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The great Genetically Modified Debate

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'The Black Swan' has no relevance in this discussion. The risks of genetic modification have been well studied and ample (if not stifling) government oversight is in place. Also, I don't get the hype about that book. It was a very dry read. Big on anecdotes and low on facts.
 
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Ciber said:
Big on anecdotes and low on facts.
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Talebs work is and should be treated as a work of philosophy with a some mathematical ideas. He uses anecdotes to make harder ideas more accessible.
And he always has his an mathematical explanation in the 'technical appendix.'
 
So, overall, the problem with GMOs isn't a problem with GMOs per se; it's an economic problem, or rather, a problem of economic incentives.

GMOs modified to resist greater amounts of toxic chemicals- pesticides, weed killers, etc- incentivize the increasingly heavier use of those chemicals. These chemicals linger in the environment, harming local wildlife, accumulating in our water, and harming the local ecosystem in countless untold ways. This isn't a problem with GMOs themselves, but it is an externality of our current agricultural system which GMOs exacerbate.

And of course, the problem will still be here even if we were to ban GMOs. Corporate interests would still promote monocropping and overuse of pesticides and weedkiller, would still do all the same things as they do with GMOs with non-GMO crops. So the focus on GMOs is, in a lot of ways, a blinder- it hides the real problems with the agricultural industry behind the question of whether "GMOs" are "natural", and distracts us from the far more serious ecological problems caused by modern agricultural practices.
 
SeptimusMagisto said:
No they don't. Roundup-ready crops need less pesticides than their "natural" counterparts.
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That's not what I recall offhand, but I may have misremembered.

Regardless, even if that's the case, the problem was never really with the GMOs themselves- it's the institutional practices of the agricultural industry which should be under heightened scrutiny, not whether the plant they grow is 'naturally' cultivated via bombardment with radiation or deliberately modified to have certain traits.
 
MrCogmor said:
IIRC there was a guy sued for it but that was because the farmer deliberately used selective breeding with the contaminated crops so that eventually the whole field consisted of GMO derived stock.
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Actually that guy knowingly bought mixed seed from a silo, and drowned the field in round up to kill the non GMO plants. The case had absolutely nothing to do with contamination.
 
SeptimusMagisto said:
No they don't. Roundup-ready crops need less pesticides than their "natural" counterparts.
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Require? Yes. You can use more potent but less total herbicides and pesticides.

End up using less? That depends entirely on the farmer and their propensity to gamble. Roundup tolerant plants are adapted to be hard to kill with herbicides and pesticides so it is tempting for a farmer to just take no chances and use enough to remove the risk elements entirely. Farms don't have the ability to absorb a bad crop without a bailout in most cases.
 
galahad said:
The use genedrives to make mosquitos infertile and reduce mosquito numbers plan has backfired spectacularly as it ended up creating stronger mosquitos. Another reason to be cautious around this sort of application of GMO tech.

futurism.com

Gene-hacking mosquitoes to be infertile backfired spectacularly

"It is the unanticipated outcome that is concerning."
futurism.com futurism.com
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Keep in mind that the study that article is based upon is being challenged.

17 September 2019
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Editor's Note: readers are alerted that the conclusions of this paper are subject to criticisms that are being considered by editors. A further editorial response will follow the resolution of these issues.
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www.nature.com

Transgenic Aedes aegypti Mosquitoes Transfer Genes into a Natural Population - Scientific Reports

In an attempt to control the mosquito-borne diseases yellow fever, dengue, chikungunya, and Zika fevers, a strain of transgenically modified Aedes aegypti mosquitoes containing a dominant lethal gene has been developed by a commercial company, Oxitec Ltd. If lethality is complete, releasing this...
www.nature.com www.nature.com

