On to Forbes...
>>You really would have to be most, most, cynical to think that there could be any relationship at all between the timing of this paper and this proposition.<<
Okay, starting out with an ad hominem attack usually doesn't spell for good analysis.
Yes, Forbes, these researchers read the cosmos and started their research two years ago knowing that, at a later date, some Californians would put Prop 37 on the ballot.
The conspiracy widens - mind reading researchers and corrupt peer review scientists! Uh, but there's no evidence presented, just allegations... "this is not the droid you are looking for..."
I would assume that they would present evidence of a faulty study to rush it in time for this initiative if they had it, but they didn't. They don't have it, but they do hope they can slander the scientists by ad hominem logical lying (that's why they are called fallacies - the logic is false and a lie).
>>As the old saying goes you pays your money and you takes your choice. Who you wish to believe here is entirely up to you.<<
I choose to believe the data and the logic. This guy wants to present false opposing teams (and opick the one you "like" more) to the people who don't understand data and logic. Again, this is childish sophistry to those who understand the Trivium and logical fallacy.
>>Myself I would go with having more than just a soupcon of a suspicion that this is not very good science cobbled together and released in order to influence an upcoming political event. But that is just my opinion.<<
Again, no evidence, just an advertiser supported opinion based on... well, nothing so far.
Of course his conflict of interest isn't mentioned...
John Swinton, the former Chief of Staff of the the New York Times,called by his peers, "The Dean of His Profession," was asked in 1953 togive a toast before the NY Press Club; and this is what he said. After reading it, think about what he said.
"There is no such thing at this date of the world's history, in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you that dares to write his honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone. The business of journalists is to destroy truth; to pervert; to villify; to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are tools and vassals for rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."
There is no mention that Monsanto lied about Agent Orange, DDT and rBST, as well as getting his peers fired for tryingt o tell the truth.
Unsettling Accounts
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Nope - no mention of reality for the sheep. The mis-educated and ignorant will have to, instead, pick a team. On the one hand, the Forbes reporter will slander one team without facts. On the other hand, the reporter will hide all the evil doing of the company that advertises in his paper.
>>Just a final note for the “peer reviewed” crowd. No, it is not true that something that has been peer reviewed is thus good and true science.<<
I agree. 100%. So where is all the hard evidence that this paper is actually bad? Peer reviewed doesn't mean junk science when a major media advertiser doesn't like the results.
Oh, lookee here. Forbes is shilling profits for Monsanto...
forbes.com
Educated people might hurt those profits. So they fight for an ignorant populace. Why not be proud of your product? Oh, there's a reason alright. There's a reason a Monsanto operative made the no long term testing call. Monsanto isn't stupid. They want control to execute their self interest.
>>I am grateful for the authors for publishing this paper, as it provides a fine case study for teaching a statistics class about poor design, analysis and reporting. I shall start using it immediately.<<
That doesn't mean anything until the exact details of the problems are elucidated. Otherwise, it is appeal to authority logical fallacy. Let's see if they come up with any substantive later on in the heretofore irrational hit piece.
I will take up the link where this quote was pulled from next. A note to readers, a circle jerk of unsupported quotes doesn't make the truth, the truth. Seriously.
>>Sadly, we can have no confidence at all in results which do not perform these standard tests to exclude that chance element.<<
I'm unaware of any dietary study where all "chance potentialities" can be taken into account. None. This statement is merely trying to fool people that don't understand the scientific method and what research actually does. This research doesn't purport to prove, beyond any and all doubt, that the GMO/RU were responsible for 100% of the difference between the control.
Dropping one apple didn't prove gravity. But it strongly suggested that there could a link - and this is what this guy is hiding in his nonsense "chance" claim. Dietary studies are complex. The variables are immense - too many to even quantify. Monsanto knows this. This hack may or may not know this, but they hope their sucker readers don't know this.
The results don't prove anything, nor do they claim it. Nobody should have confidence that these results are the absolute truth - that's absurd. But you can trust that the odds of this occurring due to random chance are very low. Possible, but very, very low.
So the obvious answer is more research to learn more about what is going on. Industry has spent $0 on long term health studies. They are probably over $50 million fighting labeling, though.
This is called a straw man logical fallacy - building up a study that is impossible to build up and then burning up the impossibility.
