> What health reason would drive us to ban one while allowing another?

Why limit it to health reasons? Personally, I'm worried because corporate and consumer interests don't align. When business designed food, we got high-salt/high-fat unhealthy stuff optimized for addiction. When it designed tractors, we got DRMed electronics only repairable by those blessed by the manufacturer. Unless incentives change, GMOs will be analogous, with the addition of copyright protection and restrictive IP agreements. A new front in the already difficult battle for consumer rights.

Additionally there a number of epistemic problems in the way science is done these days, namely reproducibility, p-hacking, and corporate-backed junk science. Slapping the label "Science" or "Scientist" on something no longer automatically gives it a credibility pass. Need to see conflict disclosure, methodology, multiple reproductions, falsifications, etc.

Sounds similar to slapping the label "Non-GMO", "Natural", and "Organic" on things.

Organic is a controlled term when it comes to food. One cannot w/o penalty of jailtime just put "Organic" on a food label.

Natural has no such protection or meaning. When you see it on a label, just photoshop it out in your mind.

It's exactly the same shit just on the opposite end.

Seems like those issues exist regardless of the actual technique used to modify the organism. Perhaps we should focus on those issues rather than arbitrarily banning one GMO while allowing many others based on how the genes where altered.

More powerful techniques exacerbate those issues, and more expensive techniques further concentrate power to a handful of corporations able to afford them. As the lobbies grow more powerful, fixing those issues will only get harder.

Crop breeding is completely different from GM. The first GM products had fish DNA... in 1995? You can't do that with 1800s science.

There's a lot happening in this sector, some of it good and some of it bad. GM isn't necessarily bad, but it might be pandora's box. Monocultures are definitely bad even if they are pest resistant. We don't know how this will play yet. Some apprehension is normal.

Crop breeding is a form of GM, I am assuming you are talking about targeted gene insertion, what about mutagensis a 1920's tech, is that ok?

If crop breeding is GM, then all reproduction is GM - you've diluted the term so much it lost all meaning.

So there is no distinction between natural selection and human directed artificial selection? I thought the whole point of the term was whether humans where doing the modification producing organisms that would not otherwise exist in nature.

How humans accomplish the genetic modification seems to be the point of contention and I argue its poorly defined as there are many techniques in between selective breeding and gene insertion that we use to perform the modification.

There are no established risks to health. My fears are based on the hubris of a community that thinks changing a system through its public API is exactly the same as changing that system by flipping variables inside the system, when the system is only partially understood.

As a biologist, I think it is worth being skeptical of analogies that treat biological entities as equivalent to computers.

Agreed, there is no public or private api we are just bit twiddling. Monkey patching might also be a good borrowed term.

It is not necessarily clear to me that monkey patching (edit: or bit twiddling) is appropriate either. You can insert an expression cassette for a transgene into a plant, predicting that the gene will be expressed. You can then test that prediction, detecting the transgene mRNA. Then you can predict that the mRNA will be translated into protein. You can test that prediction by performing a Western blot. You can then predict a phenotype, for example roundup resistance. You can then perform all sorts of other tests to see if the nutritional content of the plant products are detectably different from the parent strain, and if feeding the plant products to rats results in unhealthy rats. To me, that is very different from making random changes.

I’m not trying to make a value judgement there about whether we should do all that. I can imagine someone approaching this from the precautionary principle holding the position that there is some currently undetectable, unwanted, and important change occurring in the plant. If you make decisions solely based on that, you would effectively never get any potential benefits from GMOs. Again, to some people the potential political/social/economic risks outweigh the benefits. I just think people should be clear about the rationale for their position. (Edit: grammar and clarity)

It's genetically modified through artificial and natural selection in sense of naturally occuring mutations in response to environment change.

It's very different from what people will do in laboratory.

Natural process is quite slow and gives you enough time to drop adverse crop.

Both can't be same.

> It's very different from what people will do in laboratory.

It's really the same process, with but with noise removed. Genes are genes, they do not carry metadata that say they were introduced in a lab. "Natural" vs "artificial" is a kind of magical thinking one would hope humanity would cure itself of by now. Hell, if you want to see true masters of targeted genetic modification, look no further than viruses.

> Natural process is quite slow and gives you enough time to drop adverse crop.

"Artificial" process can notice and drop "adverse" crop faster. Also, the way all organisms live and reproduce, genes not fit for the environment they're in will get dropped over time. Living things have an energy economy in them; enabling one feature usually means taking away from others.

This really deserves an Abstruse Goose reference:

https://abstrusegoose.com/215

>It's really the same process, with but with noise removed

If it is "the same process", then how are we able to make a distinction between domestication and biolistics or crispr?

Even disregarding the literal human action part, the most notable difference is that the latter allows for genes to be moved between organisms even if the two organisms would not have done so even if given millions of years without human interaction. (Ex: Spider genes in goats).

I feel this defense of GMO's is weak, as is the defense of "It's the same food chemically." as some other's may claim. If it were actually the same outcome, then it would be useless as a technique.

> Even disregarding the literal human action part, the most notable difference is that the latter allows for genes to be moved between organisms even if the two organisms would not have done so even if given millions of years without human interaction. (Ex: Spider genes in goats).

There are really no such things as "spider genes" or "goat genes" or "fish genes", there are only genes. Some sequences are found in one species and not the other, but they do not carry a tag that says where they came from. It's akin to copying functions between programs. You may say you copied over the implementation of e.g. incremental search from Vim, but that doesn't suddenly taint your program with "unnatural vimness" (license considerations notwithstanding).

> I feel this defense of GMO's is weak, as is the defense of "It's the same food chemically." as some other's may claim. If it were actually the same outcome, then it would be useless as a technique.

It's more akin this: quicksort and random sort give the exact same outcome in the end, but one of those processes is vastly more efficient at achieving the goal.

You're conflating general descriptions of algorithms with implementations of said algorithms. I disagree; an implementation of an algorithm CAN very much so be tied to one particular program. If you ignore function call side-effects entirely (cache states, timing delays, modified globals, etc.), then you would be able to transplant functions from one program to another freely. Essentially, to make functions that are fitting to quickly transplant into other programs (in libraries or not), it actually takes intentional design to make sure their side-effects are limited in scope and predictable.

I think this is revealing of an implicit assumption that we disagree on. I do not accept this idea that genes, in a sense, are like functional-programming functions. Considering the fact that there exist genes that express only in the presence of other genes or specific environmental factors, its very likely that genes DO have side-effects in our metaphor of genes as functions.

> It's genetically modified through artificial and natural selection in sense of naturally occuring mutations in response to environment change.

“Conventional” non-GM breeding these days includes methods that induce rapid change by exposure to radiation or chemical mutagens; both because of the randomness of the methods and the weaker regulatory environment, there is a lot less knowledge of what changed are induced outside of the targeted traits that are selected for with these.

> Natural process is quite slow and gives you enough time to drop adverse crop

Crop development has used artificial process for millenia; the alternative to transgenics isn't “natural process”, it's a wide variety of other artificial processes.

It is not a natural process to domesticate, corn is not natural, cows are not natural they are human creations.

Again it a continuum, why is artificial selection ok but marker assisted selection not? If marker assisted selection is ok, why not mutagenisis? if mutagenisis is ok why not targeted gene insertion? What basis are we labeling one GMO and not another? Why are we worried about one and not another?