There's no evidence that these hybrids endanger humans more than the wild mosquitoes or that they'll render Oxitec's strategy ineffective, both the paper's authors and the company agree. "The important thing is something unanticipated happened," says population geneticist Jeffrey Powell of Yale University, who did the study with Brazilian researchers. "When people develop transgenic lines or anything to release, almost all of their information comes from laboratory studies. … Things don't always work out the way you expect."
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Jason Rasgon, an entomologist at Pennsylvania State University in State College who studies insect-borne diseases, says the genetic finding is important. "But I think there are a number of things that are really overhyped and kind of irresponsible about the paper," says Rasgon, who has no financial ties to Oxitec. The authors should have emphasized that they didn't find any mosquitoes carrying Oxitec's transgenes, he says, referring to the two genes, foreign to A. aegypti, introduced to kill offspring and to fluorescently label the mosquitoes as GM. The novel DNA that did show up in the Jacobina population was from the Oxitec mosquitoes' genetic "background"—a cross between strains from Cuba and Mexico.

Rasgon, like Oxitec, takes issue with the paper's assertion that the mixing of genomes "likely" made the population stronger by increasing its genetic variation. ("Failed GM mosquito control experiment may have strengthened wild bugs," read one headline last week.) "We don't know that that's the case here, but we do know that this population is a hybrid of three strains," Powell says. His team, however, didn't test whether the hybrid mosquitoes were more resistant to pesticides or more likely to transmit disease. Neither was true of the Oxitec mosquitoes themselves, Rose says.

Rasgon is concerned that the Scientific Reports paper has fueled unfounded suspicions about GM organisms. Previous proposed Oxitec releases in Florida have faced opposition from residents. "I don't think [the paper] needs to be retracted. But some sort of clarification or a statement or something should be made," he says.
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Science | AAAS

www.sciencemag.org www.sciencemag.org

So, in conclusion, the following corrections need to be made to the article posted above :

1) That the population recovered after 18 months is by design, it's not a failure. The GMO mosquito is designed in such a way that the transgenic elements eliminate themselves from the population within a few generations, which was successfully accomplished. After that, the population recovers.

2) While the population hybridized, this was not unexpected [according to the corporation that released the GMO insects]. The GMO mosquitos are based on a lab strain. In some of the mosquitos offspring, the killer gene is not transferred. This allows a hybrid between the lab strain and the brazilian strain to occur. This hybridization provides no resistance to either the killer gene, pesticides or anything else. There is no evidence of a strengthened population.

3) The killer gene worked. There were no mosquitos who had the gene and lived.

In the end, what seems to have happened is that a research paper was a bit careless with it's speculation (a hybridisation between a lab species and a native mosquito could be dangerous if the lab species is resistant to pesticides, but that would require the corporation to be stupid), and scientifically illiterate journalists jumped onto it because clicks are live, and hysteria is clicks.
 
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The problem woth GMOs isn't GMOs themselves. It's the voracious and insatiable greed of the capitalist entities thay control them.
Like most problems really.
 
Ciber said:
No its not. For all that it makes you feel superior, pessimism is not a replacement for actually understanding how the world works. Corporate entities which are singularly focused upon profit have been historically unstable.
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I understand how the world works well enough to know thay capitalism corrupts and destroys everything it touches.
 
Vindictus said:
So, overall, the problem with GMOs isn't a problem with GMOs per se; it's an economic problem, or rather, a problem of economic incentives.

GMOs modified to resist greater amounts of toxic chemicals- pesticides, weed killers, etc- incentivize the increasingly heavier use of those chemicals. These chemicals linger in the environment, harming local wildlife, accumulating in our water, and harming the local ecosystem in countless untold ways. This isn't a problem with GMOs themselves, but it is an externality of our current agricultural system which GMOs exacerbate.

And of course, the problem will still be here even if we were to ban GMOs. Corporate interests would still promote monocropping and overuse of pesticides and weedkiller, would still do all the same things as they do with GMOs with non-GMO crops. So the focus on GMOs is, in a lot of ways, a blinder- it hides the real problems with the agricultural industry behind the question of whether "GMOs" are "natural", and distracts us from the far more serious ecological problems caused by modern agricultural practices.
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This is an important point to address, and it bears a little more elaboration.

Whether GMOs require more chemicals depends on the strain. Some strains are designed to produce more food, but have a correspondingly large appettite for fertilizer. Some have a high tolerance for certain pesticides, which incentivizes excessive use. Obviously, this can be a huge problem. Chronic overexposure to pesticides have been linked to several unpleasant conditions, and excessive nitrogen and phosphorus in runoff can lead to things like algae blooms.

But other GMOs are designed to function with less fertilizer, or have an built-in resistance to various pests, both of which reduce their dependence on potentially harmful chemicals. Broadly, most GMOs reduce the need for chemicals. Even stuff like salt tolerance, which has very little direct impact on chemical use, means that plants need less direct human intervention to thrive. The simple reality is that chemicals are expensive, and seeds usually aren't, even with a markup. So anything that reduces chemical use is potential path to profit, even if means a bit more up front.

It's one of the handful of times where environmental benefit coincides with profit, which is why blanket resistance to GMOs is so irritating.
 
In the following Scishow video the presenter talks about breeding more efficient Catfish, Sterilizing Oysters and most importantly GMO salmon that are both very efficient and sterile.


These seem like great developments in general. I hope developments like these help reduce our overfishing of the the oceans.
Does anybody else have an opinion on this 'fishy business'?
 
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Not a fan of seafood. Would sooner go vegetarian. Unfortunately in the long run it is probably the most efficient way to farm meat.
 
Man if a product labeled itself as "Extra-GMO" instead of GMO free , I think they would make a lot of money from the Pro GMO people

"Extra GMO because it's better than spraying poison on your food, like the non-gmo"
 
Zedalb said:
Man if a product labeled itself as "Extra-GMO" instead of GMO free , I think they would make a lot of money from the Pro GMO people

"Extra GMO because it's better than spraying poison on your food, like the non-gmo"
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At this point I'm thinking we should make GMOs mandatory to prevent the unnecessary production of inferior food that takes more resources to produce.
 
firefossil said:
Most of the issue with GMOs isn't that they'd bad, but that we live in a flaccid cyberpunk dystopia, where GMOs are developed and sold by the same ethically bankrupt big businesses that addict people to opiates, dump toxic waste into rivers, and otherwise show zero regard (and no accountability) for silly things like consequences.
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Honestly, I don't buy this. Megacorps do this in literally every industry, corporations being amoral profit-maximizing constructs is just as true in Chocolate as GMO's. And yet the latter has a hysteria about them that the former simply do not have.

Anti-corporate sentiment simply isn't enough to explain it, rejection of science, the naturalistic fallacy, other irrationalisms is a far better explanation.
 
Fourthspartan56 said:
Honestly, I don't buy this. Megacorps do this in literally every industry, corporations being amoral profit-maximizing constructs is just as true in Chocolate as GMO's. And yet the latter has a hysteria about them that the former simply do not have.

Anti-corporate sentiment simply isn't enough to explain it, rejection of science, the naturalistic fallacy, other irrationalisms is a far better explanation.
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There's an element of truth though. The problems that people have with GMOs are the result of the megacorps. Their argument fails however because people somehow only care about that problem when it's a GMO.

Clearfield crops are a clear example. GMO's are often criticized with claims that they allow excessive pesticide use. Clearfield crops is a non-GMO that provides similar pesticide resistance. It fulfills the same goal, but gets none of the controversy.
 
Fourthspartan56 said:
Honestly, I don't buy this. Megacorps do this in literally every industry, corporations being amoral profit-maximizing constructs is just as true in Chocolate as GMO's. And yet the latter has a hysteria about them that the former simply do not have.

Anti-corporate sentiment simply isn't enough to explain it, rejection of science, the naturalistic fallacy, other irrationalisms is a far better explanation.
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Because if a company sells a product that causes problems, you can just recall that product. If a company manufactures a self-replicating organism that causes problems, you cannot.

To me the most obvious reference point for GMOs going wrong is the Africanized honey bee, where scientists decided to crossbeed a belligerent but honey prolific species of bee with a docile yet honey lacking bee, hoping to get a docile and honey prolific bee. Instead they got a belligerent and honey lacking bee, which subsequently escaped quarantine, spread to all sorts of places outside of Africa, and killed over a 1000 humans in addition to being a general terror to both humans, livestock, and pets alike.

Or I could talk about all the times humans have spread invasive species that wreck ecosystems, but then I'd be talking all day. Heck there are invasive species out there that were brought in to stop the previous invasive species. And on the matter of breeding, humanity has an unfortunate tendency to think more in terms of maximum immediate profit over what is most beneficial to the ecosystem as a whole. Genetic engineering simply provides new avenues for them to fuck these things up.

I mean one thing that's already been theorized about is the possibility of scientists creating a plastic-eating bacteria, or cultivating one that is already developing. There are ample reasons to do it, given the massive amounts of plastic trash and the effects it has on the environment. But if it gets out of hand, you could end up with the bacteria simply eating all plastic across human civilization, thus undermining the whole reason why we use plastic in the first place, and having disastrous effects on our infrastructure that is currently reliant on plastic. That's the sort of apocalyptic scenario that goes far beyond "Boeing makes plane that falls down" or even "idiots breed shitlord species, then spread it to new continents".
 
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10ebbor10 said:
There's an element of truth though. The problems that people have with GMOs are the result of the megacorps. Their argument fails however because people somehow only care about that problem when it's a GMO.

Clearfield crops are a clear example. GMO's are often criticized with claims that they allow excessive pesticide use. Clearfield crops is a non-GMO that provides similar pesticide resistance. It fulfills the same goal, but gets none of the controversy.
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This doesn't really address my point, multinationals literally fund warlords and right-wing death squads just to make sure they still have bananas to sell and yet there is no outcry against bananas.

Almost as if people don't care that much about the horrible things pretty much every major corporation does if we like the product :thonk:
 
firefossil said:
Because if a company sells a product that causes problems, you can just recall that product. If a company manufactures a self-replicating organism that causes problems, you cannot.

To me the most obvious reference point for GMOs going wrong is the Africanized honey bee, where scientists decided to crossbeed a belligerent but honey prolific species of bee with a docile yet honey lacking bee, hoping to get a docile and honey prolific bee. Instead they got a belligerent and honey lacking bee, which subsequently escaped quarantine, spread to all sorts of places outside of Africa, and killed over a 1000 humans in addition to being a general terror to both humans, livestock, and pets alike.

Or I could talk about all the times humans have spread invasive species that wreck ecosystems, but then I'd be talking all day. Heck there are invasive species out there that were brought in to stop the previous invasive species. And on the matter of breeding, humanity has an unfortunate tendency to think more in terms of maximum immediate profit over what is most beneficial to the ecosystem as a whole. Genetic engineering simply provides new avenues for them to fuck these things up.

I mean one thing that's already been theorized about is the possibility of scientists creating a plastic-eating bacteria, or cultivating one that is already developing. There are ample reasons to do it, given the massive amounts of plastic trash and the effects it has on the environment. But if it gets out of hand, you could end up with the bacteria simply eating all plastic across human civilization, thus undermining the whole reason why we use plastic in the first place, and having disastrous effects on our infrastructure that is currently reliant on plastic. That's the sort of apocalyptic scenario that goes far beyond "Boeing makes plane that falls down" or even "idiots breed shitlord species, then spread it to new continents".
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The weird thing is. All of the examples you've given here are not GMO's.

The africanized honeybee is a hybrid.
Invasive species are just ordinary species.
The plastic eating bacteria was natural, and then enzyme was mutated through X-ray exposure.

You're proving @Fourthspartan56 's point. Your examples of risk did not happen with GMO, yet the "criticism" is focused on GMO, and ignores the other elements entirely.
 
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