Previous Next "The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty.."

Jesuit teachingThe Society of Jesus "Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."

VoltaireFrench Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher famous "The only certainty is that nothing is certain."

Pliny the Elder Roman author, naturalist and natural philosopher, and naval and army commander of the early Roman Empire "For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream."

Vincent Van Gogh;Dutch Post-Impressionist painter "And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human."

William GibsonAmerican-Canadian speculative fiction writer and essayist, pioneering the science fiction subgenre known as cyberpunk "Premature certainty is the enemy of the truth."

Nipsey HussleAmerican rapper "Certainty is the death of wisdom, thought, creativity."

Shekhar KapurIndian film director, actor, and film producer "It's false certainty that worries me...I'm really concerned when I see people pretending to know things they clearly cannot know."

Sam HarrisAmerican philosopher, neuroscientist, and author "If I am fool, it is, at least, a doubting one; and I envy no one the certainty of his self-approved wisdom."

Lord ByronEnglish poet and peer "Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so."

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.American jurist who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1902 to 1932 "Inquiry is fatal to certainty."

Will DurantAmerican writer, historian, and philosopher "The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind."

May SartonAmerican poet, novelist, and memoirist Previous Next

Certain Doubt

How many times has the come-on "We're certain. Trust us" been used in the course of human history? As a former biologist and marine science educator in the Florida Keys I've grown to understand the ominous nature of this proclamation from a full-circle standpoint.

How? Simple. By realizing that I once did it myself. And I'm here to correct that mistake today.

Kind of. Let me explain…

I've finally learned to question any story that resonates with me as deeply this one. As a scientist, wanting an ostensible result to be proven true is a clear sign you're in dicey territory. We have the scientific method for corralling that human frailty, and thank goodness for it.

As a young scientist, I was overly prone to trust my mentors over the lack of evidence none of us bothered to verify. In my homework for this podcast regarding what really did happen, I learned that nobody had.

There is almost no more societally-polarizing topic in Ecology than habitat destruction. Our human inclination is autonomy, love of freedom, and a vigorous struggle against any barriers to our "free will". Being told "you can't build anything here" is pure anathema to that basic human point of view.

In this tale, that assault of our freedom is filed under "pest-control"; namely, Mosquitoes. I grew up in Illinois, actively camping as a Boy Scout all over the country. I came to know most of the unpleasant seeming "pestilence" a kid can encounter in the #GreatOutdoors. As an outdoors-man, and limiting the discussion to animals not plants, I have found that these particular blood-sucking insects are not only annoying, their bites and stings can transmit to us any number of truly nasty diseases.

Malaria is the chief villain in many a human effort to live in the tropics. But Yellow Fever was never far behind, historically, along with some recent discoveries like Dengue and Zika. The word "recent" has an interesting role here when you consider that the ancient fight for control of the Mediterranean Sea involving the Greeks in Syracuse, Romans, and Carthaginians in the Punic Wars was mitigated in large part by disease-carrying mosquitoes.

Finding ways to successfully colonize every corner of planet Earth, humanity's answer to settling in the tropic is an age-old story itself. Habitat destruction became and has remained the default strategy in coping with the most diminutive predators on earth. The term parasites reminds us that the label "apex predator" is a bit of a self-contradictory term.

Returning to more modern and locale specific times, by 1838 the growing population in Florida, then clamoring for statehood, was beginning to complain loudly to its civic leaders about the mosquito problem. A harbinger of ignorant wisdom came from various other states in the person of John Randolph of Virginia, who warned his fellow congressmen in 1835 against voting Florida into statehood. He argued that the land would never become habitable due to "swamps, quagmires, alligators and mosquitoes."

Legal, or at least not illegal habitat destruction began here in the "New World" not long after we'd established this new country. “What good are they anyway? Let’s get rid of them” became the shared civic sentiment in many places regardless of referring to mosquitoes, bison, wolves, or prairie dogs. The mosquito problem was hardly new, having come to national attention in 1905 when, after years of Statewide deaths due to mosquito-borne illnesses, the great Yellow Fever epidemic of 1900 hit New Orleans. "In 1905, following a tremendous effort by scientists to link disease transmission to mosquito vectors, the first area-wide mosquito control program in the City of New Orleans was implemented."

