8 ms·

Most of the "whoops" tales are people that didn't listen to their scientists telling them not to, didn't have scientists at all, or were from long enough ago th

by saulrh 11y ago

Most of the "whoops" tales are people that didn't listen to their scientists telling them not to, didn't have scientists at all, or were from long enough ago that we can discard their stories as irrelevant in the same way that we'd discard things like "spaceflight is impossible" and "nukes will end war". We've now traced the food chain around malaria mosquitoes out to three or four degrees of separation, including things like the diseases they carry. Their entire ecological niche is trivially replaced by close relatives that don't carry malaria. They're not even common enough to have major food-chain or crowding effects like you'd see with ants, rabbits, kudzu, or sparrows. Everything that we can find says that the damage from eradication would be zero. Not "small", or "manageable". None. They're small enough and unimportant enough that we should be thinking of them as disease organisms rather than insects. And I'm sure you're perfectly happy with the eradication of bot flies, polio, and smallpox. Reevaluate your beliefs. Granted, we can never be certain about it. We're not deities, we're still limited by information theory and epistemology. But we're pretty damn sure. Way more than we need to be to go save half a million people a year.

ommunist 11y ago
Is MBTE really specific to only A. gambiae and A. funestus?
- saulrh 11y ago
  Something like 30 out of the 500 anopheles species are capable of carrying malaria. Of those, only those two matter, because the rest won't bite humans. Eradicating those two would be sufficient and another species (that doesn't bite humans) would take over. "Bites Humans" is furthermore not a strong enough competitive advantage to overcome any attempts to eradicate a successor that picks up the disease-ridden malarial torch.
  - ommunist 11y ago
    Look at this problem from different angle. These two species are only abundant in areas where humans live. The malaria annual death toll is about 440000 lives. Maybe it is more worth of an effort to move humans out of there? Since no one is going to eradicate cars worldwide just because the annual human death toll in car accidents is 1.25 million!
    - x1798DE 11y ago
      But the ongoing cost of eliminating cars would be enormous. The ancestor post is saying that there would be only fixed costs involved in eliminating malaria-transmitting species of mosquito.
      - ommunist 11y ago
        What really ailes me is that all research is concentrated on killing poor mosquitoes, not the Plasmodium, which is the real cause of the disease. Should we also kill all the cats because they carry Toxoplasmae?
        tropo 11y ago
        Given the that Toxoplasmae causes detrimental brain effects in humans, yes. Absolutely 100% unquestionably yes, without a doubt. We could keep a few cats isolated behind glass in zoos. Isolated cats don't matter.
        ommunist 11y ago
        You understand! Lets apply for IMO grant for that.
        Qwertious 11y ago
        If it's a matter of animal rights, cats have a hell of a lot more higher-order brain-functioning than mosquitoes do, because the latter have effectively zero.
    - saulrh 11y ago
      Amusingly, anthropophilia versus zoophilia is genetic. If we all cleared out of Africa completely, those problematic mosquito strains may well go extinct. Now I'm wondering how fast they'd re-evolve. So it's probably more like the case I thought of at the end of my first post, where we'd have to stamp the property back out every time it evolved. It'd be pretty easy, though, and without a major animal reservoir it'd probably give us enough breathing room to eradicate the disease itself with ebola-style quarantines.
imakesnowflakes 11y ago
Layman here. Even if the impact on the food chain is zero, does it mean that there won't be other impacts? For example, on the eradication of mosquitoes, what if the disease that are currently only spread via mosquitoes mutate/evolve themselves to be airborne?
- ThrustVectoring 11y ago
  Evolution does not work that way. Parasites are generally happy to keep on reproducing until their host dies - there's no reason for them to stop, since the only reasoning that evolution understands is "there tends to be more things that reproduce better". Malaria reproduces better by going through human hosts and mosquito carriers than by going airborne. If going airborne helped an individual generation of malaria, malaria would already be airborne.
- slapshot 11y ago
  > what if the disease that are currently only spread via mosquitoes mutate/evolve themselves to be airborne? Evolution doesn't have an intent. Diseases can't "evolve themselves." Evolution happens through random mutations* and selection of the fittest. If a mutation makes a virus or bacteria or protozoan more likely to survive, then the descendants of the mutant tend to multiply more and become more common. If the mutation makes the organism less likely to survive, descendants of the mutant tend to die out over time. (In other words, no matter how hard you hope your offspring will be born with four arms, they never will be.) If anything, eliminating mosquitoes will make us SAFER from airborne zika or malaria. Why? Right now, there are tens of millions of infected mosquitoes out there right now. If airborne malaria is possible, there are tens of millions of chances for it to occur every day. And that would be such a powerful disease that it wouldn't matter that there also exists bloodborne malaria. If we eliminate tens of millions of malaria hosts, we reduce the number of chances for malaria to mutate into an airborne form. As it happens, I don't think airborne malaria is likely -- the life cycle of malaria is way too complex and depends too much on stages that are specific to mosquitoes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaria But the idea is the same. * And a few other processes, such as DNA exchange, but the effect is the same for this purpose.
