Episode #1078

News Items

        Quickie with Bob

        https://www.iflscience.com/what-is-the-thatcher-effect-and-why-is-it-so-terrifying-and-cool-82628

        Questions and Emails

        Could you do an update on the status of glyphosate/Roundup safety? I recall you were previously mostly positive to it and skeptical to the claims of its dangers. I was therefore surprised by [this episode] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxVXvFOPIyQ) of Veritasium (which I generally consider to be trustworthy), repeating both the carcinogenicity claims and the claims about Monsanto’s seed practices (which you have to some level defended as well, if I remember correctly). Perhaps most importantly, they claim (with some evidence) that the most important paper showing glyphosate safety was ghost-written by Monsanto employees I expected you to react to the episode, but then forgot about it. However, now I have listened to [this episode](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-science-historian-tackles-ghostwriting-in/id73329284?i=1000747165290) of Science Friday, which repeats the claim that the Williams, Kroes & Munro paper has been ghost-written by Monsanto. It would be nice to have your opinion on the current status. Best regards, Michal Kaut

        Name That Logical Fallacy

        I don’t know if you guys are aware of Clint Laidlaw, an evolutionary biologist who runs the Clint’s Reptiles YouTube channel. I enjoy his videos, most of which are about modern cladistic taxonomy, sometimes about wild reptiles as well as reptiles as pets, and once in a while about reacting to creationist talking points. Clint does, I think, a great job when he addresses these, and one thing he talks about doing, and to my mind seems to do, is steel man the arguments from the other side before explaining why they’re just wrong. In a recent one of these videos Clint for some reason showed a clip of Charlie Kirk debating a college student in one of his campus events. It wasn’t about creationism and Clint wasn’t arguing against him, he was saying Kirk was an example of good argumentation because he steel manned the students argument and was nice to him. I’m not sure this is really a logical fallacy. When Kirk makes his point, he clearly just has some unstated major premises that are false, but I’m curious if there is a fallacy as well, or a better way to describe what he does. It seems to me Kirk is ambushing the kid. Using an apparent steel man and kindness to put him off guard, before he makes an argument that the kid isn’t ready to confront. Did Kirk build a steel man of the kid’s argument, or really just oversimplify it so that his argument looked like it falsified it? He certainly was dishonest (the stats he cites are simply wrong), but I’m curious on your take on this, if it’s something you’re interested in. Maybe it’s just my personal bias against Kirk that made this put me off. Here’s the link with timestamp: https://youtu.be/wO2qV3HEP04?t=1664

        Science or Fiction

        Skeptical Quote of the Week.

        “It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science.” -Carl Sagan