Reply to Mr. Ash's post containing the snip: "first off I am guessing 
your belief system tells you there is a continuum here? ":

It is obvious that the deck is stacked against the truth in research. If 
one is approaching tenure and discovers 5 years into their well endowed 
soft money research project that their basic underlying hypothesis has 
no merit what do they do? Come clean immediately before their tenure 
kicks in or before the next soft money grant check clears? I think we 
all know what happens in real life all too often. And that is just on 
the academic side. Consider what seems to have happened in the private 
sector when there was real money at stake and a new drug or pesticide 
was about to go out the door.

Additional snip from Mr. Ash's previous post that I original replied to: 
"'scientific truth' changes with the addition of more information or the 
ability to model more complex systems". The notion that there is a 
"scientific truth" that is somehow distinguishable from plain truth 
seems to imply a somewhat jaded "belief system" that truth, however 
classified, is not absolute. I prefer the notion (belief system?) that 
the truth remains absolute but not always obvious and that our 
perception of it merely changes and that our reporting of that 
perception should simply be amended if "the addition of more information 
or the ability to model more complex systems" change that perception. In 
practical terms it seems that there is enough additional information and 
modeling available to consider such an amendment to the perception of 
the truth when considering the lethal and sub-lethal effects of neonics 
on pollinators and perhaps amphibians as well.


Regards,
-Cliff Youse



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