grecy 11y ago
>Most of the "whoops" tales are people that didn't listen to their scientists telling them not to, didn't have scientists at all, or were from long enough ago that we can discard their stories as irrelevant.... It fascinates and terrifies me that we humans constantly think we know what we're doing and won't mess up again, like somehow we're superior to our ancestors because we have a little more knowledge. "Oh yeah, they put lead in gasoline because they didn't know better. We know better, what we're doing now is perfect". 2050: "Oh yeah, they used to use nasty stuff in fracking compounds, but we know better now" 2060: "Oh yeah, everyone used to carry around little electromagnetic devices and put them next to their brain, but we know better now". It's it clear that anything major we do now will be looked back on as a complete f-up, once the next generations have more knowledge. We seem to think we know best, when in reality we have absolutely no idea what's going on. When will we learn to leave well enough alone?
- acqq 11y ago
  > 2060: "Oh yeah, everyone used to carry around little electromagnetic devices and put them next to their brain, but we know better now". This one is easy to debunk: look at the spectrum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_spectrum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_spectrum UV and everything in that direction: dangerous. Infrared and everything in that direction: not dangerous. The Sun emits on both sides, and we really know very good which side we have to protect us from.
  - grecy 11y ago
    You're missing the entire point. You think it's safe by 2016 standards, in the same way we thought lead in gas, or agent orange was safe by the standards of those years. In 50 years we'll know a lot more than we do now, and hindsight will be a magical thing. By 2060 standards, we're downright uneducated. Think about how little we knew in the late 1960's, and the stupid stuff that was done based on "we know what we're doing"
    - acqq 11y ago
      We already know now much more than we apply. Global warming is the most obvious example. It's true, the hypothetical people in 50 years will consider the current and earlier generations barbarian in their approach to the use of the fossil fuels. But we actually even now know fantastically good the exact effects the electromagnetic waves, and that at least since 1905 work of Einstein for which he received Nobel prize. So there was a lot of time already to check if we got that wrong. Don't worry about a few watts your phone produces, worry about the Sun and anything that produces that kind of radiation (or worse, but in that direction), the one which is on the opposite side of the radio waves and visible light and the one for which we know exactly how damaging it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thymine_dimers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thymine_dimers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraviolet_index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraviolet_index Regarding lead poisoning, it was since forever known that lead is poisonous, the "safe level" was something that was better established in last 50 years and enforced by better policies. There's no parallel for infrared and radio waves (that is, lower frequencies and energies of photons) but there is for UV or gamma rays (that is, higher frequencies and energies of photons).
rsync 11y ago
"Granted, we can never be certain about it. We're not deities, we're still limited by information theory and epistemology. But we're pretty damn sure. Way more than we need to be to go save half a million people a year." (I support eradicating mosquitos) What is missing from this discussion, however, is the agent of malaria itself. We keep discussing this in terms of the mosquito, as if it is the mosquito that is the agent of malaria - but remember, it's just a carrier - malaria is using the mosquito to further its own ends. The reservations I think we should have are not about the food chain or about predators/prey, etc. - it is that the sudden pressure we put on malaria itself forces it to adapt to a transmission host/vector other than mosquitos. Perhaps something more difficult to deal with. We're pushing something dangerous into a corner, bottling it up under high pressure ... we should be worried about where it leaks out to.
- Melkman 11y ago
  Malaria is not a sentient organism that feels cornered and will lash out because of that. The chance that it will mutate to an other infection mechanism is directly related with the number of specimens in circulation. Killing off it's carrier will reduce it.
pvaldes 11y ago
> Their entire ecological niche is trivially replaced by close relatives that don't carry malaria We can not be sure about this; evolution is fast in arthropods. And they will bring their own diseases with them. Mosquitoes are anything but unimportant or uncommon for the ecosystem.

