Actually, if the plant carries resistance to an herbicide not found in nature (Roundup), then natural selection will favor eliminating the gene and reversion to wild type.
Are you familiar with work done on deleterious mutations (e.g. Fishery effect) in captive populations? There is huge problem in fish farming where maladaptive genes tend to spread to entire population within only couple generations.
Maladaptive genes do not spread into a population. That’s pretty basic evolutionary biology. In a fishery, there is less selective pressure. Thus, fish carrying genes that would kill them in the wild might be able to survive in a fishery. In that case, the gene is not maladaptive as long as the fish is in captivity. But if those carriers ever return to the wild, the effect would disappear.
The point would be where you actually have a real, concrete danger that you are afraid of.
As it stands, you have no actual things which you are afraid of. You’re just saying that GMO crops could somehow be dangerous, in a way that could never happen through other traditional means. And that in order to be used, those crops would need to be “tested”.
You can’t test a non-existent hypothesis. Your argument is not scientific, and is instead based upon irrational fears.
I’m a computer programmer and my wife is a molecular biologist, and we are both firmly against GM food.
Do you have a scientific basis for your position? That GM food does something bad?
There seems to be some fear that, somehow, something like GM wheat would just spread over the entire countryside, and we’d never be able to get rid of it. Even improved wheat isn’t anywhere close to as hearty as non-domestic flora. You need to work hard to grow food crops. That’s kind of the point with things like round-up resistant wheat. It lets you spray roundup onto the wheat and not kill it, in order to kill all the natural flora which would normally outcompete and kill the wheat.
Nope. I have a natural, and perfectly rational sense of precaution and conservatism when it comes to food. Why? because food is the only product I actually put IN my body. If I buy a TV that turns out to be faulty, I can bin it and buy a new TV. If I eat food that turns out to be faulty…well I’m possibly kinda fucked.
Now given that we can already grow potatoes, tomatoes, wheat et al, which is tasty and has been shown over many generations to be safe, I think its sensible for me to stick with that, rather than the latest profit-maximising product from monsanto.
It would give me more confidence in GM food if the GM lobby didn’t actively campaign to PREVENT me knowing food was GM. They clearly want to take away my right to decide what food I consume.
Feel free to eat GM everything, don’t try and trick me into eating it too.
If I eat food that turns out to be faulty…well I’m possibly kinda fucked.
Do you have any reason to believe that GMO food is faulty? Given that it’s tested for human consumption just like all the other food you eat?
Now given that we can already grow potatoes, tomatoes, wheat et al, which is tasty and has been shown over many generations to be safe, I think its sensible for me to stick with that, rather than the latest profit-maximising product from monsanto.
But you are ok with all of the other products used in the production of that food? Do you think you know what goes into your food? Unless you are growing it yourself, I strongly suspect that you don’t. You just assume it’s fine, while you assume that GMO is bad, but you don’t really have much reason for either of those beliefs, do you?
It would give me more confidence in GM food if the GM lobby didn’t actively campaign to PREVENT me knowing food was GM. They clearly want to take away my right to decide what food I consume.
I don’t tend to have a problem with labeling food, although I understand why they may be afraid of such a thing given that many people have been convinced by other corporations that GMO foods are bad, despite no scientific evidence to suggest such a thing.
I mean, by your own admission, you have no scientific reason to believe GMO food will hurt you. And you are apparently a fairly scientifically minded person. Hell, in many cases, GMO foods offer the promise of HEALTHIER foods which contain less toxins from things like pesticides, since you can produce plants which produce a very small dose themselves which is much more effective since it’s in the plant… or can reduce the amounts of pesticides released into the environment by not requiring spraying of pesticides on the fields. These things could actually benefit your health, but you discount them out of hand because “GMO is bad.”
Its my right to decide what I eat. If GM was so great, then the billion dollar monsanto corporation should be putting big stickers on packets of GM flour saying GM! premium! Genetically modified for you! Rather than actually lobbying hard to be exempt from even labeling in tiny letters that it is GM.
You have a blind trust in corporations to put anything on a shelf and you will eat it. I do not.
Newsflash: a lot of food seems healthy for years until finally the effects show through. The UK has had its fair share of food scandals. Even recently, there was a scandal of horsemeat being sold as beef. If that can get through the checks, then excuse me if I don’t put my health in the hands of a food safety check that will be sporadic at best and useless at worst.
I’m happy for someone else to be a guinea pig for cutting edge scientific guesswork regarding genes. You go right ahead dude. Just leave me out of it. And if you think currently genetic modification is anything other than trial and error guesswork…well you are flat out wrong.
It’s amazing like, in fact, the arguments for homoeopathy.
Yes, you keep arguing that it needs labelling for no good reason, simply to let you create moral panics to drive out cheaper food. You oppose things like Golden Rice even when the industry bends over backwards to deal with the objections, you’re simply frightened of science.
Yes, you can choose to eat only “legacy” foods and grains, at great expense. Or you can deal with the fact things like hexapolid wheat are profoundly unnatural, and require chemical reactivation of fertility. Your choice!
Uh-huh. You know those “virus” things? The large subset which target DNA?
