It's just so much more complicated than that.
There is an additional huge array of variables like introns[1] and exons[2].
There's also the fact that not all base pairs encode even for genes, there's things like tRNA[3] and ribosomes[4] and the super amazing ribozymes[5].
Even after all that you have specific DNA binding factors[6] that along with the insane machinery[7] of our DNA regulate which base pairs are even exposed or copied into proteins or other cellular products.
Our genetic code is far more complex than just being "genetic codes." And we're still uncovering more layers of complexity and self-reference[8] the closer we are capable of looking.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intron
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exon
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_RNA
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribosome
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribozyme
[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA-binding_protein
[7]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_gene_expression
"Genetic engineering" is more like "cut-and-past-programming" on a stream of data that is not-really-code. Fully understanding the implications of even "simple" changes may wind-up impossible.
Older versions of genetic engineering are like pasting code into a random section of a program. CRISPER-CAS9 is more like replacing one section of code with another. Better? Sure. But we still dont really understand the system.
Some parts have a very straightforward meaning. For example the DNA code for insulin is well known and understood, you can copy it to bacteria to make them produce a 100% accurate version of human insulin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin
> The human insulin protein is composed of 51 amino acids, and has a molecular mass of 5808 Da. It is a dimer of an A-chain and a B-chain, which are linked together by disulfide bonds. Insulin's structure varies slightly between species of animals. Insulin from animal sources differs somewhat in effectiveness (in carbohydrate metabolism effects) from human insulin because of these variations. Porcine insulin is especially close to the human version, and was widely used to treat type 1 diabetics before human insulin could be produced in large quantities by recombinant DNA technologies.
Many enzymes have also a similar straightforward DNA->protein->function story.
(The regulation method to decide what enzymes to produce and how much of them is more complicated, but some are well known.)
If you want to identify the genes for more general traits like height or intelligence, then you will get something like what you said, that is a very complicated interaction on many genes that we don't understand.
(There are some examples of molecules families. You have many variants of it encoded in the DNA, and each is optimized for a different task. IIRC the idea is that some molecule is used for two similar thing, then after a lot of generations by a random chance you get two copies of the code in the DNA, then after a lot of generations each copy is used for one task, then after a lot of generations each copy evolves to be optimized for it's task. See the variants in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemoglobin#Types_in_humans and also the distant variant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myoglobin )
Why produce insuulin if you can’t use it. The mere presence of that sequence may have consequences for other development. Some sequences may be if, then, else statements, there is so much we don’t understand.
We are playing russian roulette, except the number of bullets changes every round.
But we’ve done this before, “humans can’t possibly alter the global environment”. Even climate scientists were saying that until about 20 years ago.
So... not "well known and understood" then - if it were, a definitive "yes" or "no" would be the appropriate answer.
If intelligence isn't heritable and has nothing to do with genetics, please teach a paramecium how to do quantum physics and I'll give you a million dollars
https://www.sciencealert.com/an-amoeba-has-solved-an-exponen...
It's not quantum physics, so I'll settle for $100k
And every month since I've read something that supports this and undermine the current conventional wisdom / proof.
Yup, and my then the market is established and the companies creating the market will say it's impossible to know that the side effect was actually caused by altering your DNA, and go on knowingly selling services that are destroying lives all in the name of money
This isn't about whether and to what degree "companies" are cartoonishly evil. And when you divert the conversation into that very well worn path, you distract from other problems.
There are lots of threads on HN where complaints about corporate ethics are on topic.
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(17)30629-3 https://www.quantamagazine.org/omnigenic-model-suggests-that...
For such a system to work, there must be great robustness in the way that traits are encoded. The omnigenic model implies graceful degradation, as also observed in neural networks. Only vanishingly rarely is a single neuron/gene critical.
So now we are going to start in on biology?
Wait, WHAT?!
The thing that allowed millions of people to ascend from what would now be seen as abject poverty and subsistence farming?