Florida's Anti-Mosquito Association was formed in 1922, and the Legislature created the first mosquito control district, the Indian River Mosquito Control District, in 1925 in conjunction with the formation of Indian River County. The St. Lucie Mosquito Control District was formed a year later in 1926. Early permanent control efforts focused on hand ditching, some diking and dewatering, and proposed some dredge and fill work. The Great Depression's "Work Projects Administration (WPA)" constructed 1,500 miles of ditches in Florida's salt marshes by hand or with explosives.

Perhaps the most significant mosquito control event in Florida was the creation of State funds through the efforts of Dr. John Mulrennan, Sr. in 1953. This legislatively established program was designated for permanent control work which included dredge and fill, ditching, and impoundment and established the Entomological Research Center, now known as the University of Florida, Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, Florida Medical Entomology Laboratory in Vero Beach.

But the truly mortal blow was struck in 1941 when the State passed General Senate Bill 388, allowing for each county to form their own Mosquito Control District in order to tax the locals in order to finance any means necessary to "eradicate mosquito-borne illnesses in their jurisdiction".

I guess now would be a good time to quote the great American Naturalist Aldo Leopold from “Round River: From the Journals of Aldo Leopold”; “The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, "What good is it?" If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”

And tinkering is the best way to put it. There are other species of animal on Earth that use tools to manipulate their local environment, but only human beings can directly transform the very ecology on which their own survival depends in order to make what can only be described as “an easier” or “more comfortable” way to live off Earth’s natural bounty.

That's just about when I enter the fray, teaching students allegorical information about this very effort as having been demonstrated with applications of empiricism. 45 years ago.

Here's the story I told, parroting what was told to me by those who came before me; "After World War II, the Army Corps of Engineers, well known as crack construction hands, were underutilized. Never trained, or even expected to operate like scientists, they claimed to have figured out a solution with the essential validating claim “We just know we’re right”. And, sadly, no one with enough power stood up and said “Prove it!”

So Monroe County, the southern Everglades and The Keys, became a test-zone for the State of Florida despite the wise warnings from those few experts who had undertaken to study and research the problem in order to understand the natural world better.

The Florida Senate's General Bill 388 created "Mosquito Control Districts", gave the go-ahead, read “designated the funding via the power of local taxation”, to dig a series of shallow canals no more than 12” deep…to protect endangered and protected the Key Deer…by 6” across, all leading from the islands’ interiors to the shoreline to drain off the large amounts of standing-rainwater “known” to be harboring the mosquito larvae that hatched to then attack the citizens a few days after every rainstorm. And from May through November the tropical weather pattern means it rains somewhere in the 120-mile long island chain every day. And night. Some days everywhere.

The “we just know” kicker was their self-proclaimed, rather self-congratulatory “knowledge of the ecosystem” flourish. They would add killifish, “known” to be voracious consumers of recently hatched mosquito larvae. Which was true…partially.

Moving ahead a year or so, the project was completed, and everyone waited to see the results. As reported anecdotally by those same beleaguered citizens, the problem got worse. Noticeably worse. Even much worse for some. Enough controversy erupted that another set of subject-matter experts was consulted, then brought in to research the issue. This time scientists who studied Ecology, not Pest Control.

In rather short order the following set of facts was generated, and the answer to “What happened?” turned out to be “You didn’t just know. You guessed. And you were completely wrong. About everything you said you ‘knew’”.

Back to science, not allegory.

While the casual observer can indeed watch mosquito larvae developing then hatching in standing rainwater puddles, actual research demonstrated that most of the fresh rain-water that harbors mosquito larvae on the island chain is sequestered on the undersides of the leaves of trees, palmettos, and any of the many types of sub-tropical vegetation growing there. Most of it never drains off into the canals.

