I typed about five pages of diatribe about the 2013 paper by Seneff and Samsel.
Then lost it all. Oh, well, maybe it was for the best. Paging right past this post might be a good idea, but I couldn't let praise of the Seneff paper go un-responded-to.
Rhapsody, I don't mean this as criticism of you, it comes from weeks of debating Roundup in another garden website and 12-15 hours of following popular articles back to the junk science they came form, or finding where they totally misquoted good science. I had a 100% frustration rate! When i started, I expected to find mixed results and ambivalent science on both sides, but instead found 100% propaganda or phoney science on one side.
Probably from your citing the "Roundup Unready" article, we've come to different conclusions about Roundup. The fact that I get heated when I chase down that body of literature to its sources is no reflection on you, we just came to different conclusions.
My heat is directed at activist journalists who should know better and should use more integrity when they misreport and distort their sources.
Notice that the "Roundup Unready" article is very sanctimonious about encouraging us to check out the article and its citations ... but I did not see any link to that article that a reader might pursue!
This should bring it up, not that it is easy reading or necessarily makes any sense to anyone. Eventually I gave up because it seemed to be grinding an axe rather than critiquing or even demonstrating detailed comprehension of its source materials.
http://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/...
The journal "Entropy" is a good example of the trend towards "open access" online "science journals". The short version of my opinion is that they will publish ANYTHING and then call it science. But please form your own opinion of them!
http://www.mdpi.com/journal/en...
Also, in their words, they are
"devoted to the exploration of entropy in statistics and science." Not agriculture, toxicology or any other science relevant to glyphosphate.
A while ago, in a thread in another garden website, I took the time to follow through and read parts of the same article article and find some of her other work and primary research interests. She has
no credentials, academic training or experience in agriculture or toxicology. She's a computer scientist with a background in AI and natural language processing.
Samsel and Seneff did not conduct ANY studies to write this article. None, zero. They cited other papers. I wish she had any training in the scientific specialties those papers were about!
Her hobbyhorse seems to be esoteric aspects of entropy and inventing new terms like "exogenous semiotic entropy". I'm not making that up.
Here's her home page on MIT's site:
http://people.csail.mit.edu/se...
And here is an extract from the abstract of her article:
"Consequences are
most of the diseases and conditions associated with a Western diet, which include gastrointestinal disorders, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, depression, autism, infertility, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. We explain the documented effects of glyphosate and its ability to induce disease, and
we show that glyphosate is the “textbook example” of exogenous semiotic entropy: the disruption of homeostasis by environmental toxins. "
I think she realized that no one was taking her abstract ideas seriously, so she coupled them with things like "Roundup causes bad things" so she could be published in "open source journals", and be widely cited by unscrupulous or credulous activist journalists and widely bashed by everyone else.
Try to read the paper, it uses many very abstract words in very scary ways, but in my opinion is unscrupulous hot air. I couldn't read it all or understand very much of what she was really trying to accomplish.
The connection between what she cited and what she concluded did not exist as far as I could see, but that might come from my ignorance of the principles of "exogenous semiotic entropy", sarcasm intended.
http://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/...
I don't know whether Seneff is sincerely trying to prove something abstract and incomprehensible about AI and information theory, or just a publicity hound. But they way she cites other people's articles suggests she either doesn't understand the subjects she has no training in, or plays very loosely with what might be relevant to her claims.
What I found consistently while following links that other people advanced as "real science" about glyphosphate (and, to a lesser extent, anti-GMO screeds) was that a very scary-sounding popular article would cite some hard-to-find and hard-to-read REAL scientific paper, and then totally misquote and distort it.
In this case, the Roundup Unready article stayed pretty close to Seneff's paper ... but I didn't respect that paper and had to list "Entropy" in my head as "they publish pseudo-science".
= = = = =
Tamar Haspel said this in the Huff Post:
Condemning Monsanto With Bad Science Is Dumb
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
"After reading the paper, I had to wonder -- who are Samsel and Seneff? Seneff is a Senior Research Scientist in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT. Her advanced degrees are in electrical engineering. She describes herself as having "recently become interested in the effect of drugs and diet on health and nutrition." Samsel describes himself as an "Independent Scientist and Consultant," and, for the last 37 years, has run Anthony Samsel Environmental and Public Health Services, which does "Charitable community investigations of industrial polluters." I think it's fair to say they probably went into this with a point of view."
= = = = =
This anti-GM site wasn't very kind either.
http://www.gmwatch.org/index.p...
I don't know this site's bias, but they dump really hard on this "paper":
http://www.examiner.com/articl...