The thing that enabled mass tool manufacture that eventually led to the Green Revolution and boosted agricultural yields enough to increase the planet's carrying capacity a few orders of magnitude?
THAT screw up?!
Say what you want about the environmental consequences and our failure to manage carbon and toxic byproducts.
But there's objectively no way you can say the Industrial Revolution didn't vault the entire world's population technologically, medically, and materially forward.
We are losing 150-200 species of plant, insect, bird and mammal every 24 hours.
That’s an estimated 1,000 times the natural rate.
We fucked up real bad, and the fact that there’s 7 billion of us now and we’ve got iPhones doesn’t change that a shred.
we Will pay for this destruction, in unforeseen, invisible, and difficult to imagine ways.
We could have done better, and ignoring that blocks our path to a better way.
If the oil lobby hadn't suppressed research and political will from doing something about climate change back in the 70s, we could be saying something different.
We wouldn't be having this conversation but for the Industrial Revolution, because none of us would be wealthy enough (in real terms) to afford the technology to do so.
Indeed, the technology itself likely wouldn't exist because the world as a whole wouldn't be wealthy enough to afford the research.
Avoiding progress out of fear for its effects is Luddite in the truest sense. And I don't say that pejoratively -- simply to note that it's tantamount to advising "Stop making progress!"
Innovate. Overcome challenges. Build and discover a better future.
I'm honestly flabbergasted that I read "Burn the mechanized mills!" on Hacker News.
I'm not advocating groupthink, and there are certainly ways we could have built a better present, but the blind ungratefulness to say "Mass manufacture and electricity were mistakes" deserves some outrage.
Also, please don't use quotes to make it look like you're quoting someone when you're not. That's also a flamewar trope and a vector in the unwanted direction.
I'll try to limit double quotes to avoid confusion, though I was under the impression quote consensus was > demarked.
I'd certainly characterize my reaction as incredulous and shocked. I re-read the parent 3 times to make sure I wasn't misunderstanding their point.
I realize we're not making progress in some areas we should be as a species, but I had no idea people had gotten this cynical.
The site guidelines try to address this like so: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/
...and now extrapolate to biological systems evolving over a much longer period.
Drew Endy did a lecture this a while ago. It's from one of the chaos computer club seminars.
It might work with good, continuous testing (ie, with bacteria were you can test x generations in n specimen) - but it's hard to see how it would ever work reliably in higher animals?
Evolution is like Motie Engineers (https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mote_in_God's_Eye). I would summarise the essential difficulty as non-heirarchical.
Exactly this! And this is why GM foods are more dangerous than you might expect. Even if gene x does only x in organism A, there is no guarantee that gene x does only one thing or the same thing in organism B.
In the case of genetics, we have a some understanding, but it is fairly limited. There is real potential for unexpected harm, given how much we don't know and the complexity of the code. Of course, we can do some amazing things with the parts we do understand.
Selecting breeding is like using a high level GUI that is decently functional. Like most GUIs, it significantly restricts how you can modify the underlying data. The plus side is that it is harder to put the data in a bad or dangerous state using only the controls offered by the GUI.
If the consistency checks in the natural genome don't stop you, pretty much by definition whatever you're doing could happen through an unlikely coincidence of selective breeding (especially if you involve a wild virus to take the place of the lab virus.)
This may be your opinion. While GM foods are not per see dangerous, the long tail risk is tremendous, exactly because you can not tell what a gene is going to do in another organism. Take my word for it, I have a PhD in that shit.
Taleb also advocates the precautionary principle: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.5787.pdf
Honestly, Taleb should stick with what he knows: finance. In other fields I trust his opinion about as much as I would any other Wall Street banker.
Genetic engineering is more like changing the byte code in your OS hoping to change its functionality. Without having the source code.
Until we know how the system works your ideas are only ideas.
