Genetically Modified Rice Makes More Food, Less Greenhouse Gas 295
Applehu Akbar writes: A team of researchers at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences has engineered a barley gene into rice, producing a variety that yields 50% more grain while producing 90% less of the powerful greenhouse gas methane. The new rice pulls off this trick by putting more of its energy into top growth. In countries which depend on rice as a staple, this would add up to a really large amount of increased rice and foregone methane.
Well, sure, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well, sure, but... (Score:5, Funny)
... what's it taste like?
chicken, of course.
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That'd go perfectly with GM chicken that tastes like rice.
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I can see the future now... someone eating GM chicken on a bed of GM rice driving his GM truck.
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It only causes cancer in California.
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Since I am not California, indeed few people are, sounds like nothing to worry about.
Re: Well, sure, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Since the ecosystem already contains barley and rice, what possible harm can come from a plant that incorporates DNA from both?
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What you describe seems more likely in hybridization than in GMO. At least in GMO we know what we're doing; in hybridization, we slap two things together and see what happens.
Re: Well, sure, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
The trouble is, like most anti-GMO people, you have a fundamental lack of understanding of what genes actually do.
They mutate by themselves for one thing. Should we be running around ensuring that no natural mutations occur? No because that would be an insane exercise and would fly in the face of the fact that DNA has been doing shit for a billion years before you came along to worry about it.
Intermingling crops? Are the crops you're talking about native to the area you're in? Are those crops naturally occurring strains of plants or have they been only in human cultivation for a few thousand years?
I'm not gonna say we _can't_ kill the planet by messing with species, but I will say with the utmost confidence that we won't.
Re: Well, sure, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
I think we should just go back in time and ban breeding altogether, I mean before we domesticated dogs or so.
Because that's what breeding is, genetic modification, just slow. To be fair, being slow it also gives you a longer heads up if some apples go pear shaped.
MUtation rate are known (Score:3)
Yes stuff mutate. That is how we got from bacteria to human over billion of year. The key here is that function of protein evolved too, and sometime mutation are deleterious, and sometime function changes. But if both are sufficiently different, the probability to g
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and, naturally, I will now get modded down to (-1, Troll/Flamebait/whatever) for daring to state the truth
But here's the thing, and this is a really important thing: while some things you say are true, most of what you're saying is at this point speculation. And honestly, you sound more than a bit unhinged to me.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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It should, perhaps, be noted that if we were to keep the stuff in the lab until we'd tested it thoroughly for 1000 years, we STILL would "never know the truth about the long-term health effects of eating GMO foods until if and when a pattern emerges".
Or anything else, either. Patterns are what we use to decide that something is real or imaginary.
Re:Well, sure, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Well, sure, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
But you forgot the first rule of the food religion: If it's not natural, then it tastes like chemicals causes cancer.
Definition of natural meaning it was grown on cow shit and never pasteurized.
Re:Well, sure, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
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They do have the right to know - all they have to do is convince their non-GMO suppliers to choose to label their products as non-GMO.
If you've ever done any grocery shopping, you'll know this is already somewhat common.
Just like how many dairies sell their milk in containers prominently labeled "These cows were not given bST".
Re:Well, sure, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
...except the variety of a particular type of plant matters.
The obvious one here is that it has different nutritional content.
Someone in another forum also brought up the issue of allergies. This really isn't rice anymore. It's a hybrid grain. It's really much more like tritcale and they do label for that.
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Do charlatans have a right to stir up fear to enrich themselves via books and useless substitutes, with no evidence of a problem whatsoever and tons of evidence in safety?
Pardon me, I have to go buy gluten-free cheeseburger buns. It must be a valid concern, right? Also, I am getting a vaccine without thimerosol or adjuvants, whew!
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The whole GMO issue has nothing to do with feeding the poor. GMO grains cost more so the starving proles can't afford to buy the seeds, they just save their current seeds for next year.
