3 ms·
Almost no support for the thesis of "bad things will happen if we wipe out mosquitoes" other than "We don't know what will happen." On the flip side, we do kno
by ghshephard 11y ago
Almost no support for the thesis of "bad things will happen if we wipe out mosquitoes" other than "We don't know what will happen."
On the flip side, we do know what will happen if the Aedes aegypti, Anopheles, etc... is allowed to continue to exist - 100s of thousands of people a year will die.
I wonder how the author would feel about keeping mosquitoes around "just in case", if hundreds of thousands of her neighbors were dying every year.
And guess what, if, for some very, very bizarre reason it turns out that Aedes aegypti/Anopheles was a super important species, there is zero difficulty in breeding and releasing billions of them back into the wild in very short order.
- berntb 11y agoAs you probably know very well, there must have been similar arguments when they killed off birds in China during the cultural revolution... :-) (Sure, you can breed mosquitoes quickly, but what happens until the birds or something else which used to eat them breeds back into reasonable numbers? I don't know, you don't know. That is just one unknown.) I'm not really arguing, I do agree that people have precedence over bugs. But changes like these have bad precedents. And a catastrophe here might make changes in some other place politically impossible, with even worse results.
- mjburgess 11y agoIt's like modern culture is trapped in a cold-war b-movie about the excesses of science. On the pro-science side there's singularities and AI fantasy and the anti-science side the planet is "being destroyed". It's just one giant argument from ignorance, "we don't know, therefore you don't know, therefore we can say anything we like".
- digital_ins 11y agoisn't that the argument that a lot of people use about religion too?
- ascorbic 11y agoThe author might as well say that we should keep polio around, just in case. Just because mosquitoes are macroscopic they have this perverse fear of unintended consequences.
- ascerbic 11y agoI think you mean ascerbic lol.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]