> But I also RESPECTFULLY suggest you look around (at diseases cured, technology developed, advances made in thousands of fields, including agricultural output [which environmentalists predicted would be outstripped by population by the 1980s]) and check your biases.
You are right — I do have some biases and an anti-science thing, and it does possibly taint my world-view somewhat.
You see, there is nothing that is so bad that a scientist can’t make it just a little worse if he does an experiment or two.
This mosquito thing is a great example. How do we know it is a good idea to get rid of all these mosquitoes? On the surface it seems like a fine idea: I hate getting bitten by mosquitoes, and I bet I’d hate having dengue fever even more. And on the surface, dengue fever seems like a bad thing because it kills 150 people per year or something like that. So as experiments go, it seems like a good candidate...
...but I wonder what the local fish will eat when there is no mosquito larvae because these scientists have killed them all off. And I wonder whether more than 150 people per year could possibly die of starvation as a result.
Or perhaps worse, I wonder if the mosquito could mutate — evolution is very clever that way, with mutating — in such a way as you end up with a Dengue-carrying supermosquito that is much more difficult to kill?
I dunno, I’m only wondering. I’m not a scientist and I really would rather not find out the hard way the answers to these niggling questions. Scientists, on the other hand, would be delighted to. It’s a jolly experiment!
That’s why science can’t seem to agree on things like whether cholesterol is good for you or bad for you. Or whether you should or should not eat fat. Or whether an all-vegetarian diet is healthy for you or not.
These are non-trivial questions that scientists are quite happy to pronounce confidently on, then later pronounce the opposite equally confidently. They are immune to the consequences: millions of people will craft their dietary habits around what they say. Entire industries created and destroyed with their each whimsical “scientific” pronouncement. Scientists do not care: off to the next experiment!
Only the weatherman is allowed to be wrong more often than scientists with impunity. If aircraft pilots or ER Nurses were wrong as often as scientists, our gaols would be full of pilots and nurses.
Mark my words: the day will come when scientists will “prove” that nicotine is good for you. It is merely a question of time, and perhaps boredom: some scientist somewhere is bound to prove it.
Do I trust scientists with this mosquito question? Heck no, and for all the above good reasons.
You make some excellent points and I’m sure you’re aware of the history of the Africanized bees in the Western Hemisphere and how they came to be here. Somebody (presumably a scientist) wanted to look into the possibility of cross-breeding African bees (which produce a lot of honey) with South American bees (which are more docile).
So what did they do? Did they take some docile bees to Africa and experiment with the cross-breeding there?
No...
The rest is history...
However, on the subject of mosquitoes, dengue fever is bad but malaria is much much worse (in terms of yearly death-toll) and I would definitely want to consider the possibility of getting rid of all mosquitoes if it ended malaria forever.
In fact, I remember reading an article maybe 20 years ago about a “diet pill” for mosquitoes, basically some kind of organic, biodegradable substance that could be sprayed on ponds and other standing water with the effect of inhibiting the uptake of nutrients by mosquito larvae. At the time I read the story it was hailed as a breakthrough, a way to end the scourge of malaria forever.
I never heard anything more about it.