Just three corporations control one quarter of the world's seed market (Monsanto, Syngenta and DuPont) and biodiversity is not high on their agenda. National seed lists in many countries make it illegal to buy and sell unusual varieties and it is prohibitively expensive to keep seeds on the list. Agribusinesses require farmers buying seed to sign contracts that prevent them saving and replanting seeds at a later date. As this is difficult to enforce, seeds are now being genetically modified to be sterile af
Re:Well, sure, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
Being the libertarian that I am, normally I would be on board with that, except for one major problem: There's only so much room on the food labels, and there's so much other important information that could be put there instead, but isn't.
Take me for example: I have IgA nephropathy and am in stage 4 CKD. I have to be extra careful about how much potassium and phosphorus I consume. Yet most labels don't show potassium, and hardly any show phosphorus (at best you get a %DV count, which gives you a very poor idea of its actual contents.) The manufacturers don't have a problem giving you these figures if you ask, but they don't put them on the labels because the package is only so large.
A complete nutrition information chart given to the manufacturers from a food lab is very lengthy, and no food label on just about anything would be able to accomodate it all, so they typically only put on their labels what the FDA says they must.
That said, I'd be pissed as hell if the FDA started requiring immaterial facts such as a GMO label that affects nobody one way or another, but ignored electrolytes that can kill people like me.
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If there is an app for me to compare brick & mortar items with online items in real time, it seems we are living in a time where it should be trivial and cheap to quickly access all the information you would ever want to know about an item before you purchase it.
Re:Well, sure, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
There is plenty of room on the label for a tinyurl.
If you were to accept that you needed a smartphone in order to read food labels (a big "IF") - then the entire label could be replaced by a QRCode which links to a page with *ALL* of the information. The actual label could then be simplified to a really simple "UNHEALTHY/HEALTH" number going from 1..10 as proposed previously to simplify things for the 95% of people who aren't going to read anything more detailed than that anyway.
For people like you - I'd imagine that using a phone to get vitally important data that would never fit on a label is less of an imposition. Furthermore, it would be easy to have software provided for you that would allow you to scan the product and get a personalized "OK TO EAT"/"DO NOT EAT!" indicator as set by your doctor.
Come to think of it - you wouldn't even need any extra printing at all...pretty much all labelled food already has a bar-code on it - it would be simple enough to prepend a standard URL onto that number to turn it into something that a special app could use to pull all of the necessary information. Legislation to make product vendors add this information would then be simple enough.
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I think I said that in my last paragraph.
Policy should be based on facts (Score:5, Insightful)
However, I also believe people have a right to their own paranoid delusions
That depends heavily on exactly how harmful the delusion is. Some are harmless, others not so much. But public policy should be based on actual facts and real evidence.
therefore they have a right to know whether or not the food they buy contains GMO ingredients
Why do they have a "right to know"? Is there any actual evidence that they are harmful even a little bit? If the answer is yes then maybe you have an argument. But since the answer so far is an unequivocal no, despite large amounts of research into the question, then I cannot agree with you. I prefer my public policy decisions to be made on scientific facts and not made on ill informed paranoia.
If there is a market for people who want to know if a food is GMO-free then you will see labeling to that effect on some products and that is fine. Although if they are truly paranoid I'm not sure how they could ever be sure the label was actually true.
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What about labeling food with 'black people were involved in production of this food (not in Soylent Green meaning)' to give informed choice to KKK people to not buy such products? But at same time we are fine to have notifications of 'rabbi was involved in production of this food', to given informed choice to some other people to not buy other food.
It is has nothing to do with religion or common sense. It is just that some groups/religions had enough power to make their arbitrary requirements ok, while oth
Re:Well, sure, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
therefore they have a right to know whether or not the food they buy contains GMO ingredients
Then they should only buy food labeled as "GMO Free," which is manufactured specifically for people with those kinds of concerns.
the federal government has a duty to endure that foods and other products are properly labeled, which in this case, would be a large, conspicuous "GMO" on the front label.
