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All crop plants are cultivated. The hard way to do genetic modification is through selective breeding (plant A's pollen rubbed on plant B's pistil) until you ge
by CelestialTeapot 10y ago
All crop plants are cultivated. The hard way to do genetic modification is through selective breeding (plant A's pollen rubbed on plant B's pistil) until you get the plant with the traits you want. There are some limitations, like you can't generally breed plants of different species. GMO typically refers to the more direct route of genetic engineering, where you insert the genes that give the plant the desired traits from some other donor which may be of a completely different species, maybe even an engineered gene that doesn't appear in nature.
- rz2k 10y agoWe're saying the same thing, and by using scientifically literate terminology we're probably furthering Taleb's point. They're cultivated in the sense that their seeds are propagated and they're cared for. Concerns about artificial selection used for tens of thousands of years might be dismissed as a naturalistic fallacy, and more surgical genetic engineering methods only introduced last century are difficult to distinguish in a meaningful way. However, example disasters from introducing species to ecosystems suggest that the conservative biases that partly make up the naturalistic fallacy would have sometimes lead to safer outcomes. In spite of these disasters though, it seems that the planet would not have a carrying capacity of 8 billion people without the inorganic advances of the green revolution. Nor, perhaps even conditions where probably half a billion of those people have a higher quality of life than the most fortunate 100 thousand people living two hundred years ago.