Speaking ill of the dead

Jerry Coyne has written a couple of posts about the death of Lynn Margulis over at his blog Why Evolution is True. The first one was rather respectful of her contributions to science and ignored her less than stellar contributions to science. The second post went into more details about her flaws.

In the comment section to the first post I dared to make the statement that Margulis was not a great scientist, but rather someone who made a great contribution to science, but otherwise promoted quackery such as HIV/AIDS-denial. Or as I put it:

I would think that great scientists as a minimum should be able to apply critical thinking to subjects, and be able to understand the scientific literature, even if outside their area of expertise.

Margulis was a HIV/AIDS-denier and a 9/11 conspiracy nut. She also frequently showed disregard towards the scientific method, and claimed that her ideas were dismissed because they flew against orthodoxy.

She did some great contributions to science, but as a scientists, she had deep, serious flaws, and promoted opinions which were not only wrong, but dangerous (e.g. HIV/AIDS-denial).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this wasn't taken too kindly by some of Margulis' friends and colleagues, who obviously felt that I was insulting the memory of their great friend. Or as one Michael J. Chapman put it:

I was Lynn’s friend and co-author for 20 years (look us up on Amazon). I also team-taught her courses on symbiogenesis, Gaia theory and protists. The comments here display a level of understanding of her work that might earn, at best, a C+ in one of her undergraduate courses. At worst, by contrast, are cowards who can’t even wait a while before slamming the departed. Yes I mean you, Kristjan Wager, so clearly envious of her fame, so clearly unworthy to lick the grime off her porch steps.

This comment speaks to the general idea of not speaking ill of the dead, and saying that if you do so, you have some kind of base motives for it. Well, fuck that - I don't play that game. If someone don't earn my respect during life, they certainly don't earn my respect by dying.

Personally I don't give a rat's ass about Lynn Margulis' contributions to science. I am not a scientist, and don't claim to be one. What I do care about is how she used her status, gained through her contributions to science, to promote dangerous ideas. She denied that there was such a thing as a HIV virus, using her reputation of "thinking outside the box" to indicate that other scientists were just dismissing her ideas because she flew against orthodoxy - something she had done before, and won.

I dislike all quacks, but if there is one sort of quacks I really hate, it's HIV/AIDS-deniers.

The family and friends of Lynn Margulis have lost someone close to them, but the rest of the world has just lost another quack. A quack who had contributed to the science in the past, but had gone on to endanger other people by promoting dangerous, and wrong, ideas, putting other people at risk.

I won't apologize for saying that.

R.I.P. Norman Borlaug

I just saw the news that Norman Borlaug has died, 95 years old. Borlaug won the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on making better crops, allowing countries such as Mexico, Pakistan and India to become self-supplying in corn.

LA Times has an obit which describes his work, and the effect it had.

In the early 1960s, India and Pakistan were confronting famine and CIMMYT sent Borlaug to intervene. He planted demonstration plots of the new dwarf variety, but was unable to convince the state-owned seed companies to adopt them.

By 1965, however, famine in the region was so bad that the governments acquiesced. Borlaug organized a shipment of 35 truckloads of dwarf wheat seeds. Because of customs problems, the seeds couldn't be shipped from Mexico in time for planting, so he sent them to a port in Los Angeles.

U.S. customs officials held them up at the border before finally permitting them to cross. Then National Guard troops detoured them from Los Angeles because of the Watts riots. Finally, the $100,000 check drawn on the Pakistani ministry bounced because of three misspelled words on its face.

Ultimately, the cargo ship set sail for Karachi and Bombay and Borlaug went to bed relieved, only to wake the next morning to word that India and Pakistan had gone to war.

Because of the delays, the team had no time for germination studies and planting was started immediately, often in sight of artillery flashes. "We did a lot of praying," he later recalled.

Despite the problems, the new crop was 98% bigger than the previous year's and the Asian subcontinent was placed on a new path. India ordered 18,000 tons of seed from Mexico and the harvest was so big that there was a shortage of labor to harvest it, too few bullock carts to haul it to the threshing floor, and an insufficiency of jute bags, trucks, rail cars and storage facilities.

By 1968, Pakistan was self-sufficient in food production. India joined it in 1974.

It is probably impossible to overstate his importance to the world - it's estimated that his work has saved over a billion people from starvation. He was a great man, whose work still has an impact on the lives of most of us today.

NY Times also has an obit of him which is well worth reading.

Speaking about the dead

Generally, people seem to adhere to the old principle that one shouldn't speak bad about the dead. Especially not when they are recently dead.

To some degree I concur with this - when someone is dead, it's not possible for them to defend themselves, and it brings anguish to those people left behind. However, that doesn't mean that one shouldn't speak truthfully about the dead, and make clear what kind of person they were - especially not if it was a public person.

Why do I bring this up? Well, because of Jesse Helms.

Like when Jerry Falwell died, a lot of people seem to be busy with saying good things about Jesse Helms, and his contributions to US politics. Others, being more realistic, tries to tell the truth about his politics, but to say nice things about his personality.

A good example of the first group, is President Bush, who has praised Helms saying that he was a "unwavering champion of those struggling for liberty". Here, I presume Bush means "as long as they were not Gay or People of Color", whose liberty Helms' had a long record of opposing.

To the second groups belongs the New York Times, who in their obit of Helms goes to great pains to portrait him as a likable man, even while describing his politics fairly accurately.

Well, I am sorry, but Helms' record speaks for itself. He opposed the liberty of homosexuals and minorities, and his attempt to stop funding for AIDS research did real harm to a lot of people. There is nothing good to be said about the man, and while I'm sorry for his family, I think the US is a better place for him not being there any longer.

For a better obit of Helms, I recommend the one in the Guardian, which contains passages like this one.

What is beyond question is the malign impact of Helms's innovation on all subsequent American politics. He inaugurated the age of massive back-door political donations, now euphemistically known as "soft money". In his own 1984 re-election battle, he spent $16.5m, then the most expensive Senate campaign in American history (and the federal election commission twice penalised him for using illegal contributions). Sixteen years later, a New Jersey candidate would lavish $60m on gaining a Senate seat, making it evident how effectively Helms's initiative had opened political office to the highest bidder.

Given the age of these people, I guess that we will have a lot of this sort of obits in the next few years.

John W. Backus has died

A true giant of the field of Computer Science, John W. Backus, has died, 82 years old.

MarkCC explains Backus' contributions to the field.

The NY Times Obituaries: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran Developer, Dies

IBM's profile of Backus