Toevalsvondst zet drogreden Frans de Waal op scherp

Frans de Waal (2009)
Een tijd voor empathie

Ik was aan het bladeren in het 544 pagina's tellende boek 'De kosmos en het leven, een Meesterwerk' van Rolie Barth. In de paragraaf 'Evolutionaire verklaringen van moraliteit' (hoofdstuk 20) wordt er drie keer verwezen naar Frans de Waal. Kennelijk is de Waal -vooral bij niet-biologen(?)- een veel gelezen auteur. Tot mijn grote verbazing had Barth in twee boeken van Frans de Waal een bespreking van de 'Naturalistic Fallacy' gevonden. 

Dat is de drogreden om uit een 'is' (hoe dingen zijn) een 'ought' (hoe dingen behoren te zijn) af te leiden. Ik had die boeken ook gelezen, maar ik kan mij van die passages niets herinneren. Ik kan het mij niet eens voorstellen. In 'Een tijd voor empathie' (paperback, 2009) staat de 'Naturalistische drogreden' expliciet beschreven (pagina 41,42) en staat zelfs in de alfabetische index. Dat had ik dus makkelijk kunnen vinden als ik er naar gezocht had. En in 'De Bonobo en de Tien Geboden' (2013) wordt de 'Naturalistische drogreden' impliciet beschreven op pagina 172. Hier wordt de drogreden niet expliciet benoemd en staat niet in de index. Daardoor is het moelijker te vinden.
Alsof dat niet genoeg was had Barth ook de aflevering van het tv programma Zomergasten 2017 gezien waarin Frans de Waal te gast was. Barth had opgemerkt dat De Waal daar vertelde dat "de biologie ons geen morele regels kan geven". Nota Bene! Dat kan ik mij niet herinneren. Maar wat Barth niet opgemerkt had was het feit dat De Waal zich schuldig maakte aan de 'Naturalistische drogreden' in diezelfde uitzending! "Maar je eet wel vlees!" merkte de interviewer Janine Abbring op. Het antwoord van Frans de Waal: 

"De hele natuur bestaat uit een levenscyclus. Je hebt dieren die eten planten. Je hebt dieren die eten dieren. Je hebt zelfs planten die eten dieren. Als wij doodgaan worden we opgegeten door dieren.".

Met andere woorden: ik eet dieren omdat het natuurlijk is. Hij leidt dus zijn moraal af uit de natuur. Precies het soort redenering waarvan hij weet dat het een drogreden is. Dat weten we nu. Een drogreden is onacceptabel voor een wetenschapper. Hypocriet omdat hij pleit voor empathie. En omdat hij het in al zijn  boeken opneemt voor dieren. Tegenstrijdig omdat hij nota bene in dezelfde uitzending van Zomergasten zichzelf tegenspreekt. Zwak omdat hij direct voorafgaand aan zijn 'levenscyclus' argument vertelde dat de vleesindustrie zeer 'dieronvriendelijk' is. Misleidend voor alle lezers van zijn boeken omdat hij al die tijd verzweeg dat hij een vleeseter was. Tenslotte heeft hij een miljoenen publiek als je al zijn lezingen, youtube video's en boeken bij elkaar optelt. Dus hij is een publieke figuur met grote invloed. Maar vrijwel niemand van zijn publiek weet van de zaken waar ik hier over blog.
  

Met dank aan Rolie Barth voor de verwijzingen in zijn boek! Ik was zelf nooit op het idee gekomen om de NF drogreden in de boeken van Frans de Waal op te zoeken. Voor mij was dat een totaal onlogisch idee.

Bronnen

Rolie Barth (2021) De kosmos en het leven, een Meesterwerk. Buijten & Schipperheijn. 544 pagina's.

Frans de Waal (2009) Een Tijd voor Empathie. Wat de natuur ons leert over een betere samenleving. Uitgeverij Contact. Engelse uitgave: The Age of Empathy, Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society.

