why are we genetically altering what is here

Discussion in 'Science' started by Doc Dred, Dec 9, 2013.

  1. ringotuna

    ringotuna Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    There is no con, and your stance is wrong. The food produce we consume today, as I said is the product of human manipulation. What nature provided may have been sufficient when the worlds population consisted of a few hundred thousand nomadic hunter gatherers to eek out an existence but it could not possibly sustain the worlds population today.
    Take corn for example. In the 30’s average US corn yields were between 20 & 40 bu/acre. Today, through advances in breeding, and farming practices the same farms are yielding 160 bu/acre. Understand that these advancements are a direct result of human intervention.

    Please provide a link to the projects you mentioned. (Splicing scorpion genes into corn so birds and insects fear it, & Fish genes in apples)
    Are you a plant breeder? You don’t appear to know anything about it. You and the other victims of the professional propagandists can call it what you like but since you’ve shown you don’t know the difference between breeding, grafting, and pruning you’re hardly qualified to tell me that genetic engineering is not a continuation of breeding.

    “Some hormone or something”? Gee Doc, you’re really out in front of the issue, aren’t ya.

    You’ve already been corrected on this.

    How is this relevant to humans interfering with natures “perfect” food?

    Improvements in yield, nutritional value, farming efficiency, production costs, pesticide use reduction, do not come under the category of “just because science can.”

    Anecdotes are a poor counter argument to scientific study.

    http://www.geneticliteracyproject.o...ost-analyzed-subject-in-science/#.UqwbitGA2AI

    Science IS good, but like anything else, if you’re going to challenge it you should do so from a position of knowledge. And since you lack that knowledge you should really pay attention and learn from those who do. That’s just common sense.

    I enjoy a good grass fed steak myself.
    Nature gave us "perfect" chicken pox, Human intervention gave us varicella vaccine.
     
  2. tecoyah

    tecoyah Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Humankind has been manipulating our food for many thousands of years...which is probably why we multiplied so damn much:

    "The history of modern-day maize begins at the dawn of human agriculture, about 10,000 years ago. Ancient farmers in what is now Mexico took the first steps in domesticating maize when they simply chose which kernels (seeds) to plant. These farmers noticed that not all plants were the same. Some plants may have grown larger than others, or maybe some kernels tasted better or were easier to grind. The farmers saved kernels from plants with desirable characteristics and planted them for the next season's harvest. This process is known as selective breeding or artificial selection. Maize cobs became larger over time, with more rows of kernels, eventually taking on the form of modern maize. "

    http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/variation/corn/
     
  3. politicalcenter

    politicalcenter Well-Known Member

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    When you consider that no ill effects in humans has been reported due to GM crops and the savings in fuel and insectesides is substantial it is a boon to mankind. The BT pesticide is natural bacteria that is not a danger to our ecosystem (though it may harm bees) and much safer than the chemicals (that kill bees) that were formally used to control pests.

    GM corn can be drilled into the soil with little disturbance to the soil keeping the soil where it belongs and out of lakes and streams. The crop residues also stay in the field and the organic matter helps improve soil quality while the roots from the resisdue also hold the soil where it belongs in the field.

    If you are concerned about the environment GM crops are a benefit and a lot of the nasty produce you find in local stores could be a result of picking fruit before it is ripe and being gassed before shipping so it has a longer shelf life. And meat can be ruined by stress at slaughter rather than what it is fed...but feed does effect meat quality...that is why I am raising acorn finished pigs. Besides the acorns are free.

    - - - Updated - - -

    When you consider that no ill effects in humans has been reported due to GM crops and the savings in fuel and insectesides is substantial it is a boon to mankind. The BT pesticide is natural bacteria that is not a danger to our ecosystem (though it may harm bees) and much safer than the chemicals (that kill bees) that were formally used to control pests.

    GM corn can be drilled into the soil with little disturbance to the soil keeping the soil where it belongs and out of lakes and streams. The crop residues also stay in the field and the organic matter helps improve soil quality while the roots from the resisdue also hold the soil where it belongs in the field.

    If you are concerned about the environment GM crops are a benefit and a lot of the nasty produce you find in local stores could be a result of picking fruit before it is ripe and being gassed before shipping so it has a longer shelf life. And meat can be ruined by stress at slaughter rather than what it is fed...but feed does effect meat quality...that is why I am raising acorn finished pigs. Besides the acorns are free.
     
