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Literally everything you're talking about applies to selective breeding of crops as much as it does transgenic crops (what people typically mean by GMO). It app
by daeken 7y ago
Literally everything you're talking about applies to selective breeding of crops as much as it does transgenic crops (what people typically mean by GMO). It applies even more so to irradiated seeds, which - strangely - no one seems to mind or want labels on.
Randomly changing millions of base pairs: good. Precisely cutting a gene from one crop and putting it in another: bad. Baffling.
- sametmax 7y agoOne is using a self-safe system that has been tuned for balance for 1000000 of years and have a proven track record and no agenda. The second one is made by a few smart people for only 20 years for money. The second one has to prove to be safe. It's funny that all of HN hold boing so responsible for demonstrating things are safe when it affect only a few hundred people. But we have to be taking the word of people playing with new high tech toys for their own benefit that have the potential to affect the entire humanity because... ?
- shawnz 7y agoWhy do those principles which make natural evolution safe not also apply to GMOs?
- sametmax 7y agoIn the same way that a tiger killing a rabit is not the same thing than a human with a nuclear weapon. Power, scale, agenda and synergies matter.
- daeken 7y agoHow do you figure it's self-safe? That implies that selectively bred crops can't be harmful, but that's nonsensical. Many selectively bred crops carry higher than natural carcinogen quantities, for instance (potatoes). And that's ignoring plants that are straight-up deadly. And which category does seed irradiation fall into? If exposing seeds to high radiation in order to randomly mutate them is an acceptable "non-GMO" mechanism, clearly something is wrong.
- sametmax 7y agoBecause it worked for a lot longer than 20 years. In 100 years, without GMO problems, we can label them safe too. Plus evolution doesn't have an agenda that would make it creates things like the terminator gene. We are in a very peculiar situation. I'm open to see how it plays out, as long as we don't arrogantly pretend we know for sure everything will be ok. Because we heard this one before, and it was always stated by people that wanted to sound trustworthy or smart, never the ones that wanted to make sure we are all happy. Besides, how asking for severe and regular audits is even a bad thing ? If one is against that, I trust their judgment even less.
- daeken 7y agoSeed irradiation hasn't yet been in use for 100 years -- the first commercial crop to use it was ~80 years ago -- but we consider it safe, despite that it consists of forcing completely random changes to occur. Why? Because we don't talk about the safety of the process; we talk about the safety of the result. There's no way we can ever say "GMOs are safe" because it's like saying "crops grown during the 14th week of the year are safe". It's a technique, not a product.
- sametmax 7y agoFood irradiation in general is yet another issue, that deserves a different threat.
- joshyeager 7y agoThe parent isn’t talking about food irradiation, they’re talking about atomic gardening: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening
- YjSe2GMQ 7y agoAnthrax is "self-safe" too. It's an organism made by evolution.
- alexandercrohde 7y agoI think the larger point still stands. It's my understanding that most fruit you eat these days is clones of the exact same source. In fact, many varieties of apples are completely unable to reproduce by seed, only by clone. It's cool that we've made these cool hybrids, but it seems like nobody is thinking about the systemic environmental risk.
- patient_zero 7y agoliterally almost nothing he was talking about has anything to do with the differences between GMO and selective breeding, but it was a master-stroke of debate tactics for you to lead the discussion into that and away from his actual point. good work.