Lolz! is all i can offer this i’m afraid Starlight. Let’s completely ignore that it needs labeling for very good reasons, oh i don’t know, say like all the other labeling we have on food? It’s a longshot i know. You do know i started and take part in the ‘Show why science is awesome’ thread? GM is just not the type of science i agree is a universal good thing, infact it is in the ballpark of the type of science that i consider dangerous and has all the potential to be used for very bad things. Not all science is good, but i think you know that and are just looking for a trolly good time.
Science-Knowledge is neutral, so by extension of this principle genetic modification is not dangerous or evil. Application of genetic engineering to a humanity’s food supply without taking proper due diligence is dangerous. Simple fact that untested GM wheat was found in Oregon shows that precautions weren’t followed. “This wheat is not harmful” is irrelevant - simple fact that it was found in the wild is enough to raise all kinds of red flags.
In medicine they call it “near miss”. Nobody was hurt. This time.
As to food labeling for GM - I’m pro labeling. I believe informed consumer choice should drive markets - if there is a demand for GM food at a certain price point, then people will buy it.
Disagree all you want, but estimates are that population will stall out around 10 Billion, so close enough. I see that further down the thread you’re advocating controlling population growth by starvation? That’s . . . a unique idea. Good luck with that.
While I can understand it could be fun to paint others with a grotesque caricature, there more nuance to my position than that.
We have enough food supply to feed existing population, but very little in terms of reserves. As a result our existing food supply is not robust enough for everyone to survive systemic disruptions (10 year drought, new strain of fungus/virus), but at least it is robust enough for food-producing nations.
One of the reasons I oppose reckless genetic engineering of food supply in persuit of increased yields is because it has a potential to increase fragility of our food supply. Did you know that subsistence farmers in Africa cannot grow corn (modern varieties that produce increased yields take too much water and are not robust enough) and had to switch to other crops?
So this brings us to “starvation” point. Currently we can feed X people, if bad things happen X/4 die of starvation. If we push to feed 2X people, if bad things happen 2X/2 people die.
That is, it is not enough to just feed people. You have to have enough systemic robustness that you can keep feeding people when things go wrong.
History is full of examples where food disruptions caused empires to fall - it happened in Egypt, with Maya, Dark Ages in Europe… why are you in a hurry to add Western Civilization to this list?
Could you define what due-dilligence looks like? You are never, ever going to prove GM food is definitely safe, but you can build up increasing amounts evidence to support (or oppose) a claim of safety. So how do you decide what’s enough? A clinical trials pipeline similar to the drug industry? Or something different?
Timex in all his incoherent ramblings had one good point - it isn’t possible to prove negative. Thesper, I am by no means an expert in this field, but I do realize that there is a need for both liability (to internalize incentives for due diligence) and regulatory oversight (to externalize incentives for due diligence). There are number of concerns that have to be addressed in my mind. They are: is it safe for human consumption and stay that way for X generations, is application of GM organism going to negatively impact ecosystem, is GM plant less robust than its unmodified equivalent, and if so to what degree/situations.
I think drug industry-like clinical trials are excessive and inadequate at the same time. Excessive in terms of human safety due to consumption, inadequate in terms of global impact.
Currently GM are only after higher yields and product tie-ins (e.g. roundup resistance). Nobody investigating these other questions, and nobody is seriously considering that mass extinction of GM crops due to unintentionally introduced susceptibility to something naturally-occurring will also result in mess extinction of humans due to starvation.
Yes, just like homeopathy. After all, there MUST be something special about GM food products, even though it can’t be detected, the makeup being identical. I mean, magic!
There is absolutely no reason to label except as an attempt to make GM specifically economically unviable. And of course that also applies to medicine.
That actually shows a significant ignorance of the thing you are railing against.
Increased yield is a goal to be sure – more food produced per acre, so you need less cleared land to feed the same number of people. Pest and disease control is almost as big in the GMO “to-do” list though – make the plant itself resistant to blights and bugs and you reduce or eliminate the need for pesticides, fungicides, and othericides; this makes it cheaper for the farmer to produce the crop, keeps the chemicals out of the runoff, reduces the “collateral damage” to non-targeted animals, and as an incidental side-effect reduces the pollution that would have been generated by the delivery trucks and sprayers.
One that I find interesting is GMO crops that do nitrogen-fixing: one of the big components of the “green revolution” last century was the realization that many crops (and most cereals?) suck nitrogen out of the soil, and by artificially adding nitrogen back in you don’t need to let land lay fallow or rotate less-advantageous crops into those fields every other season. GMO crops can fix some of the extracted nitrogen into the plants’ roots, which are them plowed under and make the nitrogen available for the next planting. This again makes it cheaper for the farmer since she’ll need less fertilizer and/or can reuse the same fields rather than doubling the farm’s area… and again, you don’t need to burn the gas to deliver and spread the nitrogen.
Then of course you can go with the oft-cited golden rice example. Here’s a GM crop that was designed specifically to save lives by preventing malnutrition. Of course, if you believe that one of the great evils of GMO is that it allows more people to live where they otherwise would have died, I guess you could put that in the “con” column.
