The Adventures of Tobasco da Gama

Oversimplification. If there’s one tactic that is common to all right-wing idealogues, that’s it. They take complex issues and pare away all the subtle features and complicating factors to focus on just one thing — the one thing that they feel capable of arguing for or against, usually. You can see it everywhere, from creationism/ID to warmongering to global warming. All get reduced to one-dimensional issues with a single factor, followed by a single call to action. If we just invade Iraq, terrorism goes away. If we just find irreducible complexity, evolution is impossible. If we have a cold winter, global warming doesn’t exist. This is the main reason they hate science, of course.

Bug Girl, regular contributor to the Skepchick blog, documents a new one (to me, at least). Apparently, anti-environmentalist wingnuts have been attacking Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (which is well over forty years old, but wingnuts hold grudges a long time) for causing a malarial epidemic.

No, really. The claim is that banning DDT prevented the eradication of malaria-bearing mosquitos, killing millions of people a year. (Carson, I suppose, was giving comfort and aid to the plasmodium enemy by publishing her book.) Ok, sure, lots of people die from malaria. It’s a terrible thing. But is it true?

In a word (since we’re talking about oversimplification): no. Go read the article. Turns out, to nobody’s surprise, there’s a lot more than the simple relationship of “more DDT, less malaria” than the wingnuts would have us believe. Bug Girl is also promising a more thorough discussion of the development of resistance to DDT, which I’m very much looking forward to.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 9th, 2007 at 14:04 and is filed under Activism, Politics, Science & Skepticism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.