I'd have to disagree with that. There are lots of people who care and have tried to be good stewards to the public. The problem is that you also have corporations with major amounts of cash and influence that actively discredit anyone who speaks out. These are facts.
For example, whether or not GMO issues are horseshit or not doesn't matter when anyone who speaks out is given a gag order or when we find leaked documents showing that companies know of damage and our systems are so fucked we aren't even allowed to ask about it without getting sued into oblivion.
People care, but caring isn't enough anymore.
And my favorite group, the ones confusing technology with science, and insisting that GMOs must be perfectly safe, "because science" -- when most of the research and assurances is from companies looking for a quick buck, not impartial scientists (which almost don't exist anymore the way they did when academic/research jobs where plenty, scientists were often independently wealthy, and tenure a sure thing).
I don't know if I fall in that group (I don't think I confuse the two and I don't really talk about GMO much) but my prior belief would be that GMO products are probably safe, through some kind of hand-wavy mathematical argument: it's like modifying a program to do what you want; chances are if you mess up, it'll crash quickly and won't work rather than working almost-as-intended while injecting nefarious input into the next program.
Would LOVE to read evidence to the contrary though. So please share your citations.
Perhaps you've missed my whole initial argument?
No, I made a point about the burden of proof. But of course that takes actually reading what has been written to tell.
This. It's far too common here at HN.
So in fact it's in the "global warming is real" side of the debate.
Except if you mean someone could make the same argument I speak against, and say "global warming doesn't exist, because science is wonderful and would never hurt us" or "global warming doesn't matter because science will save us". Then yes, those people would be confusing science with technology again.
Companies that produce GMO products (and the groups on the other side as well) stifle debate to the point that it's nigh impossible to find unbiased research to form an actually cogent opinion.
In that scenario, how are GMO creators incentivized to create more GMO products? Sell the first seed for a billion dollars and then the person that buys that seed can give out its progeny for free?
In that scenario, how are Genetically Engineered Baby creators incentivized to create more Genetically Engineered Baby genotypes? Sell the first baby for a billion dollars and then the baby can give its germline cells for free upon sexual maturity?
They are selling life. Life forms reproduce. It's a pretty basic assumption and if GMO merchants want to change that then they need to embrace terminator seeds.
The idea that, given these premises:
a) we who don't understand even 10% of how the ecological ecosystem works
b) we don't understand even 10% of genes and how they interplay
c) we don't understand even 10% of second order effects of such changes
d) we don't yet have explanation for tons of interactions and functionality in the body (from what triggers cancers to all kinds of lesser stuff)
e) we can't even have a decent dietary advice from medical bodies that is not revised completely every 10-20 years
f) corporations will even put plutonium to kids milk if there's profit in it (and then lie about it)
g) all kinds of industry-sponsored research has been shown to be paid lies
... GMOs are perfectly safe.
It's more like changing various bits in working computer memory, with a ho-hum printout of parts of the program's in-memory structure and a crappy flow-chart of what it does, and wishing that the running program (and OS and such) will continue to play just fine...
For hundreds of years farmers have been saving seeds from the plants that produced better. As a result the random mutations that farmers like have been selected for with no study on if those are safe mutations.
By Contrast with GMO we know which gene we change and why, and have done studies to prove safety. Maybe biases studies, and maybe not enough of them, but we have done them. That is more than you can say about anything not GMO.
Yeah, if breadth and scale doesn't mean anything.
It's like saying: "We have been blowing things up since the advent of gunpowder by the Chinese a millennium ago. Doing it with atomic bombs changes nothing".
Traditional "GMOs" were already closely related, and the modifications that could emerge were very constrained. Not so much with GMOs that allow for arbitrary outputs.
For one, selective breeding has been going on for millennia -- and from people who had to eat its results, not mega corporations 10 times removed and interested in short term profit. If it was that dangerous we'd know it by now.
Second, the species must be already related and/or compatible to a certain degree -- the same reason we don't have cat and snake hybrids in nature. Whereas with GMOs you can have arbitrary changes and mixes.
So it's not "waay more random" as it has way more limited scope. It's only random in that practitioners are not certain of the successful inheritance of the desired traits.
But it's like comparing playing with lego bricks to playing with creating stuff at the molecule level.
Yeah, modern selective or “traditional” breeding uses completely novel methods of introducing diversity (including artificial mutagens), is done by exactly the kind of megacorps you are concerned about, and has less oversight or regulatory control than GMOs.
> So it's not "waay more random" as it has way more limited scope
No, it is way more random than inserting a known gene at a known location, and verifying he product in the ways done with modern GMOs. And the scope of genetic change in any one product is greater than in a GMO, not more limited.
My wife works in ag biotech, and has worked on both transgenic (GMO) and non-transgenic platforms.
> But it's like comparing playing with lego bricks to playing with creating stuff at the molecule level.
A less imperfect analogy might be that it's like comparing writing code by hand with a reasonably comprehensive test suite with making random bit flips to machine code until it passes a much more limited test suite. And just to be clear, the latter is the non-GM option.
Easy: You're against the less random of the two. This means that apparently you don't know how GMO and/or selective breeding works.
> If it was that dangerous we'd know it by now.
This same logic applies to GMO, which has been around since the nineties. Aside from some late capitalism-esque economic effects nothing interesting happened.
> Whereas with GMOs you can have arbitrary changes and mixes.
And that is bad because...?
Yes, I can see how "since the nineties and regulated" gives the same guarantees as "for millennia".
>And that is bad because...?
Because they don't know the side-effects of what they're doing on top of it.
I think you've just created the film series that will succeed Sharknado.
Do you have any specific examples of damage from GMOs?
Other than that, I really think there is some truth to the documentary Cooked. I don't deprive myself from food, as long as it is homemade food out of real ingredients. I can't afford organic food and the weather of the place I live in is not that great to grow my own food (and my time availability is not that much either).
If we're going to feed billions of people, it's probably going to involve staples.
Fed Up Trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCUbvOwwfWM
Low fat food is not really healthy.
Eat natural foods, eat less of them, avoid sugar.
and you knew it caused obesity? ...yea
so you knew it was literally killing you? ...yea
and you kept eating it anyway? ......sigh......yea.
EDIT: syntax. Also, forgot to mention food deserts and availability of fresh produce in various neighborhoods.
Sugar (often either table sugar or honey) is a traditional bread ingredient; HFCS isn't the form the average home baker would use, but sugar in bread should not be surprising to anyone.
All you can do is attempt to minimize your intake.
Which is admittedly different than completely sugar free, since that's entirely absurd.
But we've survived every generation except the last 4 without so much processed sugar, and we now have global supply lines handing us crops practically to our doorstep.
Eating a Twinkie won't kill you, eating an entire box every day for 20 years will.
you need more than that for a theory of a dystopian future
telling us how much you feel bad for eating too much is not a theory
it's a therapy session