Fear, Loathing, and RF Technology

It began with the bees. Geoffrey Lean and Harriet Shawcross wrote an article in The Independent on 15 April arguing that cell phones were killing bees and thereby endangering the survival of the human race (since we need bees for pollination.) Somehow, according to Lean and Shawcross, "radiation" from phones interferes with the "navigation systems" of bees, leading to the death of entire hives (known as "Colony Collapse Disorder" or CCD.) The "evidence is increasing," the authors argue in increasingly hysterical language, that cell phones lead to brain tumors, senility, and male impotence.

The problem with this argument is that the authors have failed to distinguish between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation. Radio waves are many orders of magnitude larger in wavelength than sunlight, much less radioactive wavelengths (gamma rays are often a millionth of a nanometer, whereas radio waves are generally at least a meter.) Ionizing radiation produces cancer and other nasty things. Non-ionizing radiation produces heat. A cell phone, in terms of the radiation it produces, is little different from the radio sets that have been around for nearly a hundred years. (Light from candles is another form of non-ionizing radiation, yet somehow no one has claimed that those cause cancer, despite prolonged direct exposure for many humans over the course of millenia.)

A more plausible cause of CCD is related to mites that live on bees, although conclusive evidence remains elusive.

The Independent has a history of making spurious technology-related claims. In May 2006, its writers argued that electrical fields and radio waves somehow cause cancer in humans. This kind of hysteria has a precedent in the 1980s, when many fear-mongers argued that high-tension electrical wires caused cancer (there was even an Eddie Murphy film in which a major plot point involved little children getting cancer from power lines.) Unfortunately for the hysterics, the Earth's electromagnetic field is several orders of magnitude stronger than that emitted by the high-tension wires.

In other words, if cell phones or wireless signals harm the health of humans or any other living species, it is by some undiscovered mechanism (divine intervention?) If we are to base our reasoning on objective reality, however, it appears that non-ionizing radiation is not the cause of either cancer or CCD. It seems that the writers at the Independent saw or heard the word "radiation" and jumped to unreasonable, unscientific conclusions. (They could just as easily scream about 450-terahertz radiation coming from computer LEDs. Except that 450-terahertz radiation is equivalent to almost any variety of visible light, including the glow of candles.)

Ignorance of basic science is evidently in as common in England as America. Prince Charles, after all, recently advocated the use of magic to treat medical problems. One wonders whether these examples of science and rational thought being rejected in favor of irrationality and mysticism are a sign of the cultural dominance of postmodernism and anti-Enlightenment thought in the Western world.