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There are no plants engineered to not produce plantable seeds. There's a long-standing moratorium on terminator genes that is generally observed. The reason wh

There are no plants engineered to not produce plantable seeds. There's a long-standing moratorium on terminator genes that is generally observed. The reason why you have to rebuy your seeds from the companies is because of hybrid vigor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosis It's still not 100% understand how this actually happens (heaps models and results exist), but when you cross two reasonably distantly related parents, the offspring F1 will outperform both. However, if you then backcross the offspring again, you'll lose that hybrid vigor, and your F2 behaves like crap again (often the F2 is also all over the shop in the phenotype, which makes harvesting annoying with different flowering times, different sizes etc.) That's the whole business model of the seed companies: keep on remaking F1s, sell them. There's nothing nefarious or GM about this, it goes back to the 50s and 60s with Norman Borlaug making hybrid F1s in wheat triggering the green revolution.

bitshiftfaced 4y ago
I never knew about this. That's interesting. So then hybrid vigor is the reason farmers don't grow their own seeds, which contradicts the article. Obviously the OSS people would know this, so then the purpose must be more about encouraging plant diversity and allowing more companies to sell these varieties to farmers.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  Hybrid vigor is also why eugenic nightmares are misconstructed. If some nefarious dictator wanted genetic supersoldiers, he'd breed them by hybridizing sickly inbred strains, and then prohibiting the supersoldiers from themselves reproducing.
  - trallnag 4y ago
    can you explain further or maybe link to something? Eugenics can also mean eradicating certain unwanted elements like illnesses or black skin.
    - bluGill 4y ago
      Hybrid vigior is known to apply to plants. It isn't clear if it applies to humans. While it is known that marrying your sibling (brother/sister) is bad, and near cousins are a questionable, is it better (for your children) is you are very distant? Should you look to a different continent for a spouse? I don't know for sure, but the evidence I've seen doesn't support that. Unlike with plants, so long as your are more than 5th cousins away (I'm not sure where the line is, so I picked something distant enough that I think everyone will agree it is too far) there doesn't seem to be any advantage in getting more distant.
imtringued 4y ago
What's nefarious is being coerced to take on foreign debt to buy these seeds and then watching the country fall apart because the food is for domestic consumption and not for export, which means there will be a trade deficit as the seed exporter is not obliged to import products from your country (which violates Say‘s Law that so many people seem to hang onto). So your only option is to send all the bright people in your country to the seed exporting country so they can earn domestic currency so that your country can afford basic food production. You can then chalk all of this up to corruption and incompetence and government mismanagement even though it is quite literally just a trade deficit that could be solved by having the other country import your products. This is why Keynes suggested his Bancor system, because it gets two countries to fix their trade imbalances instead of pointing fingers and starting a blame game that helps nobody.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - shawn-butler 4y ago
    Says someone who I would guess has never been hungry a day in his or her privileged life? There is a valid argument to be made that food scarcity, like housing and medical care should not be subject to capitalist profit-taking. That some information is so beneficial to the common good that it can never be a trade secret. Also your tone is downright disrespectful and should be moderated.
bluGill 4y ago
Hybrid was discovered in the 1930s. WWII needed all the farm production the US could get to feed the rest of the world, so hybrid crops were pushed heavily on all farmers. Since then few farmers have gone back.
robwwilliams 4y ago
It is not just the hybrid vigor. In fact, I would say the main advantage of the F1 hybrids is actually lower phenotypic variance of the crop. Sure you will have hybrid vigor in an F1, but you can get that vigor with a four-way cross of pure inbred lines too. But the four-way progeny will also be highly variable. If I were a farmer I too would want the consistent low variance of F1 isogenic progeny. An inbred line optimized for environment X could work. In some (rare) cases engineered inbreds can be even better than F1s but they may not work well out in the real world of environmental flux.

bitshiftfaced 4y ago

I never knew about this. That's interesting. So then hybrid vigor is the reason farmers don't grow their own seeds, which contradicts the article. Obviously the OSS people would know this, so then the purpose must be more about encouraging plant diversity and allowing more companies to sell these varieties to farmers.

pfdietz 4y ago
Hybrid vigor is also why eugenic nightmares are misconstructed. If some nefarious dictator wanted genetic supersoldiers, he'd breed them by hybridizing sickly inbred strains, and then prohibiting the supersoldiers from themselves reproducing.
- trallnag 4y ago
  can you explain further or maybe link to something? Eugenics can also mean eradicating certain unwanted elements like illnesses or black skin.
  - bluGill 4y ago
    Hybrid vigior is known to apply to plants. It isn't clear if it applies to humans. While it is known that marrying your sibling (brother/sister) is bad, and near cousins are a questionable, is it better (for your children) is you are very distant? Should you look to a different continent for a spouse? I don't know for sure, but the evidence I've seen doesn't support that. Unlike with plants, so long as your are more than 5th cousins away (I'm not sure where the line is, so I picked something distant enough that I think everyone will agree it is too far) there doesn't seem to be any advantage in getting more distant.

imtringued 4y ago

What's nefarious is being coerced to take on foreign debt to buy these seeds and then watching the country fall apart because the food is for domestic consumption and not for export, which means there will be a trade deficit as the seed exporter is not obliged to import products from your country (which violates Say‘s Law that so many people seem to hang onto). So your only option is to send all the bright people in your country to the seed exporting country so they can earn domestic currency so that your country can afford basic food production. You can then chalk all of this up to corruption and incompetence and government mismanagement even though it is quite literally just a trade deficit that could be solved by having the other country import your products. This is why Keynes suggested his Bancor system, because it gets two countries to fix their trade imbalances instead of pointing fingers and starting a blame game that helps nobody.

pfdietz 4y ago
[flagged]
- shawn-butler 4y ago
  Says someone who I would guess has never been hungry a day in his or her privileged life? There is a valid argument to be made that food scarcity, like housing and medical care should not be subject to capitalist profit-taking. That some information is so beneficial to the common good that it can never be a trade secret. Also your tone is downright disrespectful and should be moderated.

bluGill 4y ago

Hybrid was discovered in the 1930s. WWII needed all the farm production the US could get to feed the rest of the world, so hybrid crops were pushed heavily on all farmers. Since then few farmers have gone back.

robwwilliams 4y ago

It is not just the hybrid vigor. In fact, I would say the main advantage of the F1 hybrids is actually lower phenotypic variance of the crop. Sure you will have hybrid vigor in an F1, but you can get that vigor with a four-way cross of pure inbred lines too. But the four-way progeny will also be highly variable. If I were a farmer I too would want the consistent low variance of F1 isogenic progeny. An inbred line optimized for environment X could work. In some (rare) cases engineered inbreds can be even better than F1s but they may not work well out in the real world of environmental flux.