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Most of your counterarguments either barely make sense, or don't even address the arguments I made. But I'll try to clarify and spell things out for you. > Onc

Most of your counterarguments either barely make sense, or don't even address the arguments I made. But I'll try to clarify and spell things out for you. > Once we reach that level of design, why would we not engineer all sorts of beneficial items in? Why would we not engineer all sorts of beneficial items into Twinkies? Why wouldn't we maximize visibility of healthy food in supermarkets, instead of junk food? Because it reduces profit. PR efforts such as golden rice will give way to profit maximization as soon as there's wide acceptance of GMOs. This is what already happens with other food that corporations are able to totally engineer, but you think they'll suddenly find their conscience and do what's best for the consumer once it's GMOs they're engineering, not cookies? > So for free all farmers and people are getting more seed options, not fewer. They get more seed options just like they have the option of hand tilling the soil instead of using tractors - they'll go bankrupt unless they plant the most optimal seed. Even if the gain is only 5% or less, profit margins are so thin that can make or break a farm. This is only "goofy" if you completely ignore economics. > There is no law of physics that cannot mutate things slowly or quickly, so this assumption that there is some magical limiting rate of evolution is also not science based. [..] GMO is delivering on that in a manner that no selective breeding can do quick enough. Those sentences contradict each-other.

ChrisLomont 6y ago
By your reasoning every product we produce would converge to a single super Twinkie of maximal profit, and we’d make nothing nutritious. Since this is clearly obviously false, being a straw man, there is no reason we’d not also engineer many varieties of food. You also keep repeating that somehow seed control is going to make things expensive, despite decades of it doing the exact opposite, hence vastly lower consumer expenditures. So, once you stop avoiding actual economics as demonstrated econometrically, your arguments fall apart. > Those sentences contradict each-other. No, they don’t. You think extremely black and white, missing important nuance. Certainly selective breeding could randomly in one generation create anything, but the odds are too low to make it practical, thus GMO, by increasing the odds, improves the expected outcome, which is what we care about. And certainly mutation could make our changes irrelevant in one generation, but we hope that it doesn’t. There’s no one size fits all rate of evolution that supports your simplistic claim that one has to outpace the other. We only engineer in the hopes that it doesn’t. If you really want everything explained this carefully so you don’t inject extreme positions I’ll do it. There’s no reason to continue if you’re more interested in repeating the same claims regardless of evidence. If you want to continue please cite some decent evidence to back your claims.
- rbecker 6y ago
  > Since this is clearly obviously false, being a straw man, there is no reason we’d not also engineer many varieties of food. And yet tomatoes are getting more and more tasteless. > You also keep repeating that somehow seed control is going to make things expensive Nowhere in my posts did I claim that - the terms "seed control" or "expensive" aren't even in my posts. I claimed that the requirement to use GMO seeds to remain economically viable will concentrate the control over the food supply into a handful of corporations. If you take the smallest glance at agribusiness, you'll see consolidation is exactly what's already happening, and GMO will make it worse. > No, they don’t. You think extremely black and white, missing important nuance. Certainly selective breeding could randomly in one generation create anything, but the odds are too low to make it practical, thus GMO, by increasing the odds, improves the expected outcome, which is what we care about. So.. genetic engineering is vastly faster than natural or artificial selection? I.e. my original claim? Oh, sorry, I forgot to add the important nuance of on average.

ChrisLomont 6y ago

By your reasoning every product we produce would converge to a single super Twinkie of maximal profit, and we’d make nothing nutritious. Since this is clearly obviously false, being a straw man, there is no reason we’d not also engineer many varieties of food. You also keep repeating that somehow seed control is going to make things expensive, despite decades of it doing the exact opposite, hence vastly lower consumer expenditures. So, once you stop avoiding actual economics as demonstrated econometrically, your arguments fall apart. > Those sentences contradict each-other. No, they don’t. You think extremely black and white, missing important nuance. Certainly selective breeding could randomly in one generation create anything, but the odds are too low to make it practical, thus GMO, by increasing the odds, improves the expected outcome, which is what we care about. And certainly mutation could make our changes irrelevant in one generation, but we hope that it doesn’t. There’s no one size fits all rate of evolution that supports your simplistic claim that one has to outpace the other. We only engineer in the hopes that it doesn’t. If you really want everything explained this carefully so you don’t inject extreme positions I’ll do it. There’s no reason to continue if you’re more interested in repeating the same claims regardless of evidence. If you want to continue please cite some decent evidence to back your claims.

rbecker 6y ago
> Since this is clearly obviously false, being a straw man, there is no reason we’d not also engineer many varieties of food. And yet tomatoes are getting more and more tasteless. > You also keep repeating that somehow seed control is going to make things expensive Nowhere in my posts did I claim that - the terms "seed control" or "expensive" aren't even in my posts. I claimed that the requirement to use GMO seeds to remain economically viable will concentrate the control over the food supply into a handful of corporations. If you take the smallest glance at agribusiness, you'll see consolidation is exactly what's already happening, and GMO will make it worse. > No, they don’t. You think extremely black and white, missing important nuance. Certainly selective breeding could randomly in one generation create anything, but the odds are too low to make it practical, thus GMO, by increasing the odds, improves the expected outcome, which is what we care about. So.. genetic engineering is vastly faster than natural or artificial selection? I.e. my original claim? Oh, sorry, I forgot to add the important nuance of on average.