I don't understand why people distrust GMOs. GMOs make food production more efficient; what's bad about that?
Mark Lynas, environmentalist who opposed GMOs, admits he was wrong.
51–60 of 85 posts
Re: Mark Lynas, environmentalist who opposed GMOs, admits he was wrong.
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a huge middle ground between "proven safe" and "proven unsafe". People in this debate seem to forget that. Personally, I want pretty good evidence that something is safe before putting it in my body. If the mere lack of evidence that it's unsafe is sufficient for you, well, that's your choice.
You can never prove something is safe. The only indication that something is safe is lack of evidence of unsafety multiplied by time. What would be evidence for you that something is safe enough to put into your body?
Well, if a population of several thousand humans had been eating it for 50 years without evident ill effect, I suppose that would be more or less good enough.
In any discussion of risk it is important to remember the value to be obtained. I might take a drug with known dangerous side effects on the chance it would cure a disease from which I suffered. But to me, the only possible benefit of eating a GMO food is that it would be somewhat cheaper than something else I could eat. For some people, that might be a good enough reason. For me, it's not.
Re: Mark Lynas, environmentalist who opposed GMOs, admits he was wrong.
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>I'm making a Talebian argument here. Nature is a VERY complex system. When we mess with it, we make incremental visible gains, and run the risk of large, invisible losses. I've never understood this argument. It basically amounts to "yes, there are advantages to GMOs, but we haven't found any disadvantages yet, therefore they are unsafe!" This is basically the equivalent of early seafarers being afraid of uncharted…
I've never understood this argument. It basically amounts to "yes, there are advantages to GMOs, but we haven't found any disadvantages yet, therefore they are unsafe!" You've got the wrong thing after "therefore". The argument you're trying to paraphrase would probably advocate the Precautionary Principle instead: "... if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, i…
I never understood how the Precautionary Principle wasn't just Pascal's Wager and subject to the same logical problems.
Re: Mark Lynas, environmentalist who opposed GMOs, admits he was wrong.
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just because you never heard of him doesn't mean the kings in Africa who banned GMOs have not.
What evidence is there that they have? This person is not the cult leader he claims to be. These kings in Africa you mention generically with no specifics, perhaps they read journals? Even if it is established these scores of kings each met with this fellow personally, went elephant or cheetah hunting together and had some laughs, it indicates little about the motivations of these supposed and possibly fictional king…
Are you saying that the pressures from people like this aren't causing California counties to ban GMOs? I think it's a great thing that someone who has been focusing on this stuff for 16 years is finally coming to terms with the consequences of his writings and actions. The fact that one person turned around is a good sign, IMO.
Yes, much ink has been spilled about the dangers of GM soy and soy in general. The issue that the article suggests is that people not only form opinions on food based off of no evidence, but even go so far as to expound their influence in matters that are not trivial. It's easy for Americans to pass up food, but a kid who is starving in Africa and eating Cow dung isn't given this option, and starving these children based on belief and no science is just morally wrong.
I'm looking up some of those articles as well. The one point of interest, for those who are only looking at the titles and seeing "danger," this is from the abstract from Burns, J.M.:
The results of the 13-week subchronic feeding study show that rats fed diets containing corn event MON 863 grain responded similarly to rats fed diets containing the nontransgenic control LH82 x A634 grain and diets containing grain from reference control nontransgenic commercial corn varieties. There were no test article-related changes based on the evaluation of survival, clinical signs, body weights, body weight changes, food consumption, clinical pathology, organ weights, and macroscopic and microscopic pathology.
So, thank you for showing some balance in your suggested readings. This stuff is really complicated and I hope people like you lead the charge in the future of all of the world's food choices. Unfortunately, I don't think this will happen and we'll be fed BS by make-believers and lawyers.
Re: Mark Lynas, environmentalist who opposed GMOs, admits he was wrong.
#55I think that the real problem is the false dichotomy between 'all GMOs are bad' and 'all GMOs are good'. There is clearly a middle path - 'some GMOs are safe, and some aren't, and whether release is acceptable depends on the organisms, the genes, the methods used, and the level of testing done'. I don't think putting herbicide resistance genes into plant species that don't already have them is a very good idea, becau…
The unconditional opposition to GM food takes scrutiny away from selective breeding, which may itself be harmful in some instances.
Re: Mark Lynas, environmentalist who opposed GMOs, admits he was wrong.