In and adult your precise change might have minimal impact, but what if that sequence is checked during embryo development, and if it’s not present “exactly” as expected the embryo aborts?
How long do you think it will take to figure out that your “precise” change now prevents humans from reproducing?
No engineering required, but obviously a huge change.
I have shepherds and there's a big philosophical split between shepherd owners who want 'working line' dogs and those who want 'show dogs' that are significantly more likely to have health problems. Dog breeding is a very poorly regulated market and the outcomes are just as depressing as you would imagine.
What kind of brain injury do you have to have to go out of your way to want to breed these dogs?
And why the hell don’t / haven’t animal rights activists, and society in general, vigorously pursue regulation to ban these absurd breeds.
Cross-breeding allows nature to combine things that fit together in all of the right places. And we just don't know how that even happens, or why. We don't understand nature's algorithm for DNA. No even the tip of the iceberg.
Sure, nature isn't always correct, but does thing properly 99.999% of the time. And that's good enough.
It is utterly incomparable to GM done by humans ~ genes are inserted, but the results are not equivalent to what is done by nature, because we don't understand DNA enough to know where we should be placing the inserted DNA, so that things don't massively fuck up inexplicably somewhere down the line.
What you're seeing as "nature knowing what's best" is really just life being able to function with all kinds of random genes all over the place, because the core biochemical pathways are close enough.
We have turned seeds into the equivalent of Gillette razors. A farmer buys patented seeds and the complimentary chemical to kill everything else.
The problem is that as farming has turned into a big dumb business, centuries of best practices with respect to land management are getting tossed. Farmers near where I grow up (who are left) don’t rotate and are being ground into bankruptcy as larger and larger entities dominate.
I feel like this is putting too much faith in "natural" methodologies.
Eg, who's to say a cross breeding solution is less dangerous than a GM solution?
If the concern is that it may take 50 years to know the GM is bad, why are we assuming the non-GM is good now? You could say that people have been cross breading for many many generations, but i'm unsure why we'd know that one cross breed being safe means all crossbreeds are safe. I'm not inherently defending GM. I'm attacking the notion that man made tricks like cross breeding are inherently safe.
I think the fear around gmo is that food will be less healthy. The same way prepared food takes a few elements of food mixes with chemicals to get strong favours without the depth of flavour. They do this to save costs. GMO companies are making seeds that create plants that do not get eaten by pests. It sounds great until we realize those plants have a toxic substance inside that harms us.
And no, grafting entire sections of bacterial DNA into plant genomes absolutely does not happen in nature.
Please read the link, then get back to me with any actual scientifically founded refutations you may have. Citations are throughout the link, but I don’t see any from you!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_M._Smith
Who has written 2 anti GMO books and made a movie about it. It’s a direct conflict of interest, there’s no point in reading what he writes because it’s obviously biased.
He’s not a scientist either and the Institute for Responsible Technology is just his personal blog.
And now having written a book about a subject which you are knowledgeable about and writing about that subject online together form a “conflict of interest”? Sure, but trusting studies funded by the food industry stating food industry products are safe for consumption by the entire population with absolutely zero long-term safety studies is completely sensible.
That’s exactly what the article you linked to does too. The takeaway is that any alteration to the genome of food is bad.
Just look at Atomic gardening [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening] - a practice which should be /way/ worse if mutations really did produce bad effects most of the time. Instead the effects were either dud seeds or a few useful byproducts as opposed to 'this grapefruit is now rich in cyanide'.
They're often partners in crime, when it comes to subjects not well understood. Especially with something as fragile as DNA.
For me, the real scary part is altering something, which inadvertently changes something else that isn't quite as obvious and visible or noticeable. Something that might not present itself until whatever organism it is reaches maturity, or beyond. Something like "everybody will get Alzheimers by age 50" where it takes 50 years to even discover it. And in the meantime, they thought whatever they originally tweaked was a success and made other tweaks during those 50 years thinking everything was just fine.