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From the point pf view of a biologist, his argument against GMO is pretty weak. He is essentially saying that we don't know, therefore there could be a large n

by pcrh 11y ago

From the point pf view of a biologist, his argument against GMO is pretty weak. He is essentially saying that we don't know, therefore there could be a large negative consequence. However, he has failed to grasp, or educate himself sufficiently, that gene transfer between organisms is in fact a common occurrence in natural ecosystems [0]. Further, at this moment at least, the genes that are being transferred artificially are in general not genes that would cause havoc if they somehow became mobilized from the species into which they were introduced. By way of example, the protein Bt confers resistance to insect predation,it is originally derived from a bacterium that killed insects in a parasitic cycle [1]. Plants, generally, have hundreds or thousands of ways of resisting insect predation, and adding one more to the mix is not going to devastate any ecosystem, at least not in the long term. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_thuringiensis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_thuringiensis

littletimmy 11y ago
The argument that GMOs are OK because something similar happens in nature is a poor argument. Just because there exists in nature Process X that leads to Outcome Y, does not mean that a man-made Process Z that also leads to Outcome Y is good. Nature has a way of eliminating failures; humans have a way to offload failures off to someone else.
- dvanduzer 11y ago
  Humans are part of nature, and you might be confusing arguments with logic. The effective aspect of the scientific method that separates it from scientism is falsifiability. The comparison for falsification here is "GMO farming" versus "status quo farming"; nowhere is nature involved.
  - Tycho 11y ago
    I think the argument is that 'status quo farming' engages in localised tinkering in a way which is similar to what occurs in nature, whereas GMOs are examples of top-down engineering which will be imposed across the whole planet.
evanpw 11y ago
I am not a biologist, but I think of the ecological risk of GMO as something akin to AI risk: Not a serious risk at the current level of technology or in the near future, not sufficiently dangerous to stop research or forego the benefits of today's versions, but serious enough that it would be good for a few people to be thinking about it right now.
- a_bonobo 11y ago
  > but serious enough that it would be good for a few people to be thinking about it right now. Of course, GM-technology is a huge area of tools, tools which are being used in all kinds of situations and outcomes: modifying bacteria to create insulin or washing powder ingredients (both of these have been done on an industrial scale for decades now); modifying plants to have a better defense against various pests (being done with Bt cotton and soy IIRC), or just to glow in the dark (there's a kickstarter), etc. These are all more or less "good" outcomes of GM, but you could also use GM for "bad" - you could make maize express a human neurotoxin and spread that plant in order to attack a country (a not very directed attack). The only thing that's stopping you is that it's still very hard, expensive and time-consuming to do so.
darawk 11y ago
"Further, at this moment at least, the genes that are being transferred artificially are in general not genes that would cause havoc if they somehow became mobilized from the species into which they were introduced" You are assuming that we have sufficient comprehension of these genes and their effects to make such claims definitively. And while we may have a very high degree of confidence in that, say enough confidence to entrust my life, your life, or hundreds of individual lives - entrusting the wellbeing of the entire planet requires a different scale of rigor. And that, I think, is the essence of Taleb's argument. 99.99% sure might be enough to get a drug approved, and it well should be, because only some fraction of the population is at risk. But because DNA is inherently self-propagating, a mistake can have extremely far-reaching consequences, and as such the tolerable level of risk must be orders of magnitude lower. This has been Taleb's essential, consistent thesis throughout his career. That humans are bad at assessing the probability of relatively unlikely events, and that when those events are extremely catastrophic, that cognitive deficiency can be disastrous.
x5n1 11y ago
This is totally ignoring the fact that nature doesn't know wtf it is doing either. Your argument is an appeal to nature, that if it's natural it's good. "Even if we can agree that some things are natural and some are not, what follows from this? The answer is: nothing. There is no factual reason to suppose that what is natural is good (or at least better) and what is unnatural is bad (or at least worse)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature Gene transfer may have already screwed up the planet once: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-single-act-evolution-nearly-wiped-out-all-life-earth-180950341/?no-ist http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-single-act-evol...
- pcrh 11y ago
  My argument isn't that because something happens in nature it's OK. But rather it is closer to the argument that the Large Hadron Collider will not create a black hole that the whole planet will be sucked into. In the case of the LHC, we know that particles collide at the speeds planned all the time, yet this does not lead to black holes erupting everywhere. In the case of the gene transfers currently done, we know precisely what they are and they are already part of the environment, having been derived from other natural organisms. The risk of the current crop of engineered plants becoming super-weeds that choke the planet is not zero, but also not plausible from a biological perspective. That someone could engineer a super weed is of course possible, as would be engineering the flu virus to produce cholera toxin. So, precautions should indeed be taken when releasing engineered organisms.
  - x5n1 11y ago
    LHC's website states: "Whatever the LHC will do, Nature has already done many times over during the lifetime of the Earth and other astronomical bodies." This case is not analogous because in this planet's history there have been 6 different extinction events. So in order for it to be analogous, they would have to say that we know a few times in the past this has caused a black hole, but this is totally different. Passing genes from one thing into another can very easily have unintended consequences as they do in nature. The link above is an example of what can happen. By the time you figure it out, perhaps it will be too late. The effects might be local or they might be global, there is no way to predict these things and we can not say with certainty that they don't happen, because we have more than one example of where they do. In fact human intelligence may be an accident of horizontal gene transfer. These are not games that are worth playing in my opinion. You are what you eat. If that stuff it in your food supply, it just might end up in you and the bacteria and other life that lives in you. Another really big problem is dependence. Once you come to depend on these things, just like we are now with carbon producing technology, you can not pull the plug. Even if you know that it's causing harm, the social mechanism needed to pull the plug don't exist in free society and if they do they are very slow moving. That's another big reason to not go down this road, because it's impossible to turn back because of all the people that will die because you can't produce the expected crop yields.
sitkack 11y ago
If a system is complex and we don't fully understand it, shouldn't we take caution? I have seen arguments, from similar positions of authority and nearly every time an expert chimed in, they were eventually to either be bullshitting or proven wrong.

