Global Warming, Evolution, vaccinations
Oh, how I've loved laughing at - ridiculing - those insipid right wingers and their fundamentalist anti-science beliefs. Many of you here have, too. The very concept of denying what is a consensus in the scientific community makes me lose patience. Attempts at reasoning quickly turns to eye rolling.
Then I remember we have our own science deniers here on the left. Many of the very same people who KNOW global warming is happening, that evolution is real, that vaccinations don't cause autism will turn around and stake their life savings that GMO is dangerous based on... what?
To hear them tell it, environmental scientists are above reproach. Anthropologist and palaeontologists and biologists are honest people of science following the scientific method and presenting their findings with no partisan agendas. Doctors are really interested in preventing childhood diseases and aren't hiding some tragic side effects.
But other doctors and scientists who say GMOs are safe? To hear some here tell it, they're in the back pockets of greedy politicians and evil corporations. Because... progressives!!!
Anti-GMO activists have pushed their anti-science agenda so hard that even those well-informed on science and technology start to doubt.
Look at this:
All of these scientific bodies are lying to hear some tell it. The World Health Organization. The American Medical Association. The Royal Society of Medicine. All of them are on the take, apparently.
Again, based on what?
Many point to the Séralini study - a study that was released, retracted, then released again without much being done to correct the reasons it was retracted to begin with.
The biggest criticism of the study is the combination of two features – the small sample size and lack of statistical analysis. The entire study is premised on comparing various dose groups with control groups that were not exposed to GMO or glyphosate. And yet, the authors provide no statistical analysis of this comparison. Given the small number of rats in each group, it is likely that this lack of statistical analysis is due to the fact that statistical significance could not be reached.
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-seralini-gmo-study-retraction-and-response-to-critics/
The authors admitted the flaws.
The new rat corn study by Gilles-Éric Séralini looks a lot like the old retracted one, according to a detailed analysis by the Genetic Literacy Project. Independent scientists who have reviewed it—unlike the prior study, this was released to scientists for review ahead of time—say it has all of the flaws of the first study that led to sharp criticism from the global mainstream science community.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonentine/2014/06/24/zombie-retracted-seralini-gmo-maize-rat-study-republished-to-hostile-scientist-reactions/
Retraction Watch learned yesterday, however, that Environmental Sciences Europe — a journal where Seralini has published before — was the journal publishing the new version. The journal, part of SpringerOpen, is too young to have an official Impact Factor (IF). Using the same calculation, however, the journal would have an IF of .55. That would place it about 190th out of the 210 journals in the “environmental sciences” category at Thomson Scientific. (For comparison, Food and Chemical Toxicology has an IF of just above 3, and a ranking of 27th.)
This is hardly the first time that the authors of a retracted paper have republished it. In a recent case, they did so in the same journal. But in a more typical case, they republished the work in another journal, with a lower IF.
The republished study was peer-reviewed, according to the press materials, and Seralini confirmed that it was in an email to Retraction Watch. But we were curious what “any kind of appraisal of the paper’s content should not be connoted” meant. We asked Seralini and the editor of Environmental Sciences Europe, Henner Hollert, but neither responded.
http://retractionwatch.com/2014/06/24/retracted-seralini-gmo-rat-study-republished/
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