Scientists are wrong... a lot.
The harm should be obvious to the layman IMHO in order to be legislated away. Otherwise, it should be left up to personal choice.
The harm should be obvious to the layman IMHO in order to be legislated away. Otherwise, it should be left up to personal choice.
Individual scientists are wrong a lot. Science as a process continues to be the (imperfect) reigning world champ of truth discovery, no matter what contrarianism du jour memes are spreading over the internet.
Tell the horrifying plastic story (if there is one)
These were uncovered over the course of years by statistical analysis, prompted by suspicions created by (noisy, often non-human) information about the mechanisms.
Similarly, we have tons of data supporting a bunch of theories of micro plastic harm in the lab. The waiting revelation isn’t going to be “omg all these people are sick and we didn’t know it,” it’s going to be “all these people have been sick and we didn’t know why.”
Which is exactly the form of the sperm quality/fertility theory as well as obesity. We know these compounds cause fertility and metabolism issues in cell cultures and in animal models. We know we are facing civilization-scale problems with obesity and fertility. Drawing the connection between these types of observations is always extremely noisy because there are obviously trillions of variables affecting “does a specific individual become infertile or obese,” or “does a person have an elevated risk of birth defects.”
I’m not necessarily on the side of an immediate and total ban, but this “we’ll see the problems if they exist” attitude is profoundly ignorant and arrogant. The historical examples appear obvious to you because you saw the results of extremely deep study prompted from initially low-quality suspicions.
I'm not sure if this is sarcasm but if it's not, this is really the peak of anti-intellectualism ideology, i.e., that if a thing is not immediately obvious without studying then we should remain ignorant of it. I don't think that kind of opinion is a good fit for this forum to be honest, which has learning and information sharing as an important goal, so I will have to flag your message, which is an extremely rare thing for me to do (actually this may be my first time ever)
I'm not sure if you're willfully ignorant or just saw an opportunity to pass a pejorative and took it.
I didn't say we should "ignore it". I said we shouldn't allow scientists to exclusively decide what should or should not be legal.