Weird Science

I love how Andrew Sullivan calls this post by Will Saletan a “fisking” of a L’Osservatore Romano article about the pill and the possible effects of oestrogen pollution. All Saletan does is poach a second-hand Agence France Press quote from a researcher vice president of a contraceptive research association telling us there’s nothing to worry about. Not only does he not link to any original research; he doesn’t even link to the original L’Osservatore Romano report, and offers no discussion of all sorts of non-Vatican funded studies on the Interwebs that show at least some kind of effect on animals (so the contention of the people quoted in the Vatican paper is at a minimum not as absurd prima facie as Sullivan and Saletan make it out to be).

Now, I may be just a country blogger, but I think an honest-to-goodness fisking requires just a bit more legwork than that. And while I’m at it, I find it ironic that both Saletan’s and Sullivan’s intention here is to needle the old greybeard bigots (as they would have it) in the Vatican as ignoramuses who let their ideology get in the way of their science, yet neither of them appear to show any genuine interest in what the science actually says on the subject.

But at least Saletan had the common sense to tag this sentence at the end of his post (which Andrew conveniently neglects to include):

On the other hand, if it turns out to be true, I’ll be really pissed.