I can't hold a conversation with you about a scientist you haven't even heard of, who had an outsized impact on the human population , food production, the environment, in the past century, and whom your only reference is Wikipedia. Sorry. I thought you'd have heard of him.
Clearly you're more familiar with him than I am. I tried to ask if you thought he was a good person - do you?
I can't pass judgement. His work enabled second- and third-world nations to cultivate better, higher-yield crops and feed much higher populations.
Who is to say? Maybe one of the 9/11 hijackers was born because of the food availability in one of those nations. Maybe a cancer breakthrough was made by an individual alive due to him.
Maybe 9/11 would have happened regardless of that one person. Maybe the cancer breakthrough would have been found by another researcher.
He has been lauded, certainly lives comfortably, and western society has heaped praise upon him, on balance.
Chaos theory; butterfly effect.
Good/bad, good/bad actions, good/bad people... it's so tiring doing the "sorting" of all the world
I probably wouldn't pass judgement either, and it only gets murkier when considering stupid or misguided people who sincerely believe they are doing good.
You'd hope that we'd learn from these things - that simply feeding people might not be good in the long term. Living in stable equilibrium with our environment sounds like a sensible foundation.
Pity civilized society is ruled by capitalism, whose profit motive essentially means that everything must be raped and pillaged for short-term profit.
Edit: I have to be afk for a while.
(post is archived)