Quote:
Originally Posted by Corkey
Bee hive colony collapse is directly effected by Monsanto's GMO's. Now if one can do with out fruit, nuts, or any other plant pollenated by bees, go for it. Personally I don't like scurvy.
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Part of the problem with talking about genetic engineering is that there's the science and then there's the business. I, and I think the other few voices here who are actually in favor of genetic engineering, are talking about the *science*. If Monsanto went out of business this very afternoon, it would not change one whit the promise of genetic engineering nor would it change the science behind it. I am not going to defend Monsanto. I am going to defend genetic engineering because the science behind it is extraordinarily sound.
As I said the other day, genetic engineering is the same thing we've been doing since we got the clever idea of trying to domesticate some plants and animals. The primary differences, the only real significant differences, are that we can do very targeted manipulations instead of, quite frankly, kind of stumbling about in the dark *and* we can cross the species barrier. That's it. Other than that, genetic engineering is the same process as breeders use except the traditional way is slow and only slightly better than random natural selection. For example, a while ago a Russian scientist did a truly elegant experiment to test the hypothesis that the domestic dog was closely related to the grey wolf and that humans selected for friendliness towards humans.
To test this, he took foxes (which are still canines) and only allowed those animals that were most friendly to humans to breed. Within startlingly few generations (less than 20) the foxes had floppy ears, more puppy-like behavior, and instead of the more uniform coats of the fox you got the more color-varied coat we see with domesticated dogs. All of these follow-on effects weren't being selected for, those genes just came along for the ride. So in the ways that selection has been done for the last 15000 years or so, lots of genes have come along for the ride.
People think that because one is 'natural' and the other is 'science' that one is better or different than the other but they are really not. Yes, we're taking genes from fish and putting them in strawberries or tomatoes but we're not taking the fish genome, we're taking a specific gene and moving it across the species barrier and that's all. The reason--the ONLY reason--that nature didn't hit upon the solution of anti-freeze for either strawberries or tomatoes is that both species (the wild variant obviously) came up with a solution for dealing with cold, namely seeds. They didn't *need* anti-freeze in the wild because they did not evolve in locations that were cold long enough for resistance to cold to be selected for and seeds did the job. Again, that's the ONLY reason why those species didn't hit on the trick the fish did--they never had the correct problem for which anti-freeze is the solution. Nature is not guided and it has no foresight. It can't see down the road and it can't back up and take a better path when some species hits upon something clever. At no time did nature think "anti-freeze in strawberries would be good, wait on second thought no". There's nothing to do that thinking. Also nature is not exactly concerned with maximizing species. It is simply concerned with genes being passed down generation to generation. Nature doesn't act for the good of the species, it doesn't even act for the good of the individual, nature acts for the good of the genes.
If we want to talk about Monsanto and its business practices that's one subject and I'll likely agree with a lot that is said. But we're talking about genetic engineering specifically, not what Monsanto is doing with it and the idea that there is good, solid, scientific support for an anti-GMO stance simply isn't true.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health...people_.2.html
Cheers
Aj