Two enviro weinies from Chicken Little U. One even has the tag of quack on the web......
Ping... (not an endorsement of findings, just advising you all of the article).
I’m all for using cane sugar.
Left out earthquakes, bad breath, global warming, and liberalism.
This is demonology, not science.
And yet people, even conservatives like rush Limbaugh, much organic as if its something stupid. There are probably some pesticides even in organic foods, but a heck of a lot less!!
Anyone with a great lawn is also in danger. My dad used to walk around shooting roundup. Now he has severe alzheimers.
Take this seriously, people.
I read the whole thing. I did not intend to do that this early in the morning.
After looking at the credentials of the authors and looking up the definition/meaning of the term “biosemiotics”, heretofore not in my lexicon, I thought that this was going to be environmentalist wacko crap, pure BS.
I speak with authority as one who has joyfully sprayed gallons of Roundup over everything green that I wanted to be dead and gone. So an attack on my favorite herbicide was worth examining.
Still, there are unexplained things going on, such as the literal explosion in autism, c-diff infections, bee colony collapse, etc., so I plowed on. By page 15, they had my attention.
They had a tough case to make, over a tremendously broad spectrum of variables, but they did a good job. They tied numerous tendrils of unexplained smoke together to raise the legitimate issue of fire.
The authors are not demanding that glyphosate be banned, but they do make a compelling case that many of the biologically negative things going on may have this common link and it should be examined for causation.
I agree. I also may rethink my skepticism over organically grown food.
SFL
Sorry but I agree with this article. I do eat organic & all beef I consume is grass-fed, as well as only wild-caught seafood. And I avoid GMOs. If that put my ‘conservatism’ in question in your mind then that’s your problem & not mine.
I’ve been a nurse for 16 years. The amount of resistant infections as well as the increase in congenital syndromes as well as autism is remarkably on the rise. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.
It would never occur to the idiot researchers that the main Western DIET (the sugar, corn, soy, and wheat) is responsible for many human diseases.....
I skimmed over the article, and saw little of substance there.
Importantly, I did not see that the author’s backgrounds qualify them to write a supposedly scholarly article on a biological subject. I have no idea what an “independent scientist and consultant” is, and I can guarantee that no one trained in computer science and artificial intelligence has any in-depth understanding of life sciences or the complex interactions of an organism with its environment.
They made a lot of assertions, none of which are backed up by experimental evidence. Despite a bucket load of references (nearly 300), they omitted any reference that supported their underlying assumptions. Their most glaring (and false) underlying assumption is that toxicity at high doses can be extrapolated down to toxicity at low doses. That is utterly untrue. No one consumes glyphosate at the quantities tested in toxicology studies. Glyphosate also breaks down fairly rapidly in the environment—it does not accumulate anywhere. The main source of toxic exposures would be among people who apply it to crops—and they should be wearing protective equipment to prevent exposure.
Some of their other assertions also show their glaring lack of life sciences education. Trying to tie glyphosate to every bad thing under the sun, especially in situations where a causative factor is already well-known, is not good science. If you want to tie glyphosate exposure at any level to an adverse outcome, you need to actually conduct a study to establish a causative relationship. Their linking glyphosate usage to C. difficile infection, and then going from there to autism is just plain torturous. It would be a beautiful example of “correlation does not equal causation”, except that they don’t even establish a very good correlation. Yes, autism is linked to gastrointestinal problems—but the most likely explanation for that is that the genetic abnormalities in the metabolic pathways that cause autism also cause intestinal defects. Autism behaves very much like a genetic disease, most likely controlled through the synergy of several genes. It’s going to take real scientists a while to figure it all out—they’re making progress, but science never works as fast as pseudoscience.
Anyway, that article is way too long to go through and criticize point-by-point, and reading all of their references to see what the references actually say is way more work than I care to do for the purpose of making a forum post.
Many orchard owners have noticed a decline in tree health after several years of using roundup to control weeds. It does build up in the soil contrary to Monsanto’s claims. To deny this chemical’s potential problems based on a religious type presupposition is just foolish.
In other words, all known illnesses are caused by glyphosphates. Not buying it. But if glyphosphates are attacked that would also be a back door attack on genetically modified seed.
Just 3~4 years ago, every one out of 5 papers (it seemed) was blaming the florination process as our most toxic and carcinogenic compound, and tied to real (or imagined) human chronic diseases.
Before that, it was Splenda, the chlorification of natural sugar. A whole bunch of midddle-aged women (and others) complained all of their illness were tied to Splenda, and solemnly swore their doctors assured them ‘they can not have chlorine or chloride in their body’.
Which reminds me of this article, Everything Causes Cancer!. Even though it is only about 'cancer', but the list could be extended to include all kinds of other human diseases and illness, I am sure.
Time to stock up on Roundup concentrate. Needless to say, I have many, many, bottles. I even still have a boatload of chemicals that Clinton banned - enough to get me through my lifetime here (and they store great).
One of the first questions is the rate at which Glyphosate decomposes once applied to plant tissue, and the amount that is retained at harvest time. I was told that it rapidly decomposes in sunlight.
I am dubious about this article for several reasons. The first of which is that it mentioned that it was “peer reviewed” several times. While that may have helped establish credibility in the past, the process of “peer review” has been tainted in recent years by scientific frauds. Multiple mentions of peer review are now ‘red flags’, and require scrutiny.
The use of techniques like “round robin” and “incestuous” peer reviews to insure that nobody outside a very small groups sees the raw data or is able to criticize it, have severely compromised it as a technique.
Another problem is that SCImago, a major, scientific journal rating organization, lists Switzerland based ‘Entropy’ journal as being oriented to “physics and astronomy”, but also publishing “miscellaneous” articles on other subjects. It is a subsidiary publisher to MDPI, the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, also based in Switzerland.
This raises a question: if this research is so telling, why is it not being published in any of the dozen major scientific journals that specialize in its subject?
ping
When Media Uncritically Cover Pseudoscience
Media, in this case, not only pursuing an alarmist story, but also pushing their own agenda.