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious what sort of realistic disaster scenario you think might occur due to cross-species gene transfer (and for that matter, purely synthetic genes) in GMOs, and how the existing safeguards are inadequate against it. Normally I'm against FUD, but please, go nuts, so long as there's a reasonable chance of it occurring (i.e. we're not talking about a mad scientist who wants to create man-eating plants)
Weed-killer resistance transfers to a weed, helping boost it to invasive species? Some mutation makes crop more vulnerable to a particular plant virus, destroying 80% of that crop in EU or US? A huge multinational wants to include "TERMINATOR GENES" in their crops to make sure the cropped seed cannot grow; environmentalists freak out at the name and oppose that; the multinational doesn't include that gene but now ins…
> Weed-killer resistance transfers to a weed, helping boost it to invasive species?
Cannot happen. If inter-plant gene transfer was that simple, it would already be an agricultural practice.
A weed-killer resistant species becoming a weed is something to consider though.
> Some mutation makes crop more vulnerable to a particular plant virus, destroying 80% of that crop in EU or US?
No. A vulnerable crop would not have a chance to become 80% of the crop share before dying out.
Re: Mark Lynas, environmentalist who opposed GMOs, admits he was wrong.
#57If he's changed his mind based on facts, then I'm happy for him. However, the implications of Monsanto's Terminator seed technology (DRM for plants) is so sweeping and, frankly, frightening that whatever time society wasted due to the anti-GMO activism was worth it. Does anyone really think that if we didn't make a stink about GMO that they wouldn't have gone full steam ahead? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic…
Uh... what implications would those be? Sterile hybrids of plants where the offspring of hybrids are generally undesirable anyway? DRM for computers is bad because the only way for it to work is to ban computers as we know them and replace them with something fundamentally broken. There really isn't a plant equivalent.
Farmers who reuse seed from last season losing that ability. Monopolization of seed production increasing food costs rather than reducing costs as proponents claim. Monopolization of seed production leading to reduced biodiversity of food crops due to typical economic strategies used to remove competitors. Rent-seeking behaviors. Food security fragility due to dependence on monocultures.
We can live without the latest DRM'd TV shows. We can't live without food.
Re: Mark Lynas, environmentalist who opposed GMOs, admits he was wrong.
#58His views are insubstantial. His main argument is that his previous ad hominem positions were not sufficient to condemn GMOs (correct) and that GMOs haven't caused any problems yet. He has not presented evidence that GMO's are safe. He has two main arguments: 1. Trial and error crossbreeding affects entire genes. 2. Viruses sometimes spread genes from one organism to another. First, trial and error crossbreeding isn'…
> Current techniques may be more risky, but generally speaking it should be hard for plants to produce a horrid mutation based on natural interbreeding mechanisms. What about the (widespread) practice of mutation breeding? [1] Blasting seeds with X-rays and gamma rays in an attempt to generate new cultivars is a genetic wrecking ball compared to performing genetic engineering. Conventional breeding has given us plent…
Indeed .. My honors project was genetically modefying a common pastural legume to produce anti-RNAs of a specific virus. It produced resistance but 2 or 3 generations down the line, the genes were still there but the RNAs weren't. Something was stopping them being expressed. Only 1 year so couldn't delve deeper but it was interesting none the less.
Re: Mark Lynas, environmentalist who opposed GMOs, admits he was wrong.
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
The world doesn't face a food shortage. We already have enough food. We just don't distribute it. One of the big concerns is micronutrients in Asia. We don't need GMOd crops for vitamin and mineral supplementation.
> The world doesn't face a food shortage. We already have enough food due to GMOs...
No.
Re: Mark Lynas, environmentalist who opposed GMOs, admits he was wrong.
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Weed-killer resistance transfers to a weed, helping boost it to invasive species? Some mutation makes crop more vulnerable to a particular plant virus, destroying 80% of that crop in EU or US? A huge multinational wants to include "TERMINATOR GENES" in their crops to make sure the cropped seed cannot grow; environmentalists freak out at the name and oppose that; the multinational doesn't include that gene but now ins…
> Weed-killer resistance transfers to a weed, helping boost it to invasive species? Cannot happen. If inter-plant gene transfer was that simple, it would already be an agricultural practice. A weed-killer resistant species becoming a weed is something to consider though. > Some mutation makes crop more vulnerable to a particular plant virus, destroying 80% of that crop in EU or US? No. A vulnerable crop would not hav…
> No. A vulnerable crop would not have a chance to become 80% of the crop share before dying out.
80% is sci-fi hyperbole. But it's easy to see that monoculture could still be as much of a problem with GMO as without it.
Dutch Elm disease managed to kill 40% of Elm trees in Europe during the first big outbreak, and at least 66% in the UK during the second outbreak. (Maybe 25 million trees out of maybe 30 million trees in the UK).
Irish potato famine was caused by potato blight.
About half the world's crop of bananas is destroyed each year because of disease caused by monoculture growing.