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| This one from RealClear Science is over six months old, and touches on the US political sphere, so some of it's already outdated. It's really the basic message that's important to me here. Indeed, there is ample evidence that the case for truly scientific policymaking must be made no matter who is in charge. Difficulty: people like to pick what science they accept and what they don't, and that tendency is different across the political spectrum. Consider a recent example: the FDA’s ban of red dye no. 3, which was based on anecdotal evidence, motivated by fear and, unfortunately, required by much older law grounded in bad science. And just one of the many things that have fallen off the radar from early this year. Advocacy groups used a 49-word law from 1958 called the Delaney Clause to force the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to ban the product, a synthetic food dye known as “FD&C Red No. 3.” The clause states that FDA cannot approve food additives that cause cancer in humans or animals, regardless of whether the cancer is relevant to humans. I just can't get worked up over the dye removal. Yes, the issue was based on bad science. But it's not like when they banned alcohol: I don't know of anyone who ate stuff with this red dye because it was tasty. Moreover, science is never fixed or “settled.” Therefore, laws or regulations based on science are also never settled. Rather than a collection of facts, science is an ongoing voyage of discovery. This is really the part I wanted to emphasize. Again, though, there's a complication: there's a significant number of people who will not change their minds when the facts change. And a lot of them are in politics. The “zero-risk” concept used by the Delaney Clause was always problematic for its flawed science, and it remains an ongoing source of controversy. There is no such thing as "zero-risk." As I like to say, your chance of getting killed by a shark while inland is astonishingly low, but never zero. And there's this, which supports things I've written in the past: Tom Standage, deputy editor of The Economist, wrote in his book, “An Edible History of Humanity,” that “The simple truth is that farming is profoundly unnatural … and all domesticated plants and animals are man-made technologies.” The upshot is that every single item in supermarkets has received some amount of manipulation by humans and finding any boundary between natural and unnatural becomes impossible. In general, people are terrible at risk management. I'm seeing this now in the ongoing development of autonomous vehicles: it seems like many people wouldn't be satisfied with reducing the current human-driver accident rate; they would only accept AVs if there were zero risk. And that doesn't make sense to me: If 40,000 people a year have been killed in automobile accidents, and AVs could get that number down by a decent amount (say 20%, or 32,000), then the choice is clear to me. But no, ooga-booga robots. So, yes, I'd like to see laws based more on science than fear or greed. But even in that utopia, what science are we going to emphasize? And in the end, laws are more about philosophy than about science. |
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