6 ms·

Don't mess with complex systems we don't understand. Whether it is GMOS, global climate or administering antibiotics to animals. It should be incumbent upon th

by geezer 11y ago

Don't mess with complex systems we don't understand. Whether it is GMOS, global climate or administering antibiotics to animals. It should be incumbent upon those tinkering with complex systems to provide proof of non-harm. Right now, its the other way around, where those who are harmed have to provide proof of harm.

privacy101 11y ago
They say that GMOs are safe, not because of the test that they have done, but because of how long they have been feeding it to us. And they create new varieties constantly.
- geezer 11y ago
  Homes prices had also always been trending up, until they didn't starting in 2008.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
bpodgursky 11y ago
Please don't conflate issues with scientific backing (antibiotic abuse) with unscientific fearmongering (GMOs). It drags the legitimate concerns down and makes them look like crackpot conspiracies.
- msandford 11y ago
  > Please don't conflate issues with scientific backing (antibiotic abuse) with unscientific fearmongering (GMOs). GMOs are only unscientific fearmongering until some kind of a heretofore invisible link is found. Now I'm not suggesting that one will be found, but to say that you know there isn't one is the height of arrogance. There are a great many things that science has known that have been later overturned. For example, Semmelweis beat Pasteur to the punch by a solid 10 years but he died basically in disgrace because the medical community chose to ignore him. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur I'd love to provide another dozen examples but I don't have a handy list to show you. Rest assured that if science could be wrong at least once it's within the realm of possibility that it could be wrong again. There's definitely no law of the universe that prevents science from making a mistake or two along the way to knowledge.
  - openasocket 11y ago
    By that logic you can assume anything is true. It is certainly _possible_ that GMOs are harmful, but without any evidence you have nothing to go on. I could use your exact same argument to argue against evolution or gravity.
    - msandford 11y ago
      You're trying to compare biology to biology and physics. Biology is messy and squishy and imprecise so you'll have an easier time there. Good luck on the physics front, though, because physics is so fundamental. We have tremendous ability to make predictions in physics and then test those predictions roughly as many times as we care to. Biology is probably a few hundred years (or more!) from that.
      - openasocket 11y ago
        If you want me to believe GMOs are harmful, you need a better argument than "biology is hard." Sorry if that comes off as harsh. I'll admit that the misuse of genetic modification could have big consequences, but the regulation currently in place seems sufficient. If you have regulations you would like to add, I would love to hear them.
        msandford 11y ago
        When you do physics you're basically trying to test one interaction and you might have a half-dozen other interactions that you have to contend with. And even then, it's really hard! NASA is continuing to investigate the EM drive on the tiny, tiny chance that it's real, but mostly to see what these folks got wrong. In biology you don't have a half-dozen other interactions to contend with, you've got probably on the order of millions. How many organic molecules are there? Do you know? I sure don't and I spent a couple of years doing computational genomics. The best we could do is spend thousands of processor hours trying to understand how the genome affects things, much less the transcriptome or proteome. If you want to suggest that "oh, GMO is fine because biology isn't THAT HARD" then I would implore you to go revolutionize biology because everyone I talked to said it was very, very hard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcriptome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcriptome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proteome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proteome
- tzs 11y ago
  There are reasons to be concerned with GMOs that are not at odds with science. Let me quote something from a comment from a few weeks ago: ---- begin quote ---- GMOs aren't inherently dangerous to human health or inherently environmentally destructive. But they do let producers do things faster and more extreme than they could do via conventional breeding techniques. They've used those conventional techniques to reduce crop diversity, and select for things like uniform time to grow and uniform size/shape to make mechanical processing easy, over selecting for things like nutrition and flavor. Is there any good reason to believe that the increased power GMO techniques give them won't be used to go even farther in those directions? With great power comes great responsibility. I'm skeptical that the big food companies are responsible enough for GMO, and with government food regulation more determined by industry lobbying than by actual science I have little faith that the government will do anything to make sure GMO techniques are only used for good. ---- end quote ----
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Those, I agree, are legitimate concerns worth discussing. But 'bpodgursky is right that it's harder to discuss those when people are mostly vocal about some invented fear-inducing non-issues. This also holds for discussions about nuclear power. About your concerns - it's worth noting that they're political/economical in nature and have nothing to do with genetic modifications itself. I agree with most of them, but personally believe that it's not enough to shut down the entire branch of science, as some of the opponents seem to want. But those issues definitely need to be addressed.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - saiya-jin 11y ago
    still waiting for that scientific backing, I don't see any outright proven threat. on the other hand, if this extra "power" allows us to create plants to feed hungry ie in Africa where usual crops wouldn't survive, that sounds like a real added value. or you want to explain a starving child that it should rather die because you don't like how the results are obtained?
- geezer 11y ago
  Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Allegations of harmful effects of smoking were also once crackpot ideas. So was lung cancer due to working in coal mines. The point is that biological systems are complex. We don't understand them well. Its better to be safe than sorry.
- dxhdr 11y ago
  We can't agree on what constitutes a good diet, or even basic things like how much red meat or sugar are unhealthy, or indeed if they are even unhealthy at all. And yet you believe that we fully understand the consequences of modifying plant DNA to add features like glyphosate resistance? The fact, is we don't understand the relationship between food, the human body, and good health. I'm very afraid of our unscientific GMO processes.
duncan_bayne 11y ago
> It should be incumbent upon those tinkering with complex systems to provide proof of non-harm. It should be incumbent upon those demanding proof of a negative to explain how that might work in practice.
- msandford 11y ago
  You're right, better dismantle the FDA post-haste since a solid half of what they do there is make sure that things don't harm people.
  - mirimir 11y ago
    They try. But they're hugely understaffed. And they get conned a lot.
  - duncan_bayne 11y ago
    Unrelated to the issue of trying to prove a negative - can you demonstrate where the US Constitution allows the Federal Government to set up the FDA in the first place? Some of what the FDA does is good and proper. But it's unconstitutional for the Federal Government to do it.
    - duncan_bayne 11y ago
      Downvotes don't count as demonstrating ;-P
  - duncan_bayne 11y ago
    http://warisboring.com/articles/super-glue-built-planes-nukes-and-saved-soldiers-lives/ http://warisboring.com/articles/super-glue-built-planes-nuke... Also, they delay life saving medicines for decades.
- unclebucknasty 11y ago
  It's no different than categorically stating that something is safe, simply because evidence of harm is yet to be found. See thalidomide, tobacco, DDT, and a host of others. So, to the extent that both sides are being "unreasonable" in demanding proof, the difference is that we are moving forward with one side's thesis. In doing so, we are exposing people en masse to the risk of their being wrong.

