Sexual reproduction has existed since sex and gender have existed. We don’t need any proof of its “safety”. Inventing new organisms in a lab using gene splicing and unleashing them into the world is a completely different process. One that has been done without adequate testing and analysis, with profit as primary motivator. Similarly this story is about saving an industry more than it is about saving oranges.
Yes, I recognize the difference between selective breeding and gene splicing. Selective breeding takes a long time, the genetic mixing is completely random and unpredictable, and you are extremely limited in the genes available. Gene splicing on the other hand is fast, not random as a single gene or suite of genes are used, and pretty much any gene is usable.
How about nature has been doing it for millions of years? Reptilian DNA has been horizontally transferred to cattle. Parasitic plants and there hosts are engaged in genetic warfare and swap genes in an effort to one up each other. Ferns and moss transfer genes horizontally. Heck biotech is founded on the genetic transfer capable with the use of agrobacterium. Salmon and tomato specifically is new but horizontal transfer has been going on for a lot longer than selective breeding.
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Ahh the Precautionary Principal, the most unscientific of notions clad in such reasonable language. Prove safety is the same as prove no harm. Since it impossible to prove a negative, it is impossible to satisfy your request.
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Sexual reproduction doesn’t propagate “bugs” to an entire population. If a plant grown from seed is unhealthy it is discarded. If a plant with an alien gene is grown and reproduced by the millions for one purpose, the entire population is at risk if this modification proves dangerous down the road. The only way sexual reproduction could produce such a potential catastrophe is if natural selection is stood on its head such that poorly adaptive mutations survived while successful mutations died off. Even the language of that sentence shows the necessitating paradox you propose.
Is it possible that a successful natural adaptation could somehow lead to a population collapse due to some future environmental pathogen that can take advantage of that adaptation? Sure. Pigs could also fly. I’ll take my chances with grounded pigs and sexual reproduction thank you.
The difference is also clear when we ask the question of how long it would take for the plant itself to manifest the gene modification done via gene splicing if it were left to vary naturally or via hybridization? If the answer is that the gene modification (sans other modifications that may mitigate or modify the particular change) is unlikely to ever occur naturally then we know there is a difference. I think the answer is that science really doesn’t have a good enough handle on how genes actually cooperate and compete, and how those behaviors are affected by environment and other factors to give educated answers to these highly complex issues. Forging ahead with gene splicing is essentially rolling the dice. Its too bad our engineering capabilities have outpaced our theoretical knowledge. But that is at least partially the result of the capitalist desire to focus scientific research on achieving results that generate profit over general research that can aid the species in a more holistic way.
It is very unusual for native species to die out from the introduction of an invasive species. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen. It does and usually only on islands. But the harm is so astronomically rare when you look at the set of all introduced species as to warrant very little concern except in the obvious island environments or similarly isolated geographies.
Don’t need proof of the safety of sexual reproduction? Why not? Potatoes have been conventionally bred for pest resistance that had dangerous levels of alkaloids. You are just as capable of making a dangerous plant with conventional breeding as you are with genetic modification. You will just find out about it a lot later in the process.
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Ahh, but as soon as humans start selecting for traits your natural process flies out the window. A great many of our food plants would not survive long in nature because we have removed the phytochemicals they need to defend themselves in order to make them not only palatable but edible. If you look at the process of selective breeding for food as the program then sexual reproduction can absolutely produce bugs as evidenced by the poisonous potato produced that way. It took many years to produce and all that productive time was ultimately a complete waste because the product was inedible. You are right that we don’t have perfect knowledge about how genes interact, but that is an argument for genetic engineering. In GE only one or a few genes are used to alter the genome. In sexual reproduction, two entire genomes are randomly brought together. Sexual reproduction has a much greater chance of problematic interactions than GE.
How are your fears not equally applicable to selective breeding and mutation breeding?
One of the reasons gene splicing is more dangerous is that genes are spliced in individually, which is not the way nature designed the process to work. We simply have no paradigm to even begin to understand the knock-on effects of gene splicing.
I never said breeding using hybridization techniques and sexual reproduction can never produce a failed result, that is ridiculous. What I said is that it is a time proven technique, and we have ways to identify and limit the bad results that can occur. The problem with gene splicing is not a problem with the technique itself. The problem is that we launch these plants into the environment without knowing enough about the potential consequences. All technologies can have positive and negative uses. Pushing a new organism into the environment and then seeing how it behaves is simply not responsible. And if you trust Monsanto or any other profit-driven group to put safety before profits you are sorely misguided.
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Sure, but that’s because you’re comparing the creation of new individuals in one case to populations in the other. Ideally you could engineer a few seeds and discarding them if unhealthy. And nothing stops people from artificially breeding a new variety and then reproducing it by the millions, which is why crops like bananas are so easily threatened in the first place.
On the other hand, no. Nature has been doing horizontal gene transfer for a long time, but not all genes end up everywhere; in fact single-gene trees often show a good resemblance to actual lines of descent. So while it is very common for organisms to have some transferred genes, it is not something that happens often when you are not looking at geological time scales.
And rate is a key factor here, since it’s what influences how well people and other organisms can react to changes. The fact that it was warmer many millions of years ago does not mean global warming in a few century won’t cause damage; saying something happens naturally without reference to rate is a specious argument. Introducing horizontal transfer far faster than nature normally does is not risk free.