Large, conspicuous, and the front of the label? You aren't interested in people being able to inform themselves. If that were the case, you would be satisfied with a line in the ingredients. Your goal is to make GMO scary to people, with a large scary label on the front.
Not really (Score:4, Interesting)
As for labels, that's all well and good for the top 10%. What about the other 90%? You know how we found out sodium nitrate causes cancer? It wasn't the FDA. It was a farmer feeding old herring to cows and noticing they kept dying of liver cancer. The food industry doesn't exactly have the best track record....
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I couldn't get past the first couple sentences.
You realize, I hope, that the MSG scare was a scam. Studies have been done. MSG isn't some scary, dangerous chemical.
That's not really the point (Score:2)
Re:Not really (Score:4, Insightful)
companies use all sorts of tricks to hide stuff like that. Soup companies use yeast to put MSG in Soup without reporting it (it's a by product of the yeast, which serves no other purpose).
And recently there has been the phenomenon where companies try to hide things by using confusing nomenclature. E.g., "evaporated cane juice" in products with "no added sugar." [foodnavigator-usa.com] Yeah -- "cane juice" -- it must be good for you, since they call it "juice"! Well, it's just another form of sugar... processed slightly differently, but still basically sucrose.
Basically, it's just a game... try to make things sound "natural" and "wholesome" when they're basically the same old crap. Same thing goes for "brown rice syrup" used as a sweetener in many things... basically sugar. But it's "brown rice"!! (Of course, brown rice also often has elevated levels of arsenic [go.com] and other things... but hey, it's "natural" and "brown," so it must be good!)
You know how we found out sodium nitrate causes cancer?
Funny that you bring nitrates up, because that's one of my favorite examples of nonsense labeling. First, we get most of our nitrates from vegetables, so worrying about the small amounts in bacon and cured meats is probably not as big a deal as people make of it. (Yes, yes... cooking does other things to the nitrates and can make them bad, but proper curing also deactivates most of them too... we could argue this all day.)
But regardless of that, my favorite misleading labeling is all the "uncured" meats you see these days: "uncured bacon," "uncured salami," etc. Yeah, except these almost always contain huge amounts of "concentrated celery juice" (or sometimes another agent) which contains more nitrates [seriouseats.com] than the standard salts used traditionally to cure meat. (And no -- to those natural foods wackos -- there's no evidence to support the idea that somehow those nitrates are better for you in the concentrated celery juice... basically because "natural" celery juice has unpredictable amounts of nitrates, they need to add more of them than they would for tradition curing salts.)
People just want stuff called "natural" with "juice" and "brown X" and "natural flavors" in it. It's almost all bogus nonsense, and often you end up paying a huge premium for something that could very well be worse for you.
Moral of the story: Labels frequently don't work to tell people what's actually better. Not saying we shouldn't try to use them, but companies will weasel their way around anything to appeal to customers.
(By the way, I'm all in favor of cooking for yourself with whole ingredients, using less "processed" foods, etc. But bogus "natural foods" nonsense is bogus nonsense.)
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> And no -- to those natural foods wackos
typical fucking american.
when there's a corporation that's lying to and conning consumers, you blame the victim ("those natural foods wackos") rather than the perpetrators.
you yanks need to learn that "caveat emptor" is supposed to be a warning, not a fucking business model.
and quit admiring con-men. they're scumbags. they deserve gaol, not praise.
> Moral of the story: Labels frequently don't work to tell people
> what's actually better.
this is not the fault
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Can you give specific examples?
Yes, I know there are cases of being able to round down from .4999999 grams/serving to 0..
But "literally made of trans-fat" plus "token amount" does not equate to rounding down a small amount.
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Based on faith not proof, we won't know if each GMO is safe until it's been tested on humans for a couple of decades or more. You accuse people of having ' paranoid delusions' but treat GM science like a religion assuming it can do no wrong.
