<font color=Green>Cellphones and Brain Cancer.
I'm going to argue that cellphones cause brain cancer.
Thanks for that link Rich.
Being a boring engineer, I figure that life is a probability of 0 or 1 and the idea that there is something between is just a measure or our ignorance. Put another way, I'm a deterministic fan club member who thinks there is a causal chain of events. Okay, it's true that when you get photons doing stupid things at quantum levels, they are a bit slippery if not downright ornery, but they don't just make it up as they go. They turn left or right, spread and stop depending on the rules of the game at the place where they are observed [if they are observed - sort of like people's behaviour is a function of whether they are observed or not].
Epidemiological sums don't demonstrate causality, they just show association, with big smoke screens of a huge array of confounding variables. Incy wincy effects are notoriously hard to detect.
It took until the 1960s for lung cancer to be solidly linked to tobacco smoking [for the most astute observers though sensible people without the evidence figured for decades and centuries before that that life and smoking were not great partners]. It is still denied in some quarters and with good reason if you assume that DNA uselessness causes most smoking deaths and robust people with really tough DNA get away with it. That's a harsh way of looking at the world.
Yes, white people should studiously avoid sunburn, and albino people are seriously in trouble with it. But the fact that melanin-rich people don't get much melanoma isn't an argument that sunburn doesn't cause skin cancer.
Anyway, eventually they figured out that smoking was very strongly correlated with lung cancer and people with the wrong DNA are presumably the ones who get it the most.
Another example is lead in petrol [or gasoline in the USA]. For decades, this neurotoxin was put in petrol to increase the antiknock qualities so high octane petrol could be made more cheaply.
That was a crazy thing to have done. It is only 4 years ago that lead was finally banned from petrol in New Zealand. The IQ damage due to lead in petrol was less than 0.25 overall in high lead zones. That's not a lot and hard to measure. But it is of huge importance. People tend to think they have 100 or so of them, so what's quarter of one of them. That fails to recognize the value of brainpower economics. I won't go into it here, but suffice to say the damage was done and the epidemiologists failed to figure it out for far, far too long. They failed because the damage was relatively minor compared with other variables determining intelligence.
Now, brain cancer from cellphones.
My guess is that it is even less significant that lead in petrol. Overall! But, for the individuals who get the brain tumour, the effect is final. We all were brain-damaged from lead in petrol and still keep on functioning. If you add up total human well-being, I'd say that the lead was hugely worse than the brain cancer. A bit of damage on everyone is worse than killing one person if the bit of damage adds up to the equivalent of 10 people deaths.
Think of it like this. How many IQ points would you and the rest of the population give up to save one person [not you] from dying? 1 million people in a city giving up 1 IQ point to save one person = 10,000 person equivalents [a very rough measure, I admit]. So I think everyone losing a tenth of an IQ point is worse than 10 people dying out of the 1 million [you can't choose Einstein or the village criminal].
Anyway, you get the point, a person dying is far more noisy and noticeable in the short run, than everyone going slightly stupid. It's probably far less politically acceptable too, [since most people don't have enough IQ points to have even read this far while understanding it].
The point of that argument, is that one person dying from a cellphone brain tumour will be a political liability even though far more damage was done by lead in petrol. Hugely more damage from lead in petrol.
But the point of the argument is also to show how hopeless epidemiologists are at finding minuscule needles in the haystack full of confounding variables. They couldn't figure out smoking caused cancer. They didn't figure out that lead was damaging our brains. They don't know whether cellphones cause brain tumours.
[to be continued]
Mqurice |