by saulrh 11y ago

ommunist 11y ago

Is MBTE really specific to only A. gambiae and A. funestus?

saulrh 11y ago
Something like 30 out of the 500 anopheles species are capable of carrying malaria. Of those, only those two matter, because the rest won't bite humans. Eradicating those two would be sufficient and another species (that doesn't bite humans) would take over. "Bites Humans" is furthermore not a strong enough competitive advantage to overcome any attempts to eradicate a successor that picks up the disease-ridden malarial torch.
- ommunist 11y ago
  Look at this problem from different angle. These two species are only abundant in areas where humans live. The malaria annual death toll is about 440000 lives. Maybe it is more worth of an effort to move humans out of there? Since no one is going to eradicate cars worldwide just because the annual human death toll in car accidents is 1.25 million!
  - x1798DE 11y ago
    But the ongoing cost of eliminating cars would be enormous. The ancestor post is saying that there would be only fixed costs involved in eliminating malaria-transmitting species of mosquito.
    - ommunist 11y ago
      What really ailes me is that all research is concentrated on killing poor mosquitoes, not the Plasmodium, which is the real cause of the disease. Should we also kill all the cats because they carry Toxoplasmae?
      - tropo 11y ago
        Given the that Toxoplasmae causes detrimental brain effects in humans, yes. Absolutely 100% unquestionably yes, without a doubt. We could keep a few cats isolated behind glass in zoos. Isolated cats don't matter.
        ommunist 11y ago
        You understand! Lets apply for IMO grant for that.
      - Qwertious 11y ago
        If it's a matter of animal rights, cats have a hell of a lot more higher-order brain-functioning than mosquitoes do, because the latter have effectively zero.
  - saulrh 11y ago
    Amusingly, anthropophilia versus zoophilia is genetic. If we all cleared out of Africa completely, those problematic mosquito strains may well go extinct. Now I'm wondering how fast they'd re-evolve. So it's probably more like the case I thought of at the end of my first post, where we'd have to stamp the property back out every time it evolved. It'd be pretty easy, though, and without a major animal reservoir it'd probably give us enough breathing room to eradicate the disease itself with ebola-style quarantines.

imakesnowflakes 11y ago

Layman here. Even if the impact on the food chain is zero, does it mean that there won't be other impacts? For example, on the eradication of mosquitoes, what if the disease that are currently only spread via mosquitoes mutate/evolve themselves to be airborne?

ThrustVectoring 11y ago
Evolution does not work that way. Parasites are generally happy to keep on reproducing until their host dies - there's no reason for them to stop, since the only reasoning that evolution understands is "there tends to be more things that reproduce better". Malaria reproduces better by going through human hosts and mosquito carriers than by going airborne. If going airborne helped an individual generation of malaria, malaria would already be airborne.
slapshot 11y ago
> what if the disease that are currently only spread via mosquitoes mutate/evolve themselves to be airborne? Evolution doesn't have an intent. Diseases can't "evolve themselves." Evolution happens through random mutations* and selection of the fittest. If a mutation makes a virus or bacteria or protozoan more likely to survive, then the descendants of the mutant tend to multiply more and become more common. If the mutation makes the organism less likely to survive, descendants of the mutant tend to die out over time. (In other words, no matter how hard you hope your offspring will be born with four arms, they never will be.) If anything, eliminating mosquitoes will make us SAFER from airborne zika or malaria. Why? Right now, there are tens of millions of infected mosquitoes out there right now. If airborne malaria is possible, there are tens of millions of chances for it to occur every day. And that would be such a powerful disease that it wouldn't matter that there also exists bloodborne malaria. If we eliminate tens of millions of malaria hosts, we reduce the number of chances for malaria to mutate into an airborne form. As it happens, I don't think airborne malaria is likely -- the life cycle of malaria is way too complex and depends too much on stages that are specific to mosquitoes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaria But the idea is the same. * And a few other processes, such as DNA exchange, but the effect is the same for this purpose.

