A person that can speak for than ten minutes on a subject that he has given less than five minutes of thought to.
A while back
Todd Kuiken, an environmental scientist who studies governance of new biotechnology for the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., says even an invasive species might be filling a useful biological niche. “I don’t think the entire ecosystem is going to collapse if you removed an invasive, but there is a lot of interconnectedness between species, especially in the tropics,” he says. “My concern is more the ecological interactions.”
Now I may be a little late to this party, but some things take a while to cool down. (I’ve removed most of the objectionable words form my original thoughts on this.)
Should we listen to “people” telling us what we can’t do? Should we listen even when they give no good reasons? Should we listen even when they give NO reasons? Should we listen when there are very good reasons to ignore them.
Let’s examine some of those reasons for just a few seconds.
Mosquitos spread disease.
This ONE species (Aedes aegypti) is a human specialized parasite.
It carries Zika, Dengue Fever and chikinguya
In most of the world this is an invasive species. (that is it is already disrupting an ecosystem because it is invading that ecosystem)
Are you still arguing against eradicating it?
My concern is for the Dead people, the horribly sickened people. Actual human beings that Todd will never meet nor develop vaccines or cures for the diseases that they will contract.
This is the perfect spices to try this technology on.
What are we just supposed to just sit here let them bite us? Heaven forfend there might be interactions? Those poor mosquitos might go hungry.
One of those interactions is a not small number of humans contracting a terrible disease.
My views we try it on a small scale at first (because no matter how smart I think I am I don’t think I can anticipate all unanticipated out comes)
There are several other mosquitos that fill the same ecological niches that this one does but with out the human parasitism.
If the concern is that these genes will leap species lines you must weight that risk against the deaths and makings that delay or non action will cause.
My concern is the only score that really matters. The human lives saved or improved. This is score that can be measured. I’m not sure how “ecological interactions” would be measured and and cored against current species “ecological interactions” when they have been displaced by an invasive mosquito.
Death by BioEthicist may be a new planetary scourge.
While this quote was almost certainly pulled out of context ( i.e. most people don’t start sentences with “I don’t think the entire ecosystem is going to collapse…” We don’t know the full conversation he had with this reporter) It is worth considering that we now have a possible way of eradicating an invasive, human disease carrying pest. I thing we should take it as quickly as possible.
(N.B. the malaria carrying mosquitos are much larger number and species. I’m not saying we should do the same for these as well. I just think that this is a better target this week.)