of the Vikings was 80% derived from grazing land animals and 20% from fishing in the sea. This was prior to the “Little Ice Age” from approximately 1400 to 1850. As the global cold weather persisted the diet of the Vikings changed to 80% from fishing and 20% from the diminishing herds of sheep and cattle. Eventually all the sheep and cattle died and even the fish stopped coming into the cold northern waters. The Vikings did not want to emulate the native Greenlanders because they considered them barbarians so they all starved. Hubris will get you every time.

There were many other effects of the Little Ice Age. New England was so persistently cold that the western migration of Americans was greatly accelerated. The severity of the “Irish Potato Famine” is attributable to the prolonged cold and damp weather. Question: What caused what was a relatively global warm period prior to the LIA, what caused the LIA, and what caused the warm up after?

There are two current theories as to the mechanism of the temperature change during the Little Ice Age and neither, naturally, has anything to do with the alleged irresponsible actions of man. One theory is that the sun on a still unpredictable and not understood basis periodically outputs a changing and significant amount of solar energy. Another theory is that currents carry waters from the tropical regions northward transferring heat to northern latitudes. These waters cool as they reach northern latitudes becoming denser and therefore sink, effectively forming a conveyor belt of warmer water flowing northward at the surface and cooler water below traveling southward as equilibrium tends to distribute the northern and equatorial water levels. During the relative warm period preceding the Little Ice Age the northern glaciers melted and with the mixing of less dense fresh water from the glaciers the near surface waters did not sink thereby shutting down the conveyor effect. Without the heat transfer from the tropics to the northern latitudes the Little Ice Age was initiated. Or so goes the theory.

The United States has not signed on to the Kyoto Treaty and has therefore been pummeled by the hard left in this country and around the world. However the purpose of the treaty is clear. It is to cripple the US economy. Consider: Major polluting countries, China, India, Brazil, and third World countries are exempt from emission standards for the undisputed reason their economies would be hurt. The chosen year of 1990 for base reductions favor Russia and Germany as it was subsequent to then that their economies started growing rapidly owing to the overthrowing of Communism in Russia and the unification of East and West Germany. According to a just released European Institute for Public Policy Research report, only Britain and Sweden are hono(u)ring their commitments to cut greenhouse gasses and 10 out of 15 European signatories will miss their treaty targets without taking urgent action.

There is no doubt that AIDS (Auto Immune Deficiency Syndrome) is a huge health problem in Africa. The question is, is it as widespread as advertised? Whether people in Africa have AIDS is largely not determined by tests for HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus), but whether hospital patients have several of such symptoms as a 10% weight loss, cough, fever, and diarrhea which are all symptoms of AIDS and symptoms of other diseases as well. Additionally false positives of HIV are produced by such maladies as malaria and pregnancy, common in Africa. Despite what is called the AIDS epidemic the population of Africa is continually increasing contrary to the forecasts of the most pessimist alarmists.

The effect of a diminution in smoking and earlier detection of some cancers has lowered cancer mortality rates. However even though there has been a significant decrease in the mortality of some forms of cancer there are other types which have not had any meaningful decrease in the mortality rate in the past 50 years. Cancer is a serious, but interesting disease or more correctly a series of various diseases. It is widely accepted that gene mutation is the cause of most cancers. There is an alternate explanation called the theory of cell duplication or the Aneuploid Theory which holds that mistakes made during cell division cause cancer. For example when a somatic cell divides instead of producing 46 double structured chromosomes it erroneously makes, say, a cell with an many as 80 double structured chromosome pairs. University of California molecular biologist, Peter Duesburg has been proposing this theory for 25 years. He is better known for his claim that HIV is not the cause of AIDS so perhaps his explanation for the cause of cancer should be taken with a large, even very large, dose of skepticism. The complexity of cellular biology is what makes an understanding not only of cancer, but human biology so frustrating. The Human Genome Project was first conceived in 1975 with great promise for human cellular engineering advancement. Thirty years later understanding of human cellular biology has been frustratingly slow. There is no rational reason to believe that stem cell research will advance any faster.