Frans de Waal (2013) De Bonobo en de Tien Geboden. paperback. Uitgeverij Atlas Contact. Engelse uitgave: The Bonobo and The Atheist. In Search of Humanism Among the Primates.

Frans De Waal uses a fallacy to defend eating meat. No empathy with animals. Not a vegan. youtube 3 Oct 2017. (Dit is het fragment waar FdW zijn 'levenscyclus' drogreden geeft).

Zijn wij slim genoeg om te begrijpen waarom Frans de Waal nog steeds vlees eet? De drogreden van Frans de Waal. blog 12 September 2017. Dit blog was ik vergeten. Rolie Barth wees mij er op in een email. In dat blog verwees ik al naar De Bonobo en de Tien Geboden naar pagina 172 waar de NF staat. Dat was ik ook vergeten. In dat blog had ik de NF niet ontdekt in Een tijd voor empathie. Tsja, het menselijk geheugen! Dus Rolie Barth al weer bedankt voor de tip! [toegevoegd: 10 Nov 21]

 

I have put much effort into proving Frans de Waal committed the Naturalistic Fallacy. And then this happened

Frans de Waal (wiki)

In 2017 in a 3 hour interview on Dutch television primatologist and author Frans de Waal said that the meat industry is bad, but he admitted that he continued eating meat. When the interviewer confronts him with this discrepancy, De Waal responds with: I am part of the food chain; animals eat animals; I do what animals do; I eat meat. It's natural. That argument is known as the 'Naturalistic Fallacy'. 

It's an invalid argument. You cannot logically derive human morality from nature.
I have put much effort into proving Frans de Waal committed the Naturalistic Fallacy. I have the crucial 28 sec video fragment on my youtube channel, and I added the most concise analysis of the fallacy; I blogged about it several times. I studied the fallacy to be certain it is indeed a fallacy. I have been working on a blog to show all the unexpected and absurd consequences of the Naturalistic Fallacy when it is taken as a valid argument. I haven't finished it yet.

And then this happened

I was browsing a Dutch book about another subject when I accidentally discovered a short discussion of the Naturalistic Fallacy. The author illustrated the fallacy with a quote:

"The problem is that one can’t derive the goals of society from the goals of nature. Trying to do so is known as the naturalistic fallacy, which is the impossibility of moving from how things are to how things ought to be.
Thus, if animals were to kill one another on a large scale, this wouldn't mean we have to do so, too, any more than we would have an obligation to live in perfect harmony if animals were to do so. All that nature can offer is information and inspiration, not prescription." (The Age of Empathy Chapter 2: The Other Darwinism.)

The quote is from from the book: The Age of Empathy. Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society (2010). Indeed, it is a perfect description of the naturalistic fallacy. The author of the book is: Frans de Waal! I never anticipated that the same person committing the Naturalistic Fallacy on television, had described it 7 years years before in one of his own books. He did not describe it in general, no, he applied it specifically to killing animals: 

"Thus, if animals were to kill one another on a large scale, this wouldn't mean we have to do so, too...". 

So, he knows perfectly well that nature cannot give a moral justification for killing animals. And he made no secret of it: 'Naturalistic Fallacy' is present in the alphabetic index of The Age of Empathy. It never occurred to me to search for it in his own books. But there it is. 

But why would someone use the Naturalistic Fallacy in a live television talk show if he knew it was a fallacy? An obvious possibility is that he did not have a good answer to the question But why do you still eat meat? and fell back on a false argument dressed up as a deep insight of a biologist who studied animal behaviour his whole life. He called it the 'The natural cycle of life' as if it was a law of nature. He got away with it. The interviewer did not question his argument. It looks like one of 'Nature's Lessons' (that is the subtitle of his book). Possibly this was not the first time he used this trick. Possibly his family and friends had the same question in the past and he found that this answer appeared convincing enough to stop further questioning. 

I blog about this because Frans de Waal has a large audience and I suspect nobody knows that he described the Naturalistic Fallacy in one of his books and later used that same fallacy to defend eating animals. I discovered this only a few days ago. He should not get away with this. More importantly, it should be widely recognised that this 'justification' for eating animals is a fallacy.

