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> How wrong am I to draw the conclusion from this, that people claiming that GMOs are "completely safe" (i.e. cannot have unexpected side effects, such as creat

> How wrong am I to draw the conclusion from this, that people claiming that GMOs are "completely safe" (i.e. cannot have unexpected side effects, such as creation of super-species that completely crowds out other, non-GMO and now inferior, species in the specific niche, or the migration/expression of toxin-producing genes in unexpected places) are full of bullshit? I don't whether they are full of bullshit or not, but for the life of me I can't see how this particular example demonstrates they are full of bullshit. They made a genetic mod that was supposed to prevent them from breeding. They got it wrong and they breed. Far from producing a super species, this modification weakened the offspring and will be eliminated from the gene pool over time by natural selection. It's hardly a super organism. This is pretty much true for any modifications we've made. They invariably have a the same effect: they enhance fitness in some circumstances at the cost of reducing in others. For example round-up ready definitely gives you an advantage when there are hominoids spraying round-up everywhere, but at the cost of some energy efficiency. If those hominoids disappear the advantage gene gave them will disappear but the disadvantage will remain, and consequently gene itself will disappear along with the hominoids. The vitamin A enhanced bananas do very well when those same hominoids knock off all their competition because their want that vitamin A, but when the hominoids disappear and they are back on an even footing with their competition and they won't fair so well. I could go on, but it's pretty much the same story every time. Natural selection has already produced super organisms for every niche. Think the blue whale, which is the largest animal every to roam the earth. It looks pretty "super" to me. We can alter the genome to be work better the situations we create, but when those situations vanish the situation the super organisms natural selection is so good at creating will take over again. The implicit assumption in the super organism argument is mankind is so superior we will be to bring more intellect and computation power to bear on creating super organisms in a few decades than natural selection has over millions of years. The proposition is laughable, and it's the height of hubris.

tomp 7y ago
Thanks, this is a good argument! Let me just completely dismiss your "evolution is a good optimizer" - it's a decent optimizer, but some things are just impossible for it to achieve (as I said above, local vs global search). That's why humans are so dominant - e.g. we started using tools and eventually figured out that steel is harder than most other natural materials (and thus more useful as a weapon). Otherwise, I think your point about fitness of crops is a good one - crops are fundamentally not easy to grow, if they were, we wouldn't be an agricultural society, we'd just be "picking and gathering" fruit, seeds, grain etc. that would naturally grow in forests, etc. but that's unrealistic, we have to put a lot of effort into sustaining crop production. I oppose Roundup-ready and vitamin enhanced crops on other grounds; is Roundup residual really so safe? If it's so safe and GMO foods are so much cheaper and better, why the lack of transparency? It's not like we lack food in the West, so no need to enhance it with vitamins, and we should probably be finding ways to use less pesticides, not more and deadlier. (Different situation in the third world, I think GMOs can be genuinely helpful there, if risks can be minimized.) But the one I actually had in mind is when crops are modified to express pesticides using genes that originate from bacteria (looks like Cowpea is an example [0]). Personally, I also see that as the kind of GMO with most potential (again, if risks are minimized), though you might be right that it's actually the minority of current use (why?), and the above arguments about crops being hard to grow still holds (unless genes can "jump" to a different species, though AFAIK that's only really possible in bacteria.) Mind you, I'm not totally opposed to GMOs. I think they great when used in pharma (in controlled environment with controlled products). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowpea#Pests_and_diseases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowpea#Pests_and_diseases
- rstuart4133 7y ago
  > Let me just completely dismiss your "evolution is a good optimizer" - it's a decent optimizer, Perhaps I put it badly. I wasn't saying natural selection is perfect - just that it is better than us. Obviously it isn't perfect because evolution makes mistakes - our blood vessels being in front our rod and cones is an example. So why don't we just fix that? It because it's utterly beyond us. It's inevitably controlled by 1000's if not millions of genes acting in concert, tuning when they switching on and off according to the body they find themselves in (small or large) over our lifetimes. It's an extraordinarily complex mechanism. We have made very simple adjustments to that mechanism. They are invariably involve just one gene that has one clear effect. But playing with something as complex as how the eye is laid out is completely and utterly beyond us and our computers. Yet natural selection pulled it off. It really is just a question of computational power available. Natural selection is currently doing some phenomenal number (as in many zero beyond trillions) of experiments on eyeball construction every year. We can't hope to match that, and until we can natural selection will always out compete us in the "lets design a super organism" game. So, when we do beat natural selection, it's in environments we create so the design natural selection chose is no longer optimal. Nonetheless it's only a temporary advantage, as our losing the battle against antibiotic resistant bacteria demonstrates. The same thing will happen with round up ready and Cowpea - we didn't just get round up ready crops, we also set in motion the mechanism that will create round up ready weeds. We had an advantage when we created round up ready crops - we cheated by taking an existing example from nature. Natural selection doesn't have that advantage, but over the long term it won't matter - it will just invent it again. Unlike us, it can do that. It really can create new super organisms. Right now we can't do better than copying what natural selection has done in other organisms.
  - tomp 7y ago
    Nicely put!