  4. goober

    goober New Member

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    It's all about Malthus, and the dismal science.
    Malthus looked at how much food could be grown on an acre, how many acres could be cultivated, and how many people that food would feed
    and that was the most people there could be on the earth. There are like ten or twenty times that many people now, because the technology of producing food produces more and more food. Plows, draught animals, fertilizer, pesticide, tractors, combines and now, genetic manipulation.
    It's all part of doing what is necessary to feed the people.
     
  5. GlobalCitizen

    GlobalCitizen Well-Known Member

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    I don't have as much of a problem with Doc's adjective as you do. At least it attempts to differentiate between fruit produced by evolution unguided by intelligence, and fruit produced by evolution altered by intelligence. Intelligence is new on the block, and the theory of evolution doesn't quite predict what its effect will be. It is definitely unique in that current evolution doesn't appear to be a random process like it was for the first few billion years. Yes the theory makes sense in its description of a long random process of natural selection determined by a randomly changing environment. We have a few billion years of evidence for that process. But the environment isn't random anymore (global warming), intelligence can shape it! We have evidence of evolution producing an intelligence that can use other natural forces in non-random ways. It's us! Imo, if it happened once here, it could have happened elsewhere in the universe. We have no idea of the extent that intelligence can manipulate the environment to guide evolution if given billions of years. We only know what it's doing here for a few million years. Also, imo, Doc's placing an adjective in front of "fruit" is his instinctive recognition of circumstances not yet explained by the theory of evolution, or any other one we got. Perfect imo, means random. I could be rambling lol, I just woke up.
     
  6. PTPLauthor

    PTPLauthor Banned

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    If you want to label everything that has GMO foods in it, most everything would be labeled as such. Modern maize is an example of the genetic modification of a plant dating to the Aztecs. Without GMO, we would have higher food costs.
     
  7. OldManOnFire

    OldManOnFire Well-Known Member

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    Every plant and animal from the beginning of time has been modified through natural selection. Also during this time, many plants and animals were modified by selective modifications...like planting only the largest seeds or breeding only the largest animals, etc. Humans are animals and humans have a need to survive and genetic modification can assist in this whether we modify ourselves or the foods we eat. However, if evil Gold Finger plots to take over the world by genetically modifying foods that can cause death or disease, then this is a problem. Therefore, as humans do selective modification and DNA modification it is mandatory that the results be fully reviewed and inspected and approved prior to reaching the masses...problem here is who can we trust to give us honest information? In this regards...buyer beware!!
     
  8. Perilica grad Ameriku

    Perilica grad Ameriku Banned

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    It never was. You proved completely unprepared for the task
     
  9. Perilica grad Ameriku

    Perilica grad Ameriku Banned

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    Why would anyone imagine we were suffering from an inability to differentiate between them? No... the problem with the term is that it specifically loads the question. By labeling the natural version as "perfect" all changes to that version would be imperfect. It is a circular argument, and circular arguments are invariably the result of either ignorance or dishonesty and have to be challenged for what they are.

    Nonsense. Evolution has no greater difficulty accounting for intelligence than it does accounting for body size or food preference. And different levels of intelligence have existed ever since the first neural tube became a ganglion. There is nothing about human intelligence that is qualitatively unique to us. The difference is entirely quantitative.

    So what? How would the evolutionary response to a human caused environmental change be any different than that caused by, say, a beaver caused environmental change? Or an asteroid's? The rules are the same. Populations respond the same way. Genes are inherited or not, the same way. Random mutations occur the same way. Organisms adapt... the same way.

    Or... it could have been a bird building a nest. Or fire ants digging an anthill. Or a herd of elephants wiping out a stand of acacia trees. Almost all living things "use other natural forces in non-random ways."

    I remain perplexed by the insistence of humans to imagine we are somehow unique and different... that our arrival on the scene makes one bit of difference to the operation of invariant natural law. It is bizarre.

    Who has argued otherwise... and what does that have to do with the thread?

    Certainly you cannot be serious when you assert that "perfect... means random." Such a statement renders both words essentially meaningless.

    Doc's adjective serves one purpose; To anchor a circular argument. It has no other value, and certainly no virtue.
     
  10. Flintc

    Flintc New Member

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    I may not be following this exactly, but I think what some people are concerned about is deliberate horizontal gene transfer between complex eukaryotic organisms. Normal evolutionary processes are unlikely to, for example, take a gene from a frog and splice it into a carrot. Genetic tweaking may well produce variations even in humans that would be inaccessible to any breeding program, even assuming the public would tolerate selective breeding of people. And how long would we reasonably expect to wait for a human mutation to happen along that would effectively mimic the natural insecticide found only in the Peruvian lumpwort? Hey, a little gene-tweaked natural chlorophyll might be great as a food supplement and anti-melanoma characteristic, even if it does make us look a little green, right?