This isn't a mistake. The people feeding this Forbes guy know exactly what they are doing.
Note that he hasn't provided anything substantive, rather, he comes off like an paid witness for one side of a court case.
>>Nor in studies that do not give us the information to allow us (well, not me, obviously, but someone who knows what they’re doing) to perform such tests independently. These tests are not performed ergo we can have no confidence in the results.<<
Why can't industry perform a similar test? Is he just pulling this out of *ss? What a hack.
>>Their claim is that the rats fed GM corn and Roundup got more such tumours earlier than the control group. The criticism of this finding is that the control group was simply too small to allow such an observation to be made with any certainty. And they have not conducted, or at least not presented, the standard statistical tests which would allow they or us to determine whether the results were the outcome of pure blind chance.<<
He doesn't define his terms. "Certainty" is supposed to have a meaning - and 85% confidence level, a 95% confidence level, etc... The way the author used the word, it has no meaning. This lack of information enables him to use it as an attack piece for people who don't understand science. If he really had a point, he should point out what the certainty is, which is easy to figure out in statistics, and he should argue for a higher level of certainty and tell his readers how big the control should be.
He should also call on industry to do a real study that would make him happy. I bet he doesn't... wanna bet?
Let me give an example. take a coin. flip it ten times. Now, flip it 100 times. Do you get a 350% increase in the incidence of heads in the 100 time flip compared to the 10 time flip?
Of course, this is apples and oranges, but it also proves his outright dismissal of results while hiding confidence intervals from his readers, is as absurd as his false claims against the researchers.
Yes, I thin the study could be improved... so let's do an improved study! Nope, this guy won't recommend that, because he has an agenda and it isn't the truth through research.
>>This may be many things but it isn’t good science: which is why the various scientists quoted above are so unimpressed.<<
This statement is meaningless ad hominem for the reasons outline above.
>>Almost as an aside it’s amusing to note that the finding they do claim seems not to be dose dependent. Most odd for as Paracelsus pointed out centuries ago it is the dose which is the poison. We actually seem to see that the male rats fed more GM corn and more Roundup do better than those fed less. An extremely odd finding but one which could perhaps be explained by the fact that one of the authors is a homeopath. The smaller the dose the larger the effect sort of thing. Perhaps they banged the bottles of Roundup laced water on a horsehair cushion for a bit or something?<<
Oh, so these hacks he accuses of manipulating their release date didn't manipulate the results to make them look better?
Yes, quite an odd observation. Let's do some science and figure out what is really going on. It isn't like Paracelsus was injecting pesticide genes from foreign species into plants, so maybe there is an effect we won't find EXCEPT THROUGH RESEARCH, research he doesn't call for (I already know he doesn't call for research and I'm not at the end of the article! -lol-)
>>Yes, that’s another cheap shot. That a larger dose leads to a lower effect is in fact an indication (but no more, for we’ve not the real numbers to judge) that we’re dealing with statistical chance here, not an actual effect of the doses.<<
Again, chance plays a role in all dietary studies - the human body is too complex to fully understand and their is always a confidence interval due to the acceptance that you can't eliminate chance completely in any study. The scientists know this, but they hope this guy's readers don't.
How does he know that chance didn't result in fewer tumors and more will show up next time? DOH!
Chance works both ways, but he won't tell you that and he doesn't think you can think your way out of a wet paper bag. Again, this guy sounds like an attorney shilling for a client.
I agree the result is odd, but an odd result doesn't automatically invalidate the entire study... it means more research is required. Again, he won't call for that because industry HATES long term GMO health safety science. *HATE* it. And this guy knows who butters his bread and his employer's bread.
>>Yes, that’s another cheap shot. That a larger dose leads to a lower effect is in fact an indication (but no more, for we’ve not the real numbers to judge) that we’re dealing with statistical chance here, not an actual effect of the doses.<<
No complex science is perfect. The guy plays on your ignorance again. If lack of perfection in this study renders it meaningless, then all studies are meaningless because none are perfect. That's logic and this guy is a sophist deceiving his readers.
>>A study claims that rats fed with GM corn that was produced by US firm Monsanto had suffered tumors and multiple organ damage. Following the study’s publication, thousands of protesters went out to the streets in Brussels on Wednesday, calling for an overhaul of food policy in Europe.