tomp 7y ago

Thanks, this is a good argument! Let me just completely dismiss your "evolution is a good optimizer" - it's a decent optimizer, but some things are just impossible for it to achieve (as I said above, local vs global search). That's why humans are so dominant - e.g. we started using tools and eventually figured out that steel is harder than most other natural materials (and thus more useful as a weapon). Otherwise, I think your point about fitness of crops is a good one - crops are fundamentally not easy to grow, if they were, we wouldn't be an agricultural society, we'd just be "picking and gathering" fruit, seeds, grain etc. that would naturally grow in forests, etc. but that's unrealistic, we have to put a lot of effort into sustaining crop production. I oppose Roundup-ready and vitamin enhanced crops on other grounds; is Roundup residual really so safe? If it's so safe and GMO foods are so much cheaper and better, why the lack of transparency? It's not like we lack food in the West, so no need to enhance it with vitamins, and we should probably be finding ways to use less pesticides, not more and deadlier. (Different situation in the third world, I think GMOs can be genuinely helpful there, if risks can be minimized.) But the one I actually had in mind is when crops are modified to express pesticides using genes that originate from bacteria (looks like Cowpea is an example [0]). Personally, I also see that as the kind of GMO with most potential (again, if risks are minimized), though you might be right that it's actually the minority of current use (why?), and the above arguments about crops being hard to grow still holds (unless genes can "jump" to a different species, though AFAIK that's only really possible in bacteria.) Mind you, I'm not totally opposed to GMOs. I think they great when used in pharma (in controlled environment with controlled products). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowpea#Pests_and_diseases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowpea#Pests_and_diseases

rstuart4133 7y ago
> Let me just completely dismiss your "evolution is a good optimizer" - it's a decent optimizer, Perhaps I put it badly. I wasn't saying natural selection is perfect - just that it is better than us. Obviously it isn't perfect because evolution makes mistakes - our blood vessels being in front our rod and cones is an example. So why don't we just fix that? It because it's utterly beyond us. It's inevitably controlled by 1000's if not millions of genes acting in concert, tuning when they switching on and off according to the body they find themselves in (small or large) over our lifetimes. It's an extraordinarily complex mechanism. We have made very simple adjustments to that mechanism. They are invariably involve just one gene that has one clear effect. But playing with something as complex as how the eye is laid out is completely and utterly beyond us and our computers. Yet natural selection pulled it off. It really is just a question of computational power available. Natural selection is currently doing some phenomenal number (as in many zero beyond trillions) of experiments on eyeball construction every year. We can't hope to match that, and until we can natural selection will always out compete us in the "lets design a super organism" game. So, when we do beat natural selection, it's in environments we create so the design natural selection chose is no longer optimal. Nonetheless it's only a temporary advantage, as our losing the battle against antibiotic resistant bacteria demonstrates. The same thing will happen with round up ready and Cowpea - we didn't just get round up ready crops, we also set in motion the mechanism that will create round up ready weeds. We had an advantage when we created round up ready crops - we cheated by taking an existing example from nature. Natural selection doesn't have that advantage, but over the long term it won't matter - it will just invent it again. Unlike us, it can do that. It really can create new super organisms. Right now we can't do better than copying what natural selection has done in other organisms.
- tomp 7y ago
  Nicely put!