I'm generally against GMOs in the food supply, but I'm actually not too worried about this one, because it sounds like it's just a straight-up deletion.
(ETA: I mean, as long as it doesn't have a net negative impact on pig welfare -- it's not just about food and environmental safety.)
Yeah but people don't care. They will find a way to demonize it which would likely be throwing it in with GMO's. I'm not against GMO's personally. A lot of lies spread about them.
I assume you know some programming since you're on this site. Have you never 'deleted' a line of code someone elss wrote to fix a bug except something else depended on that line so now you have an even larger bug?
Or the flip side; have you ever deleted a line of code that did nothing but cause problems, and the result of the deletion was that the product improved?
Either one is possible. When the risk is cancer and other serious illness would you not think a multi-decade experiment is needee before feeding it to humans? Much like a regression and user acceptance test would be at a grand scale if the risk is extended app outage or significant revenue loss.
The greater risk is mass starvation due to inhibited food production. Cancer can take a few years to kill you; starvation takes a few weeks.
We have been genetically modifying things to feed ourselves for thousands of years. We bred features into dogs so they would be better at finding food (e.g. beagles), is that not a form of genetic modification? We grafted strains of grass on to our wheat to make it drought resistant, isn't that genetic modification too?
I'd challenge you to find me some kind of food that humans haven't genetically modified. The experiment has been on going for a long time and human life expectancy is at the highest it's ever been, seems to be working out well!
There is no food supply issue,gmo does not avert any starvation crisis.
Breeding is as much of a genetic modification as reproduction is. The genes are modified through indirect natural means. That isn't the same as directly selecting and modifying specific genes.
All food before the past 60 years was not genetically modified,that is to say humans did not modify specific genes. Organisms were interbred and the new genes although different,we did not edit them directly.
Back to the programming analogy - editing settings in an application (natural means) and modifying it or even editing the source code isn't the same as editing the machine code after reverse engineering it without even fully understanding what instructions are supported by the architecture.
If someone edits machine code to fix a bug for an arch nobody fully understands then you should run a full regression test and UAT before deploying.
If you try to solve the hunger problem by producing more food... then what? Now you have an even larger population to feed.
To fix it, we need to reduce the birthrate. In the meantime, we can try not throwing away so much food. (There's already enough to feed everybody, it's mostly a distribution problem.)
I think this is more of an economic issue. Poor countries, or better stated their population, can't afford to pay for the food. Exact example would be during the Irish famine Ireland was still exporting food the GB as they were able to pay for it. Got the example from "Development as Freedom" [1]
Yep! But gene deletions happen in nature all the time, via even single nucleotide mutations that disable an entire gene. Mutations might be more or less likely for various genes, genes might have backup copies elsewhere, and what is even "a gene" can be a bit fuzzy, so it's not a perfect analog of what happens in nature... but the similarity to natural, common processes makes me feel a bit easier about this from a precautionary principle perspective.
(Compare, for example, to transgenic GMOs. I suppose a salmon gene being transported to a tomato plant could happen in nature, but it seems extraordinarily unlikely...)
Why is sentiment irrational? I want to eat genetically unmodified pig/plants like my ancestors did. And you know what? If I had enough money I can do that. So the poor and those oblivious to the risks of consuming food modified by humans as an experiment at the genetic level become live experiments. Might be centuries before we know of any unintended consequences?
Why am I irrational to observe living things have an order to how they reproduce and mutate? When change to the order is made not at a macro level but directly at the very foundation of the living thing then isn't it wise to wait a very long time and observe the consequence?
Why the rush? The world already throws away more than enough food to feed the hungry,it's not a supply issue. If beef and grazing animal consumption is eliminated things become much more pleasant.
Why is this debate always seen through a lense of science vs ignorant pseudoscience point?
I think it's pretty irrational to care about the consequences of what we eat centuries from now given that you'd be dead centuries - ~1 century. I mean if that is the case surely you can't sleep at night since the Andromeda galaxy will collide with the Milky way in ~4 billion years.
That's a strawman argument. Few centuries is a very reasonable timeline to worry about. I know people who have seen close to 3 quarters of a century of their decendants and are mindful of how their decisions affected their youngest.
I am worried about how people will be affected by what we their ancestors ate and ourselves as well. By your argument polluting the enviornment is also ok since catastrophic events won't happen in my life time.
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[ 15.1 ms ] story [ 608 ms ] thread(ETA: I mean, as long as it doesn't have a net negative impact on pig welfare -- it's not just about food and environmental safety.)
We have been genetically modifying things to feed ourselves for thousands of years. We bred features into dogs so they would be better at finding food (e.g. beagles), is that not a form of genetic modification? We grafted strains of grass on to our wheat to make it drought resistant, isn't that genetic modification too?
I'd challenge you to find me some kind of food that humans haven't genetically modified. The experiment has been on going for a long time and human life expectancy is at the highest it's ever been, seems to be working out well!
Breeding is as much of a genetic modification as reproduction is. The genes are modified through indirect natural means. That isn't the same as directly selecting and modifying specific genes.
All food before the past 60 years was not genetically modified,that is to say humans did not modify specific genes. Organisms were interbred and the new genes although different,we did not edit them directly.
Back to the programming analogy - editing settings in an application (natural means) and modifying it or even editing the source code isn't the same as editing the machine code after reverse engineering it without even fully understanding what instructions are supported by the architecture.
If someone edits machine code to fix a bug for an arch nobody fully understands then you should run a full regression test and UAT before deploying.
To fix it, we need to reduce the birthrate. In the meantime, we can try not throwing away so much food. (There's already enough to feed everybody, it's mostly a distribution problem.)
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Development-as-Freedom-Amartya-Sen/dp...
(Compare, for example, to transgenic GMOs. I suppose a salmon gene being transported to a tomato plant could happen in nature, but it seems extraordinarily unlikely...)
Why is sentiment irrational? I want to eat genetically unmodified pig/plants like my ancestors did. And you know what? If I had enough money I can do that. So the poor and those oblivious to the risks of consuming food modified by humans as an experiment at the genetic level become live experiments. Might be centuries before we know of any unintended consequences?
Why am I irrational to observe living things have an order to how they reproduce and mutate? When change to the order is made not at a macro level but directly at the very foundation of the living thing then isn't it wise to wait a very long time and observe the consequence?
Why the rush? The world already throws away more than enough food to feed the hungry,it's not a supply issue. If beef and grazing animal consumption is eliminated things become much more pleasant.
Why is this debate always seen through a lense of science vs ignorant pseudoscience point?