”Those in the food industry who said there wasn’t a risk lied, they didn’t tell people the truth. Europe’s independent food agencies now have to act. It is absolutely essential that we kickstart the debate and re-examine GM food. The new evidence shows how dangerous GM crops are for human health,” said Green MEP Jose Bove.<<
They did lie, even if this study is 100% bogus. You see, you can't know about long term safety UNLESS YOU DO THE LONG TERM RESEARCH. Isn't this obvious? Maybe 5th grade science?
A Monsanto attorney can't declare something safe by fiat.
This study yield completely unexpected results given random chance. Does it prove anything beyond all doubt? No. I don't believe it does - other than these are the results of their study.
Monsanto should have 100s of similar studies... all of which should contradict this study... But they don't, do they? They don't even have one. And they aren't about to do another one. They HATE health science, you see, and hope they can trick you into not demanding it by keeping you ignorant... you know, like the Masters kept their slaves? Of course, the masters kept their slaves ignorant because they love their slaves. Ahhhh, such nice masters to keep us all ignorant and teach us to reject science.
>>We might also look at the people pushing the paper. The Sustainable Food Trust. To a reasonable degree of accuracy this seems to be the militant wing of the Soil Association. For those of you who don’t know your British hippies this is essentially the British trade union for organic farmers. Yes, with all the nonsense about homeopathic treatment for animals although most of them do stop short of having to bury a cow horn in the dung pile by moonlight (no, really, there is a wing of the movement which insists that this helps in some manner).
That’s a cheap shot too: denigration by association. Even if it’s a valid observation at times this is, strictly speaking, an error of logic.<<
This operative knows exactly what he's doing - spewing lies to the masses that he hopes is ignorant.
BTW, I agree that some people would protest to know what is in their food because they don't like being kept ignorant about pesticide corn and herbicide saturated corn. Yes, a population that doesn't grasp on to ignorance are morons.
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH!
Ya know? Are you offended yet? You should be.
>>However, we can go further. The lead author, Gilles-Eric Seralini, certainly has some very strong views on the subject of GM crops. He also has form in being, umm, perhaps not as careful as we would all like him to be in his statistical techniques. Gilles-Eric has been funded by Greenpeace in the past and we all know how much they love the idea of GM crops. Dr. Seralini has even been critiqued by the European Union itself over his use of statistical techniques.
The EFSA (2007) statistical assessment concluded that the assumptions underlying the statistical methodology employed by Séralini et al. (2007) did not hold and therefore would lead to an excess of spurious significant results; the Monod and EFSA analyses confirmed this.
Would you believe that this knuckle rapping was over a paper which looked at the effects of GM maize being fed to rats? You would? My, how cynical you are.<<
So, no mention of bad assumptions in this paper? After all, this is about this paper. Perhaps he improved his analysis based on the feedback. Again, this is straw man - attacking another paper in order to impugn this paper.
It is also disingenuous - Monsanto lied about the safety of Agent Orange, DDT and rBST - including getting two reporters fired for refusing to lie on the air.
No mention of that.
I'm all ears, though. Let me know the false assumptions in this study and then we have something REAL to discuss.
>>But if we are to say that this is, at best, very slightly dodgy statistics being released to make a political point we must then ask ourselves what is that political point being made?<<
And why would anyone conclude that in ignorance? He didn't point out problems in this study - and this study is all that matters. Again, burn down a straw man. It should be trivial to see if he made similar assumption errors and they should be simple to publish. But they aren't. Nothing. Why?
>>It most assuredly cannot be to get Jose Bove demonstrating on the streets of Brussels. This is, you will recall, the man who made his name dismantling a McDonald’s franchise which was under construction. So what could it actually be, this political point that people want to make? SFGate makes the connection:
California Right to Know, the group pushing California’s Prop. 37 to require labeling of genetically engineered foods, pounced on the study. Spokesperson Stacy Malkan said the most “important and shocking part of it is that this is the first available long-term study on GMOs, which have been in the food supply for the better part of 20 years.”
Oh. Yes, that is true, isn’t it? There’s a proposition on the ballot in California this fall that would lead to the mandatory labeling of GM containing food. And as Mark Bittman has pointed out, the hope and aim is that so California, so the nation. Now I agree that this could just be taken as evidence that I have a nasty and suspicious mind.<<
Uh, how did this group of scientists know that Prop 37 would be on the ballot when they started this two year study two years ago when Prop 37 wasn't even a twinkle in the eye?
