They claim they are dispassionately scientific… just like climate change deniers do… but GMO advocates actually act to prevent research, discourage independent scholarship, and discredit anyone who disagrees with them… again, just like climate change deniers.
Hmmm… I wonder if there’s any overlap between pro-GMO entities and climate change deniers, in real life. What’s S. Fred Singer’s1 position on GMO? Oh my… look at that, LOL! That’s really funny! How about A few minutes of googling finds no shortage of professional climate change deniers who are hardcore GMO advocates!
Please do. From the examples I’ve seen and how many gene trees mostly follow phylogeny, I would expect natural gene transfers to spread at a much lower rate. If there is instead reason to expect there to be newly transferred genes spread to whole fields of plants every few years, please cite something for that; it would be both honestly relevant and something interesting to learn.
Horizontal gene transfer is going to occur many times for each species. Plants can’t adapt to change by jumping up and running away, so they have the ability to drastically modify their entire genomes, often by creating multiple copies of their genomes and then whittling it back down. And this is happening everywhere, all the time, in any species we examine.
We are always looking at the downstream side of some population bottleneck. How man extinct species of human beings were there? The number increases every day. And their genomic variability was a thousand fold less than plants.
Organisms aren’t like lab mice that happen to occur in purebred strains. Heck, even phylogenetics is probably going to done with purebred strains of related species. You can do phylogenetics just fine at a very crude level of resolution with a couple hundred markers that don’t even attempt to detect or characterize most of the differences between related strains or species.
Look into the history of ‘tulip breaking’, specifically the development of parrot tulips and the Dutch tulip craze. Parrot tulips came about as a natural infection of tulips with a potato virus. Humans found the mottling and fringing of tulips attractive, and encouraged it with cross- and inbreeding, but the original infection needed no human intervention.
Yeah, but the question was if that’s many times within their whole evolutionary history, in a million years, or in a decade, and how much of the population those foreign genes might effect. Likewise, @MadLibrarian, I didn’t ask for single examples of changes - I already know some, thank you - but the interesting claim was about rates.
Just how much does natural horizontal gene transfer occur compared to other ways that genomes are modified? Does it actually change our crops at anything comparable to the rate GM technology promises to? Because that’s what would make it relevant to a discussion on the subject.
Well I guess you’d need to systematically search a couple dozen populations of the same species that had been geographically isolated for some thousands of years. At this finer resolution, such changes might be tough to spot against the background of the many other types of genetic rearrangements occurring in plants. In the meantime, when people look at individual species, they find horizontal gene transfer everywhere. And if it were only some ancient, rare event of no importance, those genes would have been lost, right? I think we’ll know when man’s tinkering comes anywhere close to the natural rate, because our world will be an unrecognizable sci-fi landscape.
One foreign gene taking hold naturally per species per million years would not be ancient, rare, or unimportant. And it would also nothing like the rate GM is being used to introduce them into common food crops, to the point where it wouldn’t say much about it.
So if there isn’t actually have any real reason to believe it natural transfer does more than that - which I am disappointed to find - I will go back to calling it a specious argument as per above, and wondering why anyone would bother with it in place of the real evidence about safety.
But Mr. Ilagan, 27, sought answers on his own. In the process, he found himself, like so many public and business leaders worldwide, wrestling with a subject in which popular beliefs often do not reflect scientific evidence.
So here’s a guy with no particular skin in the game, looking to find out the actual facts on GMOs for this proposed anti-GMO bill in Hawaii:
Sensitive to the accusation that her bill was antiscience, Ms. Wille had circulated material to support it. But in almost every case, Mr. Ilagan and his staff found evidence that seemed to undermine the claims.
and
At the hearing on Sept. 23, he had grown increasingly uneasy as his fellow Council members declined to call several University of Hawaii scientists who had flown from Oahu, instead allotting 45 minutes to Jeffrey Smith, a self-styled expert on G.M.O.s with no scientific credentials.
My original point was that the existence of a process in nature doesn’t say anything about what happens when industry applies it at much a higher rate, and it’s off-putting to see an argument ignore that as it is a common dishonest tactic. You interestingly suggested maybe the rate wasn’t so different, but so far haven’t justified that at all; even the Gao et al. paper you just mentioned still talks about possible opportunities but not how often.
