Index 
Appearance and Reality Idea of Time Science (Safety and Risk)
Edited, November 7, 2013
Discovery: Quote from Discover Magazine, 10/13, p 20, “The ‘secret’ to this skill probably lies in the animal’s brain structure.” Are you people ignorant of the past, arrogant beyond worth, or just plain stupid. OF COURSE behavior, any behavior, has something to do with brain structure. Thales knew that; Lao Tzu knew that. Yet you propose it is a “secret” that you and your colleagues have now “discovered”, as in the magazine name. Risk, Safety, and God: Second quote, “No one really knows how much rice is safe to eat”, as if it is a scientific, technical issue with a “definitive” answer. It is not. “Safe” is a value-laden idea or term. A “scientist” cannot tell you or me what is “safe”. That’s a judgement you or I must make all the time: do we cross the street against a red light? Sometimes, yes, but more often no. Is smoking cigarettes safe? A common knee-jerk response is often “ABSOLUTELY NOT, we have proved beyond doubt that cigarette smoking shortens life!”. But most people who smoke DON’T get lung cancer. So I guess smoking is “safe” for them. I understand “risk” and understand that smoking and arsenic, among all substances influence death rates in some sort of dose-related way. The higher the dose the higher the risk, at least for those two examples. As we update our databases and resolution of analytical chemistry we “find” suggestions if not firm evidence of deleterious effects on human health at ever lower doses. When such effects are found the appeal will be right behind to regulate the newly discovered “health risk”. So our regulators meet and discuss, ask for public comment, ignore those they disagree with, laud those they agree with, and accommodate those that don’t matter. I am a seasoned writer of government “safety” regulations, 10 CFR 960, siting guidelines for nuclear waste repositories all to keep the public and workers “safe”. We (they) eventually reach some sort of internal political and ideological consensus as to what constitutes “acceptable” risk, above which risk is “punishable”. Actually it is often one person, the chief administrator, by his or her signature “promulgates” the regulations defining what is “safe”. When author of Discover magazine says, “No one really knows how much rice is safe”, I suspect you refer to the uncertainty about which part of the rice grain contains arsenic, (husk? bran?) and the regions it’s grown arsenic concentrations, not the value-laden “safety” based on arbitrary trade-offs among population, health statistics, personal or corporate freedom. We have come to accept, “less” regulation = more freedom. Or does more regulation = more freedom by reducing risk to human health? As a trained systems engineer (10 years at Sandia), I endorse such trade-offs, but have a nit to pick. I suspect the author(s) and most people believe that reducing risk to human health, especially saving lives, is good and something to be actively pursued with tax dollars. For this discussion I will agree, though I don’t. So, if “we”, i.e. sciencists identify a “risk” to humans, we automatically define a duty to do what we can to reduce that risk to save lives and reduce human suffering within cultural constraints. As I mentioned above, most smokers do not die of lung cancer. Risk is a cultural statistic. Disease is an individual experience. Many to whom I am address this polemic also seem to of the persuasion that, if feasible, “risk” due to certain chemical or even behavior should be regulated to assure a “safe” level of risk. So we coming full circle with two very important yet undefined terms, “safe” and “risk”. Risk is undefined unless it is quantified, both as absolute and incremental. Absolute risk is needed for assessments of relative risks. What “low risk” often means for a given dose is “less people developing the malady” As discussed “safety” is the social, value-laden consensus of regulators. In essence a “safety standard” says “this many people killed or sickened, no more”. | Extreme health advocates say, “This is unacceptable, knowing you are killing people by poison within your control is unacceptable; it is immoral in the ultimate degree.” I couldn’t disagree more, but again I accept for now the premise that “saving lives” is the objective. I also must note that my intended audience generally accepts evolution as the driving force of life, at least the “material” experience of humans. Me too, usually. Many further than me say, “evolution is good, God in a way”. Even spiritualists pay homage to Darwin for the “materialist” world. I will agree for the moment that evolution points a light into the shadows or morality. But I must warn you of my bias as a geologist, who sees life and death in terms of species, not just people. Here I must note that researchers into the deleterious effects of low doses of arsenic compassionately hope to fund cures for