by pcrh 11y ago

littletimmy 11y ago

The argument that GMOs are OK because something similar happens in nature is a poor argument. Just because there exists in nature Process X that leads to Outcome Y, does not mean that a man-made Process Z that also leads to Outcome Y is good. Nature has a way of eliminating failures; humans have a way to offload failures off to someone else.

dvanduzer 11y ago
Humans are part of nature, and you might be confusing arguments with logic. The effective aspect of the scientific method that separates it from scientism is falsifiability. The comparison for falsification here is "GMO farming" versus "status quo farming"; nowhere is nature involved.
- Tycho 11y ago
  I think the argument is that 'status quo farming' engages in localised tinkering in a way which is similar to what occurs in nature, whereas GMOs are examples of top-down engineering which will be imposed across the whole planet.

evanpw 11y ago

I am not a biologist, but I think of the ecological risk of GMO as something akin to AI risk: Not a serious risk at the current level of technology or in the near future, not sufficiently dangerous to stop research or forego the benefits of today's versions, but serious enough that it would be good for a few people to be thinking about it right now.

a_bonobo 11y ago
> but serious enough that it would be good for a few people to be thinking about it right now. Of course, GM-technology is a huge area of tools, tools which are being used in all kinds of situations and outcomes: modifying bacteria to create insulin or washing powder ingredients (both of these have been done on an industrial scale for decades now); modifying plants to have a better defense against various pests (being done with Bt cotton and soy IIRC), or just to glow in the dark (there's a kickstarter), etc. These are all more or less "good" outcomes of GM, but you could also use GM for "bad" - you could make maize express a human neurotoxin and spread that plant in order to attack a country (a not very directed attack). The only thing that's stopping you is that it's still very hard, expensive and time-consuming to do so.

darawk 11y ago

"Further, at this moment at least, the genes that are being transferred artificially are in general not genes that would cause havoc if they somehow became mobilized from the species into which they were introduced" You are assuming that we have sufficient comprehension of these genes and their effects to make such claims definitively. And while we may have a very high degree of confidence in that, say enough confidence to entrust my life, your life, or hundreds of individual lives - entrusting the wellbeing of the entire planet requires a different scale of rigor. And that, I think, is the essence of Taleb's argument. 99.99% sure might be enough to get a drug approved, and it well should be, because only some fraction of the population is at risk. But because DNA is inherently self-propagating, a mistake can have extremely far-reaching consequences, and as such the tolerable level of risk must be orders of magnitude lower. This has been Taleb's essential, consistent thesis throughout his career. That humans are bad at assessing the probability of relatively unlikely events, and that when those events are extremely catastrophic, that cognitive deficiency can be disastrous.

x5n1 11y ago

This is totally ignoring the fact that nature doesn't know wtf it is doing either. Your argument is an appeal to nature, that if it's natural it's good. "Even if we can agree that some things are natural and some are not, what follows from this? The answer is: nothing. There is no factual reason to suppose that what is natural is good (or at least better) and what is unnatural is bad (or at least worse)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature Gene transfer may have already screwed up the planet once: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-single-act-evolution-nearly-wiped-out-all-life-earth-180950341/?no-ist http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-single-act-evol...

pcrh 11y ago
My argument isn't that because something happens in nature it's OK. But rather it is closer to the argument that the Large Hadron Collider will not create a black hole that the whole planet will be sucked into. In the case of the LHC, we know that particles collide at the speeds planned all the time, yet this does not lead to black holes erupting everywhere. In the case of the gene transfers currently done, we know precisely what they are and they are already part of the environment, having been derived from other natural organisms. The risk of the current crop of engineered plants becoming super-weeds that choke the planet is not zero, but also not plausible from a biological perspective. That someone could engineer a super weed is of course possible, as would be engineering the flu virus to produce cholera toxin. So, precautions should indeed be taken when releasing engineered organisms.
- x5n1 11y ago
  LHC's website states: "Whatever the LHC will do, Nature has already done many times over during the lifetime of the Earth and other astronomical bodies." This case is not analogous because in this planet's history there have been 6 different extinction events. So in order for it to be analogous, they would have to say that we know a few times in the past this has caused a black hole, but this is totally different. Passing genes from one thing into another can very easily have unintended consequences as they do in nature. The link above is an example of what can happen. By the time you figure it out, perhaps it will be too late. The effects might be local or they might be global, there is no way to predict these things and we can not say with certainty that they don't happen, because we have more than one example of where they do. In fact human intelligence may be an accident of horizontal gene transfer. These are not games that are worth playing in my opinion. You are what you eat. If that stuff it in your food supply, it just might end up in you and the bacteria and other life that lives in you. Another really big problem is dependence. Once you come to depend on these things, just like we are now with carbon producing technology, you can not pull the plug. Even if you know that it's causing harm, the social mechanism needed to pull the plug don't exist in free society and if they do they are very slow moving. That's another big reason to not go down this road, because it's impossible to turn back because of all the people that will die because you can't produce the expected crop yields.

sitkack 11y ago

If a system is complex and we don't fully understand it, shouldn't we take caution? I have seen arguments, from similar positions of authority and nearly every time an expert chimed in, they were eventually to either be bullshitting or proven wrong.