[ghshephard]

Almost no support for the thesis of "bad things will happen if we wipe out mosquitoes" other than "We don't know what will happen."

On the flip side, we do know what will happen if the Aedes aegypti, Anopheles, etc... is allowed to continue to exist - 100s of thousands of people a year will die.

I wonder how the author would feel about keeping mosquitoes around "just in case", if hundreds of thousands of her neighbors were dying every year.

And guess what, if, for some very, very bizarre reason it turns out that Aedes aegypti/Anopheles was a super important species, there is zero difficulty in breeding and releasing billions of them back into the wild in very short order.

[mjburgess]

It's like modern culture is trapped in a cold-war b-movie about the excesses of science.

On the pro-science side there's singularities and AI fantasy and the anti-science side the planet is "being destroyed".

It's just one giant argument from ignorance, "we don't know, therefore you don't know, therefore we can say anything we like".

[digital_ins]

isn't that the argument that a lot of people use about religion too?

[ascorbic]

The author might as well say that we should keep polio around, just in case. Just because mosquitoes are macroscopic they have this perverse fear of unintended consequences.

[ascerbic]

I think you mean ascerbic lol.