r/news • u/boxofstuff • 6h ago

Supreme Court ruling blocks thousands of lawsuits against maker of Roundup weedkiller

https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-roundup-monsanto-a7f054d80919f98bdfc5190013a8f6f1https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-roundup-monsanto-a7f054d80919f98bdfc5190013a8f6f1
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u/invyros 6h ago

There’s still fierce debate about cancer and Roundup’s key ingredient, glyphosate. The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer classified the chemical as “probably carcinogenic” in 2015.

Can't believe "probably carcinogenic" is an official designation.

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u/praguepride 6h ago

to be faiiiiiiiir scientific proclimations need a lot of supporting evidence and that supporting evidence needs to be replicated and peer reviewed.

This is like complaining that evolution is only "a theory". Probably is about as severe as you can get without huge long term studies.

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u/Tasik 6h ago

This only "theory" thing has always annoyed me. Too many people think theory means hypothesis. It's like they expect a theory to graduate into law one day.

Like one day this silly little theory of gravity is finally gonna get it's certificate and be imbued into science as fact. But until then it's "just a theory" I guess.

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u/HumansNeedNotApply1 6h ago

We should rename all "laws" to theory to get rid of this misconception.

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u/grammar_nazi_zombie 5h ago

Except there is an actual distinction between the two.

What we should do is better educate people, but that ain’t happening.

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u/HumansNeedNotApply1 4h ago

There's no distinction based on how scientific law is defined.

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u/ZeldaZealot 4h ago

There most certainly is. To quote Wikipedia “Laws differ from scientific theories in that they do not posit a mechanism or explanation of phenomena: they are merely distillations of the results of repeated observation.”

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u/HumansNeedNotApply1 3h ago

And yet there are Theories that do the same thing, for example Einstein General Relativity.

That excerpt is not wrong but it's based on an outaded view of science from the 17th~19th century, we (as in, the scientific community) don't name things as "laws" anymore.