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Again, you are using the hubris of science to try and treat it like a religion and to smear any skeptic.
GMO is not a "science". It's technology, and like any tech "it's how you use it". Professors I tend to trust. Chemical companies not so much.
Extreme transgenics also ups the ante a bit and puts us in uncharted territory because these things are NOT the same. If they really were, then Monsanto wouldn't have such a hard on for them. They wouldn't because it would give them no added legal benefits.
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In fact, I think part of the objection GMO manufacturers have with labelling requirements is that they're cherry picking the GMO label but not requiring all the others. If we gave full labels for every food product, with GMO being little more than a bullet point, the amount of text would be so huge that
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Well, the pink slime scandal was all about chemicals used in processing that weren't disclosed despite the fact that they remained in the end product in sufficient quantities to make them smell rank.
There are other additives that are in American foods and are unlabeled while being banned in other countries. Some of these are also relevant to some portion of the population that are sensitive to them.
Some people can even smell the farm chemicals on produce if you concentrate them through juicing.
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If there is no scientific evidence of that, why waste time/money FORCING companies to put labels, which would act as *warnings*, about them?
I want all of my food labelled to show it has no cooties in it. Will you support that too?
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Prior to the 1980s there were no GMO organisms anywhere in the world.
Genetically-modified papaya was developed in 1975.
Re:Well, sure, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
"Prior to the 1980s there were no GMO organisms anywhere in the world"
Wrong.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/re... [sciencedaily.com]
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"Prior to the 1980s there were no GMO organisms anywhere in the world."
You mean that there were no manmade GMOs. But as we have found out since, natural transgenics already existed.
Re:Well, sure, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
The mistake isn't the GMO part. The mistake is considering *grains* food at all. It is not.
ok, here's where you know you've gone off the deep end....when a food that people have eaten for millennia is considered not a food, you need to re-evaluate your dietary ideas.
Cool history fact: do you know that the ability to store grains through the winter might be one of the major things that allowed humans to stay in the same place and build settlements? It helped them to rise above hunter/gatherer.
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Look, there is no denying of the impact grains had on the development of civilization.
But on the other hand what AC said is also true. I went through the whole thing - a decade of suffering until I was told to stop eating grains. I am not gluten intolerant or something like that. Now, the story of course is way more complicated than it sounds. Why could I eat grains for 30 years and then suddenly I could not? My gut flora is terribly out of balance. What caused it? According to the medics I did not give the
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Millennia is a very short amount of time with respect to the evolution of our genes as a species native to this planet and coordinated with the environment.
Humans can evolve surprisingly quickly. Look how quickly Europeans evolved the gene that allows them to drink milk, for example.
Your argument also supposes that rising above hunter/gatherer is a benefit and desirable.
Yeah, it is.
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I also have concerns about forced sterialisation, cross pollination and reduced diversity mono-cultures.
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OK... but then your problem is with patents, not with genetic modification. Patents eventually run out, at which point a GMO label on food does nothing to tell you if it's from patented seeds.
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With all these miraculous properties, you'd think companies would want to let people know that their food is GMO. You know, like on the label.
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That's cute. You think that actual benefits of GMOs mean anything to the people listening to all the FUD that gets spread about them.
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And you think that hiding the foods' provenance is the way to make people stop believing the FUD? That's very interesting.
Because when someone tells me I'm not allowed to know something about a product I'm buying, it immediately endears me to the company hiding the information.
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Just because you want to know something that is not worth including on a label doesn't mean they are hiding anything.
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> That's cute. You think that actual benefits of GMOs mean anything to the people listening to all the FUD that gets spread about them.
My main objection to GMOs is that they transfer rights from individuals to large corporations.
The "science" aspect is entirely a side show to distract from that.
Anti-GMO stonewalling (Score:2, Insightful)
And it will probably be just as attacked as golden rice by the Anti-GMO blowhards.