    Of course, it might take quite a few generations to discover the irreversible and undesirable side-effects we've engineered into our genome, but by that time, we should be good enough at this stuff to turn those to our advantage. At least we can hope.
     
  11. WillReadmore

    WillReadmore Well-Known Member

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    We're going through this with "organic", too. Labeling gives choice. It opens a market. It may or may not cost more, but that is a market issue. Labeling shouldn't require anyone to do anything that they aren't doing today - they just have to put one line in the content label saying their product isn't GMO-free - a few minutes of time from the corporate graphic artist. If they want to tap that market they can do the extra work to earn the GMO-free label.

    What the Aztecs did is something else. The GMO issue has to do with gene splicing, not breeding.
     
  12. PTPLauthor

    PTPLauthor Banned

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    GMOs are so ubiquitous today as to be considered an industry standard. Without the GMOs, expect food costs to skyrocket because of the increased crop-loss. Oh, and GMO products are in other things too, such as a lot of health and beauty products.

    I'm not saying there shouldn't be government oversight of the GMO industry, there should be. However, the backlash against the GMO industry is largely unfair because if all of the GMO industry closed up shop, we wouldn't be able to produce enough food for ourselves, let alone for export.

    Ever wondered why organic foods cost more? Mostly because it's a smaller segment of the agribusiness economy but also because of that crop-loss. Even if there were an equal number of organic farms planting the same number of crops as a GMO farm, the organic farm would still have to sell their produce at a higher cost to make up for the loss due to nature.
     
  13. Doc Dred

    Doc Dred Banned

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    That sounds like a cop out.

    instead of perceiving the land, creating more efficient green houses and all that produces food naturally, we are genetically altering food .

    It has lost it's taste, and smell…the actual nutritional value of the new food is down.

    I have a lot of African friends, for years now.

    they come from very poor areas in most cases.

    the food they eat fits in a pair of cupped hands, and yet they are healthy, and full of health until they come to Canada.

    they all crave larger portions of food and never feel full like they did back home…Why?

    it's like pregnant women, they are lacking certain nutrients and they end up with cravings…


    These Africans never get the nutrient value as before so they are constantly eating without knowing why…

    Now that was the 70's and 80's…

    it's changed now for large american companies have bought the land and are growing food in Africa like we do here now.

    but there was a time when i caught to find out why the constant eating and snacking these people did…and the weight gain…oh my the weight gain...
     
  14. Doc Dred

    Doc Dred Banned

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    ahh the money worry…so lets destroy the food and it will cost less for awhile…


    just like pumping your own gas..it was cheaper do so at first…now you don;t even have a choice and the profits are soaring…

    your repines is childish in the sense of your trusting the corporations to save you money …

    food sucks these days…
    i buy Veal instead of steak
    and young sprouted grains in my bread …the longer it is raised the more poison accumulated in the food source.
     
  15. Doc Dred

    Doc Dred Banned

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    the earth in it's purest form is perfect.
    man's meddling with it is just arrogance.

    antibiotics help to cure some illness. It lessens the time to recover from an illness, but it also has created super bugs that are immune to certain antibiotics and the need to invent stronger ones is necessary

    \\
    does a certain poster have a problem with the adjective stronger antibiotic as well…or is it scientific enough to pass the litmus test of this absurd view that viewing nature in it's pristine state is positively perfect.

    before science started to genetically alter food it was perfect.. it sustained life, tasted nice and smelled nice….oh oh i used the word smelled nice….not scientific enough…

    lets just change the entire world to some corporate view of perfect...
     
  16. WillReadmore

    WillReadmore Well-Known Member

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    I think you're missing the point. There is no major movement to stop GMO food. The GMO related measures that lost in WA and CA were about labeling GMO products as being GMO. That is all. Just labeling.

    That is not going to cause the price of food to rise. Agribusiness can still crank out frankencorn that can be soaked in herbicide and/or pestacides and still live.

    We can produce PLENTY enough food without GMO ANYTHING. We know that, because we've done it.


    By the way, you are right. The government is doing absolutely nothing to test any GMO product to see if it has negative properties. Right now, the best hope for testing is to label GMO products, so science has a chance at identifying issues in the general population. People who DO buy GMO-free food can then form a population sample as good little guinea pigs.

