On 2/14/15 8:56 AM, Marcus G. Daniels wrote:
Steve writes:
``I don't really trust engineering-thinking (GMO)
to replace evolution... humans and domesticated flora and fauna
"co-evolved"... just jumping in and replacing things with "new and
improved" isn't as simple/obvious as one might imagine, I contend.''
Perhaps the only way to learn the constraints in the problem space, though.
Risk vs. reward, like anything.
Absolutely. The only question is whether we are aware of the scale of
the risks we take when we take them or are willing to consider the risks
we surely know are there but maybe cannot elaborate in detail (yet)?
Had we known the devastating effects on the biomes and human populations
of many parts of the world during the "age of exploration", I'm sure
some would still have exercised their right/need to abruptly introduce a
wide variety of unexpected creatures (from virus particles and bacteria
to pigs, cats and rabbits) to the "rest of the world", especially
islands throughout the Pacific, as part of their "manifest destiny".
I'm as much of a technophile as anyone here, yet, I believe we live in
the constant fog of "the evil you know", working like crazy to fix the
problems that are in our face today, often caused precisely by the
problems caused by our last round of "fixes", whilst being willfully
ignorant of an evil we "could know" but choose not to apprehend. We
replace cane sugar (sucrose) with cyclamates in our diet only to find
the terrible side-effects a few years later, then we move on to new and
improved saccharines, and then with another turn of the wheel we pull in
aspartame and gawd knows what else all the while building a huge
industry on turning cornfields and soybean fields into food-product
streams that are now being implicated in some of our most tragic
public-health problems (widespread obesity, hormone imbalances, etc.)
And this isn't even
I'm not sure why we need GMO in our foodsources. We can cite world
famine and "improved productivity" as motivations, but those are never
ending cycles methinks... we already have some huge human health and
possibly social dysfunction problems as a consequence of how we have
"engineered" our food-source. GMO doesn't promise to address any of
those problems in any fundamental way, merely to help obscure the
problems in another layer of indirection.
I suspect you (and Glen and others) will insist that the pace and
quality of the march of tech progress is inevitable and maybe even
necessary in some fundamental way, so "get over it" and I have to defer
on that point. I doubt my voice, or the millions of other
yet-more-shrill ones will have any significant effect in slowing this
latest fad in agricultural tech.
But that doesn't stop me from wanting to watch the 1.5 billion
car-pileup in morbid fascination whilst muttering to myself "I knew it
all along!"
In Glen's immortal words "Get off my lawn!" <shakes gnarly old fist
ineffectually>
Marcus
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