Sources

Killing Animals in the Age of Empathy. Frans de Waal, a leading primatologist explains why he eats animals. blog 26 September 2017.

Frans De Waal uses a fallacy to defend eating meat. No empathy with animals. Not a vegan. youtube 3 Oct 2017. (This is the 28 sec fragment).

Frans de Waal (2010) The Age of Empathy. Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society. hardback. Paperback 2019. (The book with the Naturalistic Fallacy described.)

Hypocrisy: "Hypocrisy is the practice of engaging in the same behavior or activity for which one criticizes another or the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one's own behavior does not conform." (wikipedia). 

A new anti-viral therapy for SARS-CoV-2 was predicted twenty years ago by evolutionary biologist Mark Ridley

 

Corona update    
24 October 2021    

#36   

"We just need to increase the viral mutation rate and they’ll collapse under their own copying errors. The treatment would need selectively to increase the viral, and not the host's, mutation rate, but that should be feasible." Mark Ridley (2000) Mendel's Demon, page 89. [7]

Ridley wrote about his second favourite cure for AIDS. So, this was not about SARS-CoV-2. SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 did not exist in 2000. It was another RNA virus: HIV. But the same evolutionary calculations apply. Ridley did not make a wild guess. He based his claim on his own tentative conclusion that some RNA viruses have evolved near to the limit of complexity set by their copying error rates. That means they have the maximum copy error rate compatible with survival: about 1 copy error per 30,000 bases. At each replication cycle the complete virus is copied (all 30,000 bases). That means that with that error rate a virus of length 30,000 bases would produce 1 copy error at each replication cycle.

According to the recent research the mutation rate of SARS-CoV-2 appears to be 3.7 per million bases per replication cycle [3]. As it happens SARS-CoV-2 has a length of 30,000 bases. Ridley did not know that, but he was close with his estimate. If SARS-CoV-2 lives close to the point of mutational meltdown, than it is quite easy to 'mutate the virus to death'. By 'close to the point of mutational meltdown' I mean only a slight increase in mutation rate will kill the virus. The genetic information in the virus will be destroyed increasingly at each copy cycle. In other words: only a little push will throw the virus into the abyss.

pushing the virus over the edge in to mutational collapse

If the virus is close to the edge (B) only a little push is needed. When it is further away from the edge (A) a strong push is needed.

Nature 8 Oct 2021 [1],[2]

So far the theory. How does that translate into a drug? Molnupiravir is the proposed answer. Here is an abbreviated abstract of how the drug works:

Molnupiravir is a nucleoside analogue, which means it mimics some of the building blocks of RNA. When SARS-CoV-2 enters a cell, the virus needs to duplicate its RNA genome to form new viruses. Molnupiravir gets incorporated into burgeoning RNA strands and, once inside, wreaks havoc. The compound can shift its configuration, sometimes mimicking the nucleoside cytidine (C) and sometimes mimicking uridine (U). Those RNA strands become faulty blueprints for the next round of viral genomes. Anywhere the compound gets inserted and that conformational shift happens, a point mutation occurs. When enough mutations accumulate, the viral population collapses. That is lethal mutagenesis. The virus essentially mutates itself to death [1].

In fact this is a practical translation of Ridley's idea: increase the mutation rate and the virus will suffer a mutational meltdown (error catastrophe). How this is achieved is interesting. The base substitute has two configurations: one similar to C and one similar to U. If those configurations occur randomly when incorporated in a RNA sequence, they introduce random mutations when the sequence is copied. Exactly that is the reason that compound does not occur naturally in RNA. It would make the genetic code unreliable. Life cannot be built on an unreliable code.

How strong would be the effect? What dose of the base analogue do we need?  

