The bee story has a back story, a little darker and less promising than it looked through the NYT story’s window. HT: Kevin Drum and an RBC commenter.
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The bee story has a back story, a little darker and less promising than it looked through the NYT story’s window. HT: Kevin Drum and an RBC commenter.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Alltop Politics, mbfromhb. mbfromhb said: Bees and Bayer « The Reality-Based Community http://goo.gl/Bd3u [...]
It’s still marginally important science with big hype. The fact that he has funding from big Chem/Pharm doesn’t change the importance of the work.
There are extensive studies that show that the effect of apriori attitudes in research is well known. That he changed his mind shortly before getting a grant makes this suspect, and there is a problem in that very few people can do this research so it will take considerable time for someone to replicate it. If someon e trying to replicate it fails to do so, it will still be used as the basis for keeping on with the use of the pesticides. There is a problem with the appearance of evil and these results certainly have that appearance. I agree that the appearance doesn’t prove guilt, but I give the results a far lower chance of being correct knowing the back story.
This paper did not address whether or not pesticides were a factor. It simply examined the presence and absence of different pathogens and the correlation among those with the occurrence of colony collapse and then did a very simple test of the effect of these two diseases on . If you want to make an argument that this research was biased by his grant then it would be more parsimonious to suggest that this research is a non-sequitur.
Regardless, the point I’m trying to make and have been trying to make is that the actual results of the paper are not that impressive. If you read the media reports closely, none of the scientists interviewed, including the lead author, come close to suggesting that this is at all convincing. It will not be a critical paper in changing the field.
As far as court cases go, any lawyer should be able to make this paper irrelevant in court.