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University of Sussex biology professor Dave Goulson’s new report claims a 58 percent decline in the “abundance of widespread butterfly species” on English farmland from 2000 to 2009. It sounds impressive, but all Professor Goulson and his colleagues did was take data from the UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme for 17 butterfly species and chart the ups and downs of each population against the UK government’s pesticide usage database which counts the number of hectares treated with neonicotinoids throughout the country.
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Despite Professor Goulson’s claims for sympathetic media, his report shows nothing about neonicotinoids causing butterfly declines. Way down at the end where lazy journalists fear to tread, he admits as much:
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Further research is needed urgently to show whether there is a causal link between neonicotinoid usage and the decline of widespread butterflies or whether it simply represents a proxy for other environmental factors associated with intensive agriculture.
One of the journal article’s reviewers amplified this observation:
The authors are to be commended for being totally up-front in disclaiming any proof of causation and in specifically noting potentially confounding variables. This is especially important because inevitably this paper will be seized upon by environmental “activists” and the media and represented as presenting a more definitive association than it does. That will NOT be any fault of the authors or of the journal, but it is virtually certain to occur.
That’s true enough in the text of the paper, but it happens that Professor Goulson himself is one of the activists asserting a more definitive association. In doing so, he’s violating one of the most fundamental rules of logic: Correlation is not causation.
Read full, original post: Dave Goulson’s Got Another Case Of The Butterflies
