Let Me Tell You About the African Tortoise Effect

By Rich Kozlovich

Recently the American Council on Science and Health posted two articles everyone needs to read, at least if you're concerned about scientific integrity. My friend Mike Shaw of Shaw's Ecologic published this article, "Whatever Happened To Science?", which he originally posted  HealthNewsDigest.Com, saying:

A succinct answer would be to quote St. Paul: “For the love of money is the root of all evils, and some people in their desire for it have strayed from the faith and have pierced themselves with many pains.” (1 Timothy 6:10)  

Under the rubrics of LBJ’s Great Society, federal spending started to increase…dramatically. Not left out of this seemingly endless fountain of money was scientific research. Colleges—public and private—were re-christened “research universities,” and the quest for federal dollars was on. Science would soon be transformed from the search for truth to the search for funding.

Often I've said that grant money has made Scientific Integrity an oxymoron, and time and again that's proving to be true.

The second article I would like to draw your attention to is by Chuck Dinerstein,entitled, "Ideas Spread Faster Due to the Source more than their Quality - So Much for Science's Meritocracy". He notes:

The researchers found based upon subsequent publications that roughly a third of an institutions “new thinking” came from its new hires. And eminent institutions produced more faculty than a lesser program, spreading 88% of their graduates and ideas to more secondary programs. As a result, 81% of the new thoughts could be traced back to only a few higher eminence institutions. This indeed suggested that ideas spread by their merit.

Using an epidemiologic approach, the researchers described the “quality” of a paper on how often it was cited, how infectious were those papers. Ideas from more eminent institutions spread to more institutions and were cited for longer periods than similarly “infectious” quality papers from less eminent institutions.

Low quality, high quality, what's it all really mean? Perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems to me the bottom line conclusion of this article is that the quality of any scientific paper is decided by popularity and politics rather than observable, provable and repeatable fact finding.

Someone commented on the article saying:

Is this the same phenomenon viewed from a different angle? The African Tortoise Effect.

I looked up the link and here's what the author states:

Shortly after the Second World War, the famous naturalist, Gerald Durrell,  was collecting animals in Cameroon. While he generally got on well with the locals wherever he went, one frustration he encountered was that villagers might again and again offer him the same tortoise, despite his emphatic protestations that he did not want it. But they would reply "You didn't want it from that man, but maybe you want it from me."

I chuckled out loud at that since over and over again I see the same clabber about Anthropogenic Climate Change, vaccinations, pesticides, alternative energy, fossil fuels, chemicals in general, and a host of other issues touted over and over again, but by different people.  It's as they believe having someone else touting clabber would change reality.

• Anthropogenic Climate Change is the single most flagrant fraud and corruption of Scientific Integrity ever perpetrated on humanity.
• Pesticides are not weapons of mass destruction, they're weapons of mass survival.
• Vaccinations do not cause autism and save untold millions of lives every year.
• We're not running out of fossil fuels.
• Chemicals make life easier and better.
• Alternative energy is a scam.

Having someone different spouting out provable nonsense doesn't make nonsense more real. Using celebrities to do it makes it even less real.

Time is history, and history is the great leveler of truth, and the truth is that all these scares, whether they're environmental or health scares touted by eco-scare mongers, are almost invariably doom and gloom nonsense.

Going green is irrational, misanthropic and morally defective, and I Don't Want That Stinking Tortoise!!!