Normal crops are optimized by evolution for survival. GMO crops optimized for yield. Since we are not at the point where we can improve cellular machinery, it follows that re-prioritizing plants for yield will take finite resources away from survival.
No it does not, that is non-sequitur.
P1. Normal crops are optimized for survival (Agree/Disagree)
P2. GMO crops optimized for other things, like yield (Agree/Disagree)
P3. Improving plant efficiency via adjustments to cellular machinery is beyond our technological abilities. (Agree/Disagree)
P(s1). (Suppressed) There are finite and similar resources available to any given plant (Agree/Disagree)
© Therefore, GMO plants are less optimized for survival than regular crops.
Meh. A good evolutionary biologist would disagree with #1 right off the bat. Organisms are generally adapted for an environmental niche; that may or may not allow them to compete better than their peers in that same niche in this particular snapshot in time. There’s no such thing as a generic “optimized for survival”, it’s a meaningless term.
Also, as soon as you become a “crop” you are in a symbiotic relationship anyway, so your species’ survival quickly become dependent on your hosts’ ability to improve and sustain the crops’ survival – whether the host be humans or leaf-cutter ants.
Actually, Sinj, that’s an argument for using them while maintaining a legacy crop stock, since you’re arguing they won’t spread far beyond deliberate farming.
Yes, long-term GMO crops won’t spread beyond deliberate farming. There is no such short-term guarantee, and short-term spread of GMO organisms and displacement of natural ecosystems, followed by mass extinction of said GMO organisms, followed by global food disruption is one of my concerns.
If you take sufficiently long-term view not even moon falling down on earth would kill off life. I don’t think I have to explain detrimental effects such event would have on humanity.
Point taken. Being crop is a niche.
So by your argument I cannot have a GMO that is both higher yield and more survivable?
What if a GMO has a modified gene to increase nutrient intake? I now have a system with a higher potential energy level capable of both higher yield and better survivability than non-GMO. Therefore (C) is non-sequitur in your argument example.
Look, at the end of the day, you (and I) have no idea about how GMO plants are put together, the degree to which we can control/improve/alter plant processes, or the relationship that the many individual plant processes have between energy use and overall efficiency, yet you are trying to make sweeping generalised statements and correlations between yield (usually a specific measurable) and survivability (a broad less measurable term as it is highly dependent on the specific environmental conditions). Don’t presume to make stupid statements like that unless you back it up with your chemical biologist or geneticist credentials.
So next year you plant the legacy crop. Solved. It’s not like there hasn’t been failure of artificially-bred strains of crops before!
P(s1). (Suppressed) There are finite and similar resources available to any given plant (Agree/Disagree)
This is the one you’re going to have to convince people of. What evidence do you have that plant evolution/modification is a zero-sum game?
Complete nonsense for virtually any domesticated plant/animal.
Yes, it’s actually pretty obvious domesticated crops are bred for yield (even keeping in mind these graphs include agronomic advances).
Regardless of the main subject, those are some pretty amazing graphs.
No, normal crops are optimised for yield by selective breeding.
An old article, very much worth bringing up again.
http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/19/greens-and-hunger/
Shinji, your argument is nonsensical. You are simultaneously arguing that GMO crops can’t survive, and that they will crowd out all other plants in the ecosystem.
Essentially every single thing you are saying about this topic is incorrect. You are merely illustrating that your position is founded in profound ignorance.
Timex, here is a hypothetical example:
A genetically modified plan that designed to provide optimal yields cross pollinates with ‘natural’ plants and propagates its genes across all foodstock. Later it is discovered that a frog gene that was spliced in also makes it vulnerable to a frog virus. All crops are affected and suffer catastrophic failure. Humanity starves, with billions dead, while we rebuild our plant seed stock from vaults.
In this case GMO crops both take over food ecosystem and can’t survive. These are not contradicting because “crowd out” and “die off” are not on the same time scale. Unfortunately feeding humanity has to work on all time scales.
A genetically modified plan that designed to provide optimal yields cross pollinates with ‘natural’ plants and propagates its genes across all foodstock. Later it is discovered that a frog gene that was spliced in also makes it vulnerable to a frog virus. All crops are affected and suffer catastrophic failure. Humanity starves, with billions dead, while we rebuild our plant seed stock from vaults.
Your hypothetical example is nonsensical.
I can just as easily conjure up a hypothetical example where some other magical mystery virus kills all the current wheat crops, but the amazing frog wheat is spared from contagion and survives! Thus, WE MUST GROW GMO CROPS IN ORDER TO SAVE HUMANITY!
In this case GMO crops both take over food ecosystem and can’t survive. These are not contradicting because “crowd out” and “die off” are not on the same time scale. Unfortunately feeding humanity has to work on all time scales.
Your “time scale” is merely an imagined danger at some point in the future. This is merely an argument for the benefits of genetic diversity, and has absolutely nothing at all to do with genetic modification of food.
It is imaginary danger is the same sense that a gun is always imagined to be loaded. It is too dangerous to assume otherwise, so you always check.
My imaginary scenario is just as likely as yours though, that the increased genetic diversity from GMO crops would allow us to avoid a wheat plague that kills the entire food source.
So that makes your imagined scenario totally moot. It does not matter. It’s just fearmongering on your part.
It’s plain idiotic. There’s a reason seedstocks of legacy crops are kept.