Of the captured fresh rain-water that does drip off the plant or falls on open-ground, the killifish population it supports make short work of any insect larvae that find their way there. But the main predator of the mosquito, the dragonfly, lays its eggs directly in the standing fresh-water, never in the small droplets hanging off leaves like mosquitoes. And since they also happen to be about 10x larger than mosquito larvae, get eaten first. So the successfully hatched mosquitoes had been unwittingly awarded an environment nearly free of their main predator, allowing them to run rampant over the island and their own warm-blooded prey.

Uh-huh. Whoops is right. Add in the fact that these ditches began filling in with sediment immediately and created small but growing "flood plains", that is to say "more and bigger puddles than before", with no plans or funding to maintain them and the entire debacle ran the full circle of botched bureaucracy pretending to be science."

Beware the old #WeJustKnow gambit. It has a familiar, hollow ring. A mentor taught me that “The truth is ever and always the case.” Indeed. because no matter what we choose to think, the truth stands unassailed. But getting to the truth is far more difficult than temporarily convincing people that your opinion is worthy of becoming theirs.

Guessing is easy. Theorizing is harder. And proving anything is truly difficult. Learning to trust any group of professionals can also be hard, especially in our increasingly technology-intertwined modern lives.

We know this to be true simply because, at one point in time or another, we’ve all succumbed to this very temptation, assuming we know when all we’re really doing is cheering for our preferred outcome. So, ignorance is endless is the moral of this story, I suppose.

We still do not know who dug those mosquito ditches in the lower Florida Keys despite months of my own rather assiduous research . Nor can we say with any authority whom it was that authorized them.

The answer likely resides in the general-ledger of the Monroe County Mosquito Control District were anyone to undertake the task of forensic-accounting their expenditures from 1935 to 1972, when we know the practice was stopped out of the collective understanding that it doesn't work and creates even more ecological imbalance issues than before the ditches were dug.

How do I know this?

Because experience tells me that NO ONE digs trenches in the Key Largo Limestone, the petrified ancient coral reef bed, for fun. Or for free. Someone got paid to create this elaborate network of ditches that slope gently and consistently toward the sea. It requires exacting engineering, hard work in ghastly hot pine-palmetto forests leading to even hotter and more ghastly mangrove swamps.

I know because we did it on our property while laying sunken PVC-conduit to electrify our newest Marine Science Station infrastructure. With a pick, shovel, and jack-hammer. I think I lost a few fillings on those work-crews!

But there I was, teaching those very things with great assurance and nothing but anecdotal evidence to support me in the late 1970's.

Having duly dissed on the Army Corps of Engineers was wrong. A while it still looks as if they may have done the actual ditch-digging themselves, it was clearly not their idea. It never was.

And it's also not true that there was NO GOOD SCIENCE being done on the issue.

The real truth is that the point of the scientific research done into the biology of mosquitoes up until then was finding ways to kill them off. To maximize the comfort and health of human beings rather than protect and preserve the health of the ecosystem that made these places such wonderful places for people to want to live in the first place.

Not "No Science" nor "Bad science"…just the human penchant to treat #SpaceshipEarth as our infinitely forgiving playground rather than the precious and fragile source of all human life that it is. Call it "poorly directed Science".

I've learned that the very worst Science is initiated from certainty…because that's not science, just human intractability trying to pass itself off as empiricism rather than allegory, opinion, and greed inspired lies.

It's the same mindset that pushed me to teach this lesson with a certainty I am sure to have transferred to some others in the very way it came to me. Not for personal profit, mind you, but nonetheless tainted with the motivation to promulgate my own view of Ecology as more factual than I knew at the time. And that's my shame.

"Shame, Shame, Shame!" said Gomer Pyle.

My long quest for wisdom has brought me to a new place, one where I continue to be reminded of all the good reasons that there is no such thing as certainty. That the closest thing any of us can get to certainty is realizing that those who seek it are on the wrong path performing the wrong kind of search.

Perhaps the most important lesson in this, one I hope to have learned once and for all; and that is;

…the opposite of wisdom is not doubt, but certainty!