Dark Skies (Score:2)
I look forward to seeing how much extra carbon is pumped into the atmosphere by anti-GMO people burning any crops planted using this.
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Unfortunately you're very likely right, and it is a true crime against humanity - dooming millions to nutritionally preventable diseases and defects. Second gen of Golden Rice is amazing stuff!
I wish I could buy GMO seeds (Score:3, Interesting)
All the seeds that just any jerk can buy are all these heirloom seeds. Which sounds nice until you realize they're basically the most vulnerable seeds possible. The original breeds that mostly didn't make great food plants were able to take care of themselves.
The seeds you get in the packets are nice only they are modified just enough that they suck at protecting themselves... which means you have to be some sort of garden wizard or blanket the field with pesticide doom just to keep your plants alive.
I'd prefer a GMO plant that had the best of both worlds. Ideally something hearty that could deal with a very wide set of climate conditions, high pest resistance, and good production when the conditions permit.
Basically I want a plant that first looks to its own survival. And once that's handled... I want it to output as well as anything. And while we're at it... why not make the produce super nutritious.
That's a thing people don't get with GMO is that it can be made to be better for you than the original. More vitamins etc.
Take wheat for example... We could have a different breed of wheat that has one extra vitamin in it. And do that with every vitamin giving us a dozen or so types of wheat that collectively have all the vitamins and minerals a person needs.
Then when you mill the flour you can blend them together in the ideal ratio to give you a super flour that really does have everything a person needs to survive in it.
The whole anti GMO thing is obnoxious... Its the 21st century, dopes... Get over it.
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It sounds like you want to give crop plants some of the attributes of invasive species. At what point would doing so start to become a bad thing?
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The point at which it could become a bad thing has already past.
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Are you saying that because the problem already exists, it's okay to make it worse? Or are you saying that making crops resistant to pests won't make them more invasive?
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I see. You're saying it's okay to do it because it has been our goal all along. That logic is circular.
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We count on them to outcompete native plants (if corn (which was actually from Central America I believe) can't outproduce native prairie grasses in Iowa and Nebraska then we won't have any corn).
I definitely see your larger point, but I think you are confusing "outcompete" with "outproduce".
With regards to invasive species, "outcompete" usually means that the invasive species is able to displace native species from their natural habitats. Kudzu [wikipedia.org] and tamarisk [wikipedia.org] are good examples of invasive species that can outcompete native species. We certainly don't count on our crop plants to be able to do that, and most of them can't. For example, you generally don't see corn or wheat displacing native vegetati
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Crops already are invasive species. The majority of them were originally native to the Middle East and we have modified them through manual selection to grow in other regions just as successfully. We count on them to outcompete native plants (if corn (which was actually from Central America I believe) can't outproduce native prairie grasses in Iowa and Nebraska then we won't have any corn).
.
The point at which it could become a bad thing has already past
Crops are not invasive species. They are non-native species but that is not the same thing. An invasive species has a survival advantage over native species. Typically, this is an adaption to a threat not present outside its native environment. Crops are not like that. They are modified to produce more/better food for us. That puts them at a disadvantage against native plants (aka "weeds"). They need help to survive. That is exactly the opposite of invasive.
Direct genetic modification makes it easie
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"Mother fucking blueberries... every week end it is the same thing... they grow up like weeds everywhere!" ... I really don't see the problem.
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I've dealt with those blackberry bushes and they are annoying to cut back. If you're actually managing your property at all they're hardly going to grow faster than you can go out there and show them what for.
My uncle has quite a bit of property next to a national park which is to say there is a great deal of invasive vegetation that encroaches on his property. He has a backhoe that he uses to police the boundaries of this property.
Anyway, I like the blackberries... Their thorns don't scare me...
https://www [youtube.com]
Re:I wish I could buy GMO seeds (Score:5, Informative)
All the seeds that just any jerk can buy are all these heirloom seeds.