by geezer 11y ago

privacy101 11y ago

They say that GMOs are safe, not because of the test that they have done, but because of how long they have been feeding it to us. And they create new varieties constantly.

geezer 11y ago
Homes prices had also always been trending up, until they didn't starting in 2008.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

bpodgursky 11y ago

Please don't conflate issues with scientific backing (antibiotic abuse) with unscientific fearmongering (GMOs). It drags the legitimate concerns down and makes them look like crackpot conspiracies.

msandford 11y ago
> Please don't conflate issues with scientific backing (antibiotic abuse) with unscientific fearmongering (GMOs). GMOs are only unscientific fearmongering until some kind of a heretofore invisible link is found. Now I'm not suggesting that one will be found, but to say that you know there isn't one is the height of arrogance. There are a great many things that science has known that have been later overturned. For example, Semmelweis beat Pasteur to the punch by a solid 10 years but he died basically in disgrace because the medical community chose to ignore him. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur I'd love to provide another dozen examples but I don't have a handy list to show you. Rest assured that if science could be wrong at least once it's within the realm of possibility that it could be wrong again. There's definitely no law of the universe that prevents science from making a mistake or two along the way to knowledge.
- openasocket 11y ago
  By that logic you can assume anything is true. It is certainly _possible_ that GMOs are harmful, but without any evidence you have nothing to go on. I could use your exact same argument to argue against evolution or gravity.
  - msandford 11y ago
    You're trying to compare biology to biology and physics. Biology is messy and squishy and imprecise so you'll have an easier time there. Good luck on the physics front, though, because physics is so fundamental. We have tremendous ability to make predictions in physics and then test those predictions roughly as many times as we care to. Biology is probably a few hundred years (or more!) from that.
    - openasocket 11y ago
      If you want me to believe GMOs are harmful, you need a better argument than "biology is hard." Sorry if that comes off as harsh. I'll admit that the misuse of genetic modification could have big consequences, but the regulation currently in place seems sufficient. If you have regulations you would like to add, I would love to hear them.
      - msandford 11y ago
        When you do physics you're basically trying to test one interaction and you might have a half-dozen other interactions that you have to contend with. And even then, it's really hard! NASA is continuing to investigate the EM drive on the tiny, tiny chance that it's real, but mostly to see what these folks got wrong. In biology you don't have a half-dozen other interactions to contend with, you've got probably on the order of millions. How many organic molecules are there? Do you know? I sure don't and I spent a couple of years doing computational genomics. The best we could do is spend thousands of processor hours trying to understand how the genome affects things, much less the transcriptome or proteome. If you want to suggest that "oh, GMO is fine because biology isn't THAT HARD" then I would implore you to go revolutionize biology because everyone I talked to said it was very, very hard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcriptome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcriptome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proteome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proteome
tzs 11y ago
There are reasons to be concerned with GMOs that are not at odds with science. Let me quote something from a comment from a few weeks ago: ---- begin quote ---- GMOs aren't inherently dangerous to human health or inherently environmentally destructive. But they do let producers do things faster and more extreme than they could do via conventional breeding techniques. They've used those conventional techniques to reduce crop diversity, and select for things like uniform time to grow and uniform size/shape to make mechanical processing easy, over selecting for things like nutrition and flavor. Is there any good reason to believe that the increased power GMO techniques give them won't be used to go even farther in those directions? With great power comes great responsibility. I'm skeptical that the big food companies are responsible enough for GMO, and with government food regulation more determined by industry lobbying than by actual science I have little faith that the government will do anything to make sure GMO techniques are only used for good. ---- end quote ----
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Those, I agree, are legitimate concerns worth discussing. But 'bpodgursky is right that it's harder to discuss those when people are mostly vocal about some invented fear-inducing non-issues. This also holds for discussions about nuclear power. About your concerns - it's worth noting that they're political/economical in nature and have nothing to do with genetic modifications itself. I agree with most of them, but personally believe that it's not enough to shut down the entire branch of science, as some of the opponents seem to want. But those issues definitely need to be addressed.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- saiya-jin 11y ago
  still waiting for that scientific backing, I don't see any outright proven threat. on the other hand, if this extra "power" allows us to create plants to feed hungry ie in Africa where usual crops wouldn't survive, that sounds like a real added value. or you want to explain a starving child that it should rather die because you don't like how the results are obtained?
geezer 11y ago
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Allegations of harmful effects of smoking were also once crackpot ideas. So was lung cancer due to working in coal mines. The point is that biological systems are complex. We don't understand them well. Its better to be safe than sorry.
dxhdr 11y ago
We can't agree on what constitutes a good diet, or even basic things like how much red meat or sugar are unhealthy, or indeed if they are even unhealthy at all. And yