Atomic Gardening

> plant a bunch of seedlings to get the plant you're looking for

This happens anyway, based on my understanding of fruit tree breeding at US land-grant universities.

>It always amuses me to find that people are against GMO foods yet almost everything we eat is GMO depending on how you define it.

What I find problematic about many "anti-progress" stances is the (very false) mythos around a return to a purer past when we didn't do things in such supposedly "corrupt" ways. That stance is certainly prevalent in much of the anti-GMO following but I would hesitate to tar over it all with the same brush.

The second falsity is that the primary concern with GMO is individual human health.

Much of the more informed anti-GMO stances consist of the following two views:

1. The view that the past practices you mention in your comment were damaging to ecosystems and while the horse has bolted with many of the products of those packages (and reaping the fruits of those now is not too problematic) the negative impacts of those practices can be learned from to avoid future damage.

2. That it's a nuanced topic fundamentally about making informed decisions about the lifecycle impact of GMO based on current scientific knowledge rather than a blanket dogmatic opposition to the concept as a whole.

The second point in particular is absolutely not taken into consideration in current GMO practices: widespread corruption and disregard for impact analyses is well documented.

The Rio red variety was not developed in 2007. It was developed in the 1980s, in, you guessed it: Rio, Brazil. When I first heard about this some handful of years ago I was naturally curious about how a researcher in Rio in the 1980s had access to thermal neutrons without a fission reactor. After a lot of reference digging and discussion on physics forums we came to the conclusion it was most likely a penning trap style fusor with some thick moderator. The Mars Curiosity rover also had/has a penning style trap for generating neutrons to probe for underground water sources.

> It always amuses me to find that people are against GMO foods yet almost everything we eat is GMO depending on how you define it.

> Almost every crop and livestock has been genetically modified through selective breeding (domestication).

I agree with your broader point that much of what we eat is GMO. But isn't selective breeding a categorically different process of modifying an organism? My understanding is that selective breeding starts with two things that we already are familiar with, and tries to maximize or minimize some characteristic in the next generation via traditional reproduction. On the other hand, a modern definition of GMO includes genetic engineering -- manipulating DNA directly using technology.

Is it naive to worry that the latter process might introduce unexpected and potentially harmful characteristics, in ways that the former wouldn't? Additionally, if selective breeding happens slowly over generations, it seems to me that it would allow us to more carefully track how the modification of particular traits affects the surrounding ecology of the organism.

I'm in your boat. Gene's are letters in a story. To say "That's a salmon gene! It doesn't belong in my tomato!" is puzzling, like "That letter belongs to another book! Keep it out of this book!"

Anyway, good ol' paleo food was whatever nature provided, most of what was happy to kill you. Humans tamed 1000's of plants over 50,000 years changing them beyond recognition so they wouldn't hurt us with alkalis and poisons. And so the tasty bits were bigger and easier to get at. All by genetics.

Sure we can do it faster now. But we're aware of what we're doing. Grandparents with crossbred tomato didn't have any idea if she was reintroducing a poison or raising the acidity to dangerous levels. They were blundering in the dark.

I see no problem with turning on the light, and moving confidently.