Given that the vast majority of seeds I see in catalogs are F1 hybrids, it's unlikely that your statement is even remotely true. Most of what is sold to home gardeners is the same varieties being sold to commercial growers. Most home garden catalog vendors are in turn purchasing their seed from the big boys that supply farmers - Northup King, Stokes, and so on.
There are a few - Territorial Seed and Johnny's Selected Seeds come to mind - that to some degree also actively work on developing their own seed stocks; but even with them, most of the seed is being purchased from a handful of huge companies.
The only places I see heirlooms dominating a company's listings is in catalogs from companies specializing in open-pollinated vegetables - Seeds of Change, Abundant Life, etc.
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know where i can buy GMO seeds? I remember that tomato the fellow was trying to sell... the GMO tomato... and apparently no one wants to grow it and I thought... "I do"...
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If you're talking about the Garden Gem tomato (not actually a GMO, I think, but a very carefully created cultivar), see here: http://hos.ufl.edu/kleeweb/new... [ufl.edu].
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Thanks for the link. We'll see how those do in my green house.
Re:I wish I could buy GMO seeds (Score:5, Insightful)
The meta protests don't make any sense and are counter productive. They should protest what they're really upset about rather than annoying me with shit that doesn't matter or that is actually good.
What you're basically said here is that the modern environmental movement is run by sophists... aka disingenuous manipulators.
That isn't a new thing. We've had sophists in various fields since always.
If the environmental movement wants to retain its credibility it should note that if it doesn't stop it... they're going to run into the stoics eventually.
And stoics vs sophists plays out the same way every time.
Learn.
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All ideologies are basically religions. Its a core fallacy of the atheist movement in that they think they're going to escape dogmatism, be rational, and form opinions on the basis of science and logic.
I mean... they "could" do that... but they won't... because people generally don't work that way.
I'm not a religious person myself... but I do have my ideologies and my philosophies. Everyone does.
The struggle should not be in trying to supplant one ideology with another but rather in teaching people to expre
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but that all the types of proteins in the new crop are not known, and their effects when consumed by humans are not known either, neither in the short nor the long span.
Anyone who has these concerns has not actually looked at all the testing that is done on GMO crops before it's released to the public.
Well, yeah, but.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's face it, it's a GMO which we all know is *bad*. Sometimes you have to let folks starve in order to save them from something evil.
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*takes a bite of cheeseburger* You said it! *sips soda* We have to save these people from the evil corporations! *dips french fry in ketchup and crams in mouth* GMOs will destroy our planet! *drives away in gas-guzzling SUV*
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Or sell them Organic(tm) food at insane markups.
?
Profit!
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"Scientific concensus" (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm always amused by the way science is suborned to political expediency.
Some people strongly tout the consensus regarding global warming/climate change. They commonly disparage and dismiss those who don't fully subscribe as politically-motivated ignoramuses who are anti-science. The doubters view themselves simply as more cautious, unwilling to risk large costs when it is not clear that science can clearly predict there will be benefits.
Other people strongly tout the consensus regarding the safety of GM foods. The opposition claims to be simply cautious, unwilling to risk any unknown dangers of these foods despite the enormous benefits they could provide.
Interestingly enough, very often it's the same people who support massive reductions in CO2 emissions based on a scientific consensus and despite the economic costs and the uncertain climate benefits, and yet would prefer to avoid the benefits of GM foods due to fear of unknown bad results, despite the scientific consensus.
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I'm always amused by the way science is suborned to political expediency.
Some people strongly tout the consensus regarding global warming/climate change. They commonly disparage and dismiss those who don't fully subscribe as politically-motivated ignoramuses who are anti-science. The doubters view themselves simply as more cautious, unwilling to risk large costs when it is not clear that science can clearly predict there will be benefits.
Other people strongly tout the consensus regarding the safety of GM foods. The opposition claims to be simply cautious, unwilling to risk any unknown dangers of these foods despite the enormous benefits they could provide.