Who said all genes end up everywhere? no one that’s who. Horizontal gene transfer is being found to be more and more common than we ever thought possible and it has been happening since the dawn of time. It isn’t something that happens frequently but it does happen and makes the salmon/tomato argument pretty silly. When the argument is a direct refutation to a completely wrongheaded argument it isn’t specious. The rate at which it happens can cut both ways. The slow rate of change of sexual reproduction can mean that organisms can’t react quickly enough to changes in the environment and therefore go extinct. The current rate of climate change could easily mean that the fast and widespread use of horizontal gene transfer technologies allow for the adaptation of crops that would not otherwise be possible. Fast isn’t always bad.
No it doesn’t. Natural is a malleable and often meaningless term. I am using it specifically to describe processes that have been in use for centuries, even millennia, to breed successful and healthy plants and animals. Of course these processes can be hijacked or abused, and in some cases produce poor results. One can argue that the wheat we ingest today is not as good for us as it was in the past, being largely created for yield rather than health.
What is hard to argue is that we have no idea what dangers lie in hybridization. We have thousands of years of past practices and results to draw from. You simply cannot say the same thing about GMOs. We have maybe a couple of decades of experience. And yet the vast majorities of certain crops are now GMO. Once this obvious point is made, GMO proponents fall back on the blind insistence that there is no substantial difference between GMO and traditional plant modification. The techniques are clearly and obviously different. The act of splicing specific genes into organisms, genes that never existed in that organism before and that likely never would exist under any natural process is clearly not the same. Given these facts, it seems clear that we are embarking on an irresponsible journey, simply because we can profit from it.
The problem is that with gene splicing we really don’t know what “unhealthy” means. And the fact that we have bred monocultures in the past and that it is a dangerous practice doesn’t then lead us to the conclusion that its great to do so with GMOs.
What I’m comparing is what Monsanto is doing to what normally would happen when a new hybrid is created.
Wow, both the naturalism fallacy and the request for proving a negative in one argument. Way to go Ygret. However you completely miss my point. Sexual reproduction is gene splicing. It is just completely random gene splicing. It is safer to only splice one or two genes than 10,000. It is easier to seethe interactions when only using a couple of genes than 10,000. The plants are thoroughly studied in test plots before release. Heck they run ridiculous generations through tissue culture before they even get to the test plot. They know quite well how it will behave, but there are always going to be possibilities for failure. However the developers of GM plants know far more about how their plants will behave than conventional breeders.
So if the GM is done by a non-profit it’s fine?
Oh and nature did design the process to work both ways. Not that it matters.
The linked article makes this statement within the first 10 paragraphs:
“Leading scientific organizations have concluded that shuttling DNA between species carries no intrinsic risk to human health or the environment, and that such alterations can be reliably tested.”
And in one go, the entire question has been swept under the rug. I’m no luddite, but it amazes me that any “scientific” organization can make such claims without any caveats or suggestions of potential long term issues that may arise given the very limited time frame of our experience. It seems anti-scientific frankly, and that makes me wonder who is being bought off.
I wonder how much experience you have with plant breeding Ygret. I have about a hundred F2 hybrid aloes on my bench right now. Every single one of them is completely different. There is expression from about 5 different species in varying combinations. When I sowed the seeds, I had absolutely no idea what I was going to get. Some didn’t produce chlorophyll and thus didn’t make it very far. There are variations in color and form. There will be variations in flower structure that I won’t know about until they reach a mature stage where they can flower. Heck because of the variation in the original stock material, I don’t even know when each plant will flower. Now if I was going for something specific and only wanted to change flower color for instance, I could insert genes that code for that and not effect say chlorophyll production. There would still be variation in flower color depending on the effectiveness of the gene in the locations in the genome, but plant structure and color would most likely stay the same. Conventional plant breeding is a giant crap shoot. And that is what plant breeders know about hybridization.
And talking about how nature designed the process to work wrt sexual reproduction, I’m pretty sure nature didn’t intend for me to collect pollen from one plant in that blooms in the winter, store it in the deep freeze, and then paint that pollen onto another species that blooms in the summer in order to change the flower color of the summer blooming species. Yeah that is super natural. c.c
"Wow, both the naturalism fallacy and the request for proving a negative in one argument. "
The “naturalism fallacy”, as you call it, is the difference between a process that came about via nature, and which humans have learned to control and direct through breeding; processes that developed over millions and thousands of years respectively, to a decades old process that abstracts organisms from nature, implants foreign genes from alien species, and then reintroduces them to the environment. If you see no difference than I have no reason to engage in discussion with you.
And yes, its funny that in Europe, before a chemical is allowed to be used commercially, the interested party must show that the chemical is not dangerous for its purpose to human health. So you can call it proving a negative, I call it being safe.
“The plants are thoroughly studied in test plots before release.”
Why? If they are not substantially different from hybridized plants is it necessary to test them in this way? Is this done with plant hybrids?
“Heck they run ridiculous generations through tissue culture before they even get to the test plot.”
And why would they do this as well? Is it ridiculous? Is this done with plant hybrids?
The very premise that GM techniques are as safe as hybridization is belied by the technique itself. And don’t tell me they do all this costly extra, yet inadequate, work just to appease us superstitious types.