Ah, but this guy hopes his readers can't think.
This guy is paranoid and delusional... or a well paid industry hack who will do anything and everything to attack research so that his masters can avoid doing any long term health research at all.
BTW, ABSOLUTELY NO MENTION that this was the only long term health study available in the world! You see, a Monsanto attorney declared engineered pesticide corn to be safe, therefore it must be. Be nice to him, he also makes the sun rise and the grass grow.
Anyone who asks for science, well, they are bad people. They need to listen to attorneys employed by their multi-national masters. Yes, $40,000 million a month of new debt for society and free cash for bankster insiders will create jobs. THE AUTHORITY said it from on high. Come on...
>>That campaign were certainly well informed about the imminent arrival of this scientific paper.
In response to this study, Yes on Proposition 37 California Right to Know Campaign Manager Gary Ruskin released the following statement:
“The results of this study are worrying. They underscore the importance of giving California families the right to know whether our food is genetically engineered, and to decide for ourselves whether we want to gamble with our health by eating GMO foods that have not been adequately studied and have not been proven safe. By requiring simple labels on genetically engineered foods, Proposition 37 gives Californians the ability to choose whether to expose ourselves and our families to any potential health risks. The right to know is fundamental, and that’s why 50 countries around the world have already enacted labeling requirements for genetically engineered food.”
You really would have to be most, most, cynical to think that there could be any relationship at all between the timing of this paper and this proposition.<<
So, let me get this straight. He claims there is chance present in the study, so the study is invalid... in spite of every study having chance in it.
Yet, he doesn't mention that chance could be related to the release of a two year study after two years... BEFORE Prop 37 even existed?
This guy is a hack shill piece of trash who has NO RESPECT for his readers.
The author needs to show that these researchers new about Prop 37 two years ago when they started their two year study - but he can't, he knows it and he hopes the gullible reading his article don't understand his 8th grade sophism.
>>Certainly far more cynical than I am prepared to commit myself to in print.
Paid for by Yes on 37 For Your Right to Know if Your Food Has Been Genetically Engineered Supported by Consumer Advocates Makers of Organic Products and California Farmers, Major funding by Mercola Health Resources LLC and Organic Consumers Fund. 5940 College Ave, Suite F , Oakland, CA 94618, United States
As the old saying goes you pays your money and you takes your choice. Who you wish to believe here is entirely up to you. Myself I would go with having more than just a soupcon of a suspicion that this is not very good science cobbled together and released in order to influence an upcoming political event. But that is just my opinion.<<
Again, no mention of Monsanto firing his peers if they don't shill and lie about Monsanto products...
Unsettling Accounts
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You see, that's "ethical" to this operative and doesn't need to be mentioned.
He lays out his opinion, but it isn't based on much other than "the study could have been better."
The reasonable answer to that, "good, let's patch together a better study so that the citizens of America can base their eating choices on sound, scientific research." BTW, I agree with that. Any scientist or engineer would. We like science. We like data. We like investigating.
The corporatocracy likes hiding data to maximize profits.
Alas, I knew that this operative wasn't going to go reasonable on his readers.
>>Just a final note for the “peer reviewed” crowd. No, it is not true that something that has been peer reviewed is thus good and true science. I can prove this quite easily: I myself have published, in a real academic journal, a peer reviewed paper. If, as many do, you think I am a politically partial blowhard then that rather devalues peer review. If we are to be more serious we would point out that truth in science is not shown by peer review. Rather, by replication. Whether of the experiment itself or of the manipulation of the data as it is presented. And what really makes this a very bad paper indeed is that we have not been given that basic numerical information by which we could repeat the sums and calculations that they have done.
Or as the Statistical Laboratory at the University of Cambridge note:
I am grateful for the authors for publishing this paper, as it provides a fine case study for teaching a statistics class about poor design, analysis and reporting. I shall start using it immediately.
Oh dear….<<
I'll see if this "Statistical Laboratory" at Cambridge link happens to have real data and logic, unlike this Monsanto shill who added very little to the real debate and to real understanding of the issues involved.
Is this that hard? Shredding this trash is child's play. |