human suffering by treating mice, cats, and other soulless objects of torture. “But .... well, if it save human lives, why not?” So let’s get back to saving lives, risk and evolution. At low risk few people get sick or die from exposure to certain environmental features, human-made or not. Why not let nature take its course? God-like evolution weeds out the “weak”, especially for low dose, low risk. Let the environment change as it always has and “know” that evolution will pick winners and losers. Therefore we as a species will “evolve” resistance to arsenic and other “pollutants” as the Inca have done with arsenic. We must recognize we are evolving with each baby born. So where do we want to go? Many seem to say, “Hands off, we must trust God?” It’s too late for that! Listen up, climate change proselytizers, we, engineers, scientists, politicians, and all other people are the destroyers and creators of worlds. We have totally changed the biosphere, while some, even scientists to my dismay, say the “sky is falling” because of a few degrees change in average global temperatures by 4 or 5 degrees, a magnitude of change the globe has experience many times during the last 100,000 years, a brief instant in the history of the planet but perhaps 10 times the life span of moralizing humans. By our compassion for the weak and suffering we enhance their reproductive advantage. I suggest this decreases populations’ adaptability to likely environmental changes. So we create an successful artificial world despite violation of evolution’s “rules”. Ecology is full of examples of exploding populations, most of which are self-eliminating (as the coronavirus will be too in a short while as I write this 20200716, despite the rampant panic) bacterial, viral, often called “cancers”. I don’t think is it compassion alone that threatens our existence, at least existence as usurpers of prodigious amount of energy over what it take to keep a body alive. We spend about 100 times the energy it takes to live in the US, 30 times in the world but about 10 in subsistence farming. It is gone to extreme which thank to science. 7 billion and counting and all longing to expend as much energy as we do in this country. | Look around, see if you can find one acre without a species from another continent, transported by humans just 400 years ago and counting. Mammoths, Great Cave Bears, Neanderthals, other hominid strains. We killed ‘em all, just as we poke needles in cats’ eyes to help save human lives --- and we worry about we might be having some small effects on global temperatures? Effects I suspect are good for humans rather than bad (original sin). Simply put, more warmth, more water, more CO2, more life, more food for humans. Which brings us back to “risk.” If we define risk strictly in terms of deleterious effects (which are entire regulatory apparatus and supporting social moral basis), we are almost logically forced to the ALARA principle, which commonly leads to the old saying “We cut off our noses to spite our faces”. The end product of “population risk” seems to be immorality. The idea is by eliminating all causes of death, smoking, mountain climbing, arsenic in rice, we can defer death indefinitely. As evidence many people quote the phenomenal increase in life expectancy due to modern medicine, to which I always point out it is more the effects of preventing infant deaths than extending life expectancy for adults. Seventy year olds still lives as long as their great great grandparents (based on 500 years of data from 1550 or so when records started for “common folk”, before that only nobles’ ages were recorded). Particularly since about 1800 record of lifespans has been quite good, though distributed poorly around the world. The current internet computer craze is going to put genealogy to rest very soon, but still people will believe older folks live longer too. My family database on nearly 10,000 people with known ages shows that 70 year olds have about a 2 or 3 years increase in life expectancy since the 1500’s. This is a very biased sample of mostly English descendants from the southern English coast, but, I suspect, quite representative of Europe and perhaps the world. The “gains” due to modern medicine decline with age. And the oldest? Well how about Methuselah. Though I discount ages of the patriarchs, no one we know of has reached the age of 130. Since records began, some reached the 120’s. So if our great population explosion in not about longer life potential, just long life for the young, we seem to imply that God wants as many people as possible. ---- Whoa ----- you just lost me, because the young reproduce more than the old --- and by saving lives we are “glorifying God who made us in his own image. “Be fruitful and dominion over all the earth and worship me and thereby spread my glory. Well, I hope you can see the connection, even for the “atheist” perspectives of the Discover authors. |