The New Scientist website, www.newscientist.com, tells us that the US
edition of that magazine has been available weekly since October 2002.
This high quality, critical news magazine gives prominence to discoveries
and insights in human evolution, human health, diet and complexity.  It
rarely covers exercise, but – for our purposes – makes up by publishing a
lot of material which is _implicitly_ rather than _explicitly_ stimulating
and informative to the Evolutionary Fitness thinker.

There were five articles in the 4 January 2003 issue that shared a theme
of interest to us: competing egos, personal agendas and commercial
interests which distort or suppress science.  This is a theme that has
interested me since I read The Oiling of America
http://www.westonaprice.org/know_your_fats/oiling.html
and joined an internet discussion on what would happen to nutritionists,
supermarkets and the food manufacturing and processing industries if the
majority of the population switched to a Paleo diet.

1. Great Barrier Bluff – here it is reported that scientists admit to
exaggerating the damage done to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.  They did
it with the best of intentions: to stimulate action to prevent existing
damage trends from becoming irreversible and to counter dangerous
complacency.  But they did exaggerate.  A quote: ‘Science is a human
endeavour, just like politics and journalism, and sometimes they put a
spin on it’.

2. Genetically modified food – here the focus is on the way each side of
the debate pushes for the popular vote because they lack the courage to
sell their story based on its real merits.  Public positions are staked on
these ‘popular’ positions, but the intransigence of each side is rooted in
their commitment to less prominent, more difficult-to-sell positions.  A
quote: ‘Many opponents of GM crops see the key problem of the technology
as the stranglehold over the food chain that it hands to the biotech
industry.  They should  … say so, rather than scaremongering about
antibiotic-resistance genes or appealing to vague notions of the
technology being ‘unnatural’.  Proponents of GM crops who want the
technology to create more jobs for molecular biologists, or provide
benefits for growers or the biotech industry, or let farmers use more
benign herbicides, should also say so rather than resort to claims that GM
crops are the answer to world hunger and that it is ‘anti-science’ to
oppose them’.

3. Global climate change – here the biologists are pitted against the
economists.  The economists are skeptical because the biologists appear to
them to lack sound evidence to support their claims.  But as with the
Great Barrier Reef article, the ‘biologists are trying to answer the
question “are you detecting responses in nature?”  Of course the first
responses are smaller than they will be later.  And that is precisely why
you want to find them.’

4. Smoke and mirrors – In this article, the writer describes how the
cigarette companies funded research into ‘indoor air quality’ to emphasize
the significance of pollutants other than second-hand tobacco smoke.  They
sponsored research into ‘good epidemiological research’ which emphasized
the methodological difficulties in all epidemiology, hoping it take the
heat off the dangers of smoking.  Then the article goes on to describe the
Bush administration’s approach to climate science as similarly
manipulative.  They sponsor conferences and research based on the
assumption that not enough is known about climate change to take action
now.  They encourage diversion of research grants into trying to pin down
the ever-elusive certainty about the ‘precise’ contribution to global
climate change of human activity.  A quote: ‘The nature of science means
you can always point to gaps in knowledge or insist that this or that
question has to be answered, before action is justified.’  And so our
planet becomes more synthetic and less Paleo hour-by-hour.

Those who read the press carefully will note the similarities with the way
the processed food industry suborns established nutritionists, sports
stars and others into endorsing their products or broad strategies.

5. GMOs – in this article the competing interests of different nations
come to the fore:  Australia is developing a GM modified organism to kill
off its rabbits, an introduced feral pest of massive proportions.  Spanish
researchers are trying to breed into their diminishing native rabbit
populations resistance to myxomatosis and rabbit haemorrhagic disease, the
very diseases that Australia uses to keep the rabbit numbers at bay.  What
happens if the Australian GMOs get into the Spanish rabbits?  Or the
Spanish rabbits are released into the Australian bush?  There are other
examples: New Zealand scientists are about to release a parasite to
control the introduced plague of possums.  But the same parasite, if it
found its way to Australia, could decimate rare and threatened Australian
possum species.  In my view, it is one or two hundred too late for a ‘fix’
that is satisfactory to all: humans have so distorted the environment that
any effective – and ineffective – measure could lead to further
environmental damage.

New Scientist this week has a couple of book reviews worth checking out:

At http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opbooks.jsp?id=ns23777 is a review
of The Neanderthal's Necklace by Juan Luis Arsuaga looking at the
Neanderthals, their similarities to and differences from Homo sapiens –
and their fate, while at
http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opbooks.jsp?id=ns23773 is a review of
Industrialized Nature by Paul R Josephson which describes how poor
engineering and ‘trophy’ projects have been part of ‘the lasting war that
shaped our world - the war against nature’.

Finally, Jared Diamond extends his ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’ thesis in a
talk at Princeton University in the US available in streaming audio at:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/bbing/.  He surveys the collapse of past
civilizations for lessons we can apply today.  A quote (which takes us
back to my New Scientist article 4, above): ‘I can’t help wondering what
the Easter Islander who chopped down the last palm tree said as he or she
did it. Was he saying, ‘What about our jobs? Do we care more for trees
than for our jobs, of us loggers?’ Or maybe he was saying, ‘What about my
private property rights? Get the big government of the chiefs off my
back.’ Or maybe he was saying, ‘You’re predicting environmental disaster,
but your environmental models are untested, we need more research before
we can take action.’ Or perhaps he was saying, ‘Don’t worry, technology
will solve all our problems.’

Keith
(Past bulletins available at http://www.evfit.com/bulletins.htm)

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