Interestingly enough, very often it's the same people who support massive reductions in CO2 emissions based on a scientific consensus and despite the economic costs and the uncertain climate benefits, and yet would prefer to avoid the benefits of GM foods due to fear of unknown bad results, despite the scientific consensus.
News Flash: People are more often rationalizers than rational. What does the FUD of corporations, consumers or anyone else have to do with putting scientific consensus in scare quotes?
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It could, of course, be that they reviewed the benefits and risks and drew their own conclusions which sometimes match the consensus and sometimes don't.
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That's exactly what they're doing. But this shows that they don't really believe that scientific consensus is by itself a reason to select a course of action.
What about gluten? (Score:3)
Barley is a glutinous grain, so - is the resulting rice still gluten-free? I have no trouble with gluten (thank goodness - I absolutely love bread), but I know several people that are have problems with it.
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Yep. Celiac here. Really need to know if this new rice contains gluten
Surplus (Score:2)
We're collectively producing more rice than we eat. Japan is stockpiling unused rice every year, and the world markets are flooded with cheap rice. Food insufficiency (starvation, malnutrition) is currently a problem of resource allocation, not production.
At the same time, the consumers in the big rice consuming countries aren't eating just "rice". You can typically find many dozens of very specific breeds of rice with differences in flavour, texture, firmness, size and so on. And that's within a single typ
Eat rice with EVERY meal! (Score:2)
The new rice pulls off this trick by putting more of its energy into top growth.
How long before rumors start about eating this rice creating larger breasts!
Of course... (Score:2)
Of course the nut jobs will be against it.
GMO citrus or no citrus (Score:2)
GMO? Bring them on. With reasonable safety testing. Because guess what: I like citrus fruits. However, citrus fruits are going extinct thanks to citrus greening.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
It's spreading worldwide, affecting Asia, Israel, and Florida (29% reduced production), and other places. There is no good way to cure citrus greening (you can give a tree antibiotics, but that only works for a while and costs a lot. I'm not a fan of abusing antibiotics in this way, either!)
However, there's a
And...everyone hates it :( (Score:4, Insightful)
So, it's a GMO, which means the science-deniers on the left will hate it, and it reduces greenhouse gases, so the science-deniers on the right will hate it.
Basically, this is what we need, and it hasn't got a chance of success.
Re:The question is (Score:4, Interesting)
Ok let's put things into perspective for a minute:
Every time a plant breeds naturally, there are some millions of DNA nucleotides that are changed as a result of that process, and it happens in ways that are entirely unpredictable and unknown.
Yet in GMO, you're making a very deliberate change to some 200 (or less) nucleotides, and you know EXACTLY what that change does, because you've already observed its results before putting it on the market.
Why is it that I'm supposed to be afraid of the known very few GMO changes and not be afraid of the unknown thousands of changes in the natural process?
Re: (Score:2)
Why is it that I'm supposed to be afraid of the known very few GMO changes and not be afraid of the unknown thousands of changes in the natural process?
Because diversity breeds strength.
Nature has a nasty way of playing catch-up. Look at the rise Asthma, Hay fever and allergies in conjunction with our increasingly sterilised environment. I'm fine with GM food, but we should be a little cautious that any reduction in diversity will have consequences sooner or later (most likely later when it's too late)
Re: (Score:2)
Seriously, I don't know how people don't get this. Wish I had mod points today!
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I'll believe it's tested when the CEO eats it for a year (as part of their regular diet).
I grew up eating beans and rice (with a bit of meat for flavor when my mother could afford it) and I bet many of the cultures this will be recommended to will consume it daily as well, so you'd do well to not tell me this is an unreasonable request.
That said I also recognize that genetic engineering isn't completely magic, I assume that the scientists who selected this barley gene know how it will change the expression
Re: (Score:2)
New GM rice! Now with gluten!