    Agribusiness hated it when we made them label products with the amount of sugar, salt, fat, etc. that they have. But, it's pretty darn hard to make wise dietary decisions when you don't know what's in the food. And, I know of NO reason for trusting Monsanto, a pesticides, herbicides and fertilizer company, to make our food in their chemistry labs without the possibility of a choice, without the possibility of tracing problems, and without oversight - the exact features that labeling allows.
     
  17. ringotuna

    ringotuna Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    It would be difficult to quantify exactly how 'major' the movement is, but none the less there is a movement. Labeling issues are but a part of the bigger picture. To say that it's 'just labeling" is to dismiss the results of the anti-gmo campaign which leads otherwise intelligent individuals to use such fear mongoring terms as "frankenfood" and to engage in such hyperbole as "doused in pesticides." The movement, whether we describe it as major or otherwise has had the effect of misleading the low information public to believe that gmo's are un-safe and un-tested, when the reality is neither is true.
     
  18. ringotuna

    ringotuna Well-Known Member Past Donor

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  19. ringotuna

    ringotuna Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Aren't anecdotes wonderful? They can be concocted to the convenience of ones claim and are entirely un-disprovable.

    Hunger and malnutrition
    •Almost 870 million people, or 12.5 percent of the world's population, were undernourished in 2010-2012; the vast majority of them (852 million) live in developing countries.
    •Between 2005 and 2011, one out of four African countries reported a stunting rate of at least 40 percent. Stunting rates also exceeded 40 percent in South and South East Asia during the same period, with peaks in India, the Lao People's Democratic Republic, Nepal and Timor-Leste.
    •African countries show the highest rates of underweight prevalence. During 2005-(*)2011, 16 African countries showed underweight rates of at least 20 percent, with the highest levels recorded in the Horn of Africa.
    http://reliefweb.int/report/world/fao-statistical-yearbook-2013-world-food-and-agriculture
     
  20. ringotuna

    ringotuna Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    In what way?
     
  21. goober

    goober New Member

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    Some foods like the banana are extinct, commercially, and replaced by a substitute that doesn't taste as good, and probably has fewer nutrients, but you don't expect the banana business to just fold.
    Food is all about volume, and health problems came with agriculture, the "perfect earth" that was nearly disease free, was pre-agricultural, hunter-gatherer, and starvation was a frequent companion. And the average lifespan was probably around 30.
     
  22. PTPLauthor

    PTPLauthor Banned

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    So all those protests against Monsanto were just my imagination?

    Without GMOs or biocides, the crop-loss ratio would go up, which would shrink the food supply, which would cause the price of food to go up. Simple supply-and-demand.

    One of the main reasons they moved toward GMO was to lower the use of chemical insecticides and fungicides. Many of the genetic modifications to corn were to splice in genes from other plants that produce naturally-occurring fungicides or insecticides because they're perceived as safer in the food supply than the synthetic chemical fertilizers.

    Oh, and the reason GMOs are sterile is because the GMO firms realize that their products should be controlled as strictly as possible because if nature takes over with something that was artificially modified, it might cause unintended consequences.

    Actually, my whole point was that GMO food is in most things nowadays, so as a more cost-effective measure, label the food that is certified as GMO-free as such and just assume everything else contains GMOs.
     
  23. Perilica grad Ameriku

    Perilica grad Ameriku Banned

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    Whatever you might choose to call avoiding death by starvation, I'm confident that "cop out" would not make the short list.

    No. Not "instead of." Along with.

    There are often trade-offs between survival and comfort. Welcome to the human condition. That said... if you don't like the taste or smell of the food you eat, then buy better food. I have no problem in that area/ But then again. I know how to cook.

    The plural of "anecdote" is not "data."
     
  24. Perilica grad Ameriku

    Perilica grad Ameriku Banned

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    Only mystical nincompoops who have little to no experience with nature actually believe that.

    Man's meddling is no obviously different from any other living thing's meddling.

    So.. are you celebrating or complaining?

    Actually, yes. But that would be a threadjack. Just suffice it to say that what makes different antibiotics differentially affective is not because one is "stronger" than the other. They simply do different things.

    But assertions of nature's "perfection" remain vacuous and stupid.

    Enough? Not scientific at all. Just another flight into soft-headed mystical whining.

    Herring get no redder.
     
  25. Doc Dred

    Doc Dred Banned

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    HAHAHAHAHAHA
    Ok so an anecdotal piece of evidence from a human being is now considered some sort of blasphemy from some pseudo scientit…

    not enough study to prove anything so hells bells lets just go ahead with the corporation's lust for money and do the right thing for the world..

    DDT was sprayed on populace and scientits lauded the practice…

    bah humbug!
     

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