grecy 11y ago

>Most of the "whoops" tales are people that didn't listen to their scientists telling them not to, didn't have scientists at all, or were from long enough ago that we can discard their stories as irrelevant.... It fascinates and terrifies me that we humans constantly think we know what we're doing and won't mess up again, like somehow we're superior to our ancestors because we have a little more knowledge. "Oh yeah, they put lead in gasoline because they didn't know better. We know better, what we're doing now is perfect". 2050: "Oh yeah, they used to use nasty stuff in fracking compounds, but we know better now" 2060: "Oh yeah, everyone used to carry around little electromagnetic devices and put them next to their brain, but we know better now". It's it clear that anything major we do now will be looked back on as a complete f-up, once the next generations have more knowledge. We seem to think we know best, when in reality we have absolutely no idea what's going on. When will we learn to leave well enough alone?

acqq 11y ago
> 2060: "Oh yeah, everyone used to carry around little electromagnetic devices and put them next to their brain, but we know better now". This one is easy to debunk: look at the spectrum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_spectrum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_spectrum UV and everything in that direction: dangerous. Infrared and everything in that direction: not dangerous. The Sun emits on both sides, and we really know very good which side we have to protect us from.
- grecy 11y ago
  You're missing the entire point. You think it's safe by 2016 standards, in the same way we thought lead in gas, or agent orange was safe by the standards of those years. In 50 years we'll know a lot more than we do now, and hindsight will be a magical thing. By 2060 standards, we're downright uneducated. Think about how little we knew in the late 1960's, and the stupid stuff that was done based on "we know what we're doing"
  - acqq 11y ago
    We already know now much more than we apply. Global warming is the most obvious example. It's true, the hypothetical people in 50 years will consider the current and earlier generations barbarian in their approach to the use of the fossil fuels. But we actually even now know fantastically good the exact effects the electromagnetic waves, and that at least since 1905 work of Einstein for which he received Nobel prize. So there was a lot of time already to check if we got that wrong. Don't worry about a few watts your phone produces, worry about the Sun and anything that produces that kind of radiation (or worse, but in that direction), the one which is on the opposite side of the radio waves and visible light and the one for which we know exactly how damaging it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thymine_dimers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thymine_dimers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraviolet_index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraviolet_index Regarding lead poisoning, it was since forever known that lead is poisonous, the "safe level" was something that was better established in last 50 years and enforced by better policies. There's no parallel for infrared and radio waves (that is, lower frequencies and energies of photons) but there is for UV or gamma rays (that is, higher frequencies and energies of photons).

rsync 11y ago

"Granted, we can never be certain about it. We're not deities, we're still limited by information theory and epistemology. But we're pretty damn sure. Way more than we need to be to go save half a million people a year." (I support eradicating mosquitos) What is missing from this discussion, however, is the agent of malaria itself. We keep discussing this in terms of the mosquito, as if it is the mosquito that is the agent of malaria - but remember, it's just a carrier - malaria is using the mosquito to further its own ends. The reservations I think we should have are not about the food chain or about predators/prey, etc. - it is that the sudden pressure we put on malaria itself forces it to adapt to a transmission host/vector other than mosquitos. Perhaps something more difficult to deal with. We're pushing something dangerous into a corner, bottling it up under high pressure ... we should be worried about where it leaks out to.

Melkman 11y ago
Malaria is not a sentient organism that feels cornered and will lash out because of that. The chance that it will mutate to an other infection mechanism is directly related with the number of specimens in circulation. Killing off it's carrier will reduce it.

pvaldes 11y ago

> Their entire ecological niche is trivially replaced by close relatives that don't carry malaria We can not be sure about this; evolution is fast in arthropods. And they will bring their own diseases with them. Mosquitoes are anything but unimportant or uncommon for the ecosystem.