It would be too optimistic to assume that all suitable bases in the virus genome would be replaced by the drug. Now, there are between 7000 and 8000 of each of the 4 bases U,C,A,G in the virus RNA sequence of 30,000 bases (the length of SARS-CoV-2). Suppose that 10% of the say 7500 C's of a virus genome are replaced by Molnupiravir, that is 750, and when this RNA strand is copied again 50% of the Molnupiravir bases have a different configuration. This would cause 375 new mutations in the copied virus genome. This is really a huge amount when compared with  1 mutation in 3-7 virus replication cycles [6]. Compare this also to an estimated 10-20 mutations in a SARS-CoV-2 variant [8]. This high number of 375 mutations should destroy the function of all produced viral proteins ... if they are produced at all! If too many mutations occur for example in the Spike protein, the virus can't enter a human cell. If too many mutations accumulate in viral RNA polymerase, the virus RNA cannot be copied. 

Further, the effect of the drug will depend on how many of the virus particles will be affected. It would be too optimistic to suppose that all replicating virus particles would be affected. I have no idea what percentage that would be. Anyhow, the unaffected virus particles will replicate at an unrestricted rate. So, it all depends on the dose of the drug. A higher dose should have a stronger effect on the percentage of affected viruses and the percentage of replaced bases in a virus genome. But a higher dose could be toxic to the patient [9].

Concluding, we could state that 20 yeas ago evolutionary biologist Mark Ridley correctly predicted the possibility of an error catastrophe causing drug such as Molnupiravir.

In June 2021 Molnupiravir received an emergency use authorization of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for therapy of COVID-19 patients. The European Medicines Agency (EMA) is reviewing Molnupiravir.

Thoughts about first RNA replicating molecules ...

The 'RNA world' is a well-known hypothesis about the Origin of Life. I am tempted to think that unreliable, unstable bases could have been used by the very first RNA replicators. By a process of natural selection for stability, the more stable bases would end up in the successful replicators. The unstable bases would become extinct. The 5 bases we now have A,C,T,G,U must have been selected for their stability and became dominant. A personal hypothesis. Data have to be collected and experiments have to be done!

Postscript

20 Nov 2021:  Molnupiravir has been approved by The European Medicines Agency (EMA).

Postscript

1 Feb 2022

Later I found this: Ribavirin

"Studies have shown that treating RNA viruses such as poliovirus with ribavirin produce results consistent with the idea that the viruses mutated too frequently to maintain the integrity of the information in their genomes. This is termed error catastrophe.

Ribavirin is a guanosine (ribonucleic) analog used to stop viral RNA synthesis. Ribavirin is a prodrug, which when metabolized resembles purine RNA nucleotides."  

"Ribavirin was patented in 1971 and approved for medical use in 1986". So, that is 14 years before Mark Ridley's book!

(wikipedia articles Mutation rate and Ribavirin)

 

 

Postscript 24 Oct 2023

Anti-COVID drug accelerates viral evolution, Nature 24 Oct 2023

"Molnupiravir, an antiviral drug used to treat COVID-19, induces numerous mutations in the SARS-CoV-2 genome that can increase the rate at which the virus evolves — yielding viral variants that might survive and be passed on. "

Sources

1. How antiviral pill molnupiravir shot ahead in the COVID drug hunt, Nature, 8 Oct 2021 
2. The Merck pill, which could become the first oral antiviral COVID treatment, forces the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 to mutate itself to death, Scientific American 12 Oct 2021
3. Vítor Borges et al Mutation rate of SARS-CoV-2 and emergence of mutators during experimental evolution, biorxiv.org (not yet peer-reviewed)
4. Molnupiravir (wikipedia)
5. Error catastrophe (wikipedia); Mutational meltdown (wikipedia)
6. The total number and mass of SARS-CoV-2 virions, PNAS June 22, 2021.
7. This book is one of the most insightful books about evolution I have ever read. It is reviewed on my website. 
8. 24 November 2021: a new SARS-CoV-2 variant has been discovered in South Africa: the Omnicron variant (wikipedia). The variant has 51 mutations in total including deletions and 1 insertion. Added Dec 1 2021
9. See for short- and long-term risks of Molnupiravir for human health: Lethal mutagenesis as an antiviral strategy, Science 3 Feb 2022. Added 14 Feb 2022