I did notice an older paper with the same title by Richardson and Palmer which gives at least some basis to discuss that; it mentions there were fewer transfers to nuclear DNA than mitochondrial DNA, of which there were at least 26 known in Amborella. Certainly enough to say it is not an unusual thing to find, but then since it diverged from other living plants some 130 million years ago, also only about one every 50000 centuries.
I will own that as a very low estimate, but even if most plant populations have picked up foreign genes at a hundred times that level, it would still be pitifully low compared to how they are being introduced throughout fields of wheat and soy. To the degree where to assume one says much about the risk from the other makes as much sense as for slow natural and fast anthropogenic climate change, and anyone honest would instead being arguing from other means.
Again, I know horizontal gene transfer exists all over nature; but do you have anything to suggest that I am understimating its prevalence by several thousand times, or should I feel justified in dismissing them as comparable?
You’re basically saying that because a backhoe (science) can regrade your yard faster than geology (nature), then obviously geology is insignificant compared to a backhoe, ignoring the fact that the natural process are at work continuously on a vastly greater scale. I don’t know if that’s a specific type of logical fallacy or just another word salad with a side order of red herring.
I haven’t talked about significance in shaping the world, which doesn’t depend on rates, but in risk, which always does. Earlier you suggested nature changes things fast, too; I take it you’re not going to support the idea the speed is comparable.
Well, more living things will adapt to a large climate change over epochs than a small one in decades. There is less threat to your life from a slowly rising sea level than from a flash flood. And if there were possible harm to people from a new gene transfer to a food plant, the risk from one every million years would be so different from a few a decade, nobody would think you could establish safety simply by extrapolating.
I’d be interested to know what fallacy you think that is, because if it is one, I will owe an apology to all the people I’ve told that anthropogenic climate change isn’t safe just because there are much slower natural changes.
This feels like the debate over the Scouts who tipped over the “200 million-year-old rock formation.” A mutation that happened a million years ago didn’t take a million years to happen, it happened in a millisecond, even if it took us a million years to notice. It also doesn’t tell us much of anything about the rate of mutation, using the example of all the extinct species of humans. We keep finding new species, and the absence of genetic data from extinct species doesn’t “prove” human evolution is orderly. We’re on the other side of population bottlenecks where many of the mutations and extinct species were lost. We grossly underestimate the rate of human mutations because we only look at the evolutionary survivors, like the proverbial drunk looking for keys under the streetlight because the light is better. . And plants easily mutate a 1000 times faster because they can survive gross rearrangements of their genomes and are host to various active transposable elements. Sap sucking insects and other vectors can transmit that DNA and the transposable elements that would move that DNA into the genome of a new species. That could be an aphid, it could be a deer that didn’t brush its teeth.
Sure, but the difference between one in 50000 centuries confirmed above and one in soy every decade or so is way too much to ignore on that alone. That’s why I asked if you had anything to suggest the rate where foreign genes are introduced naturally was really anything comparable to our use of artificial ones, what would make them relevant, and was disappointed you’re only assuming the orders of magnitude away.
At the very least that doesn’t seem nearly solid enough speculation that you can argue anyone is crazy for neglecting it. I’d much rather people stick to arguing the safety of GM on the basis of things which have actually been examined than wild guesses, thanks.
Well if reversed the question and compared the amount of HGT to GMOs, and if we sampled species randomly, we’d conclude that GMOs are nothing but a myth, especially if we gave up after only finding 1000 HGT species and 0 GMOs . We might need to check another couple thousand species before we found the first GMO.
Ah yes - especially if we started by sampling organisms in the deep sea instead of a wheat field visible from space! Clearly, that addresses all my concern about sticking to the things established by real evidence instead of offering rhetoric exactly like companies that downplay fracking and oil spills. And then we can wonder why fools like @Medievalist or @Cowicide might ever suspect GMO advocates aren’t entirely trustworthy, right?
Look, if you get any evidence HGT actually occurs at a level that many orders of magnitude higher than my low estimate, please let me know, because I am interested in that. Until then, I would encourage you to think about what a but-it’s-all-natural argument actually says to people, but that’s of course up to you.
I never was? I don’t know who you think you’re arguing against; I have some concerns about a few things like the possibility of introducing allergens, but so long as the evidence shows they are being managed properly, I think GM is generally a safe technology. But that advocates apparently need to defend it by the same specious tactics as oil companies really does make me feel leery about that conclusion.
We got such familiar products such as Graham Crackers, Shredded Wheat from that period. Americans are known for their occasional waves of enthusiasm for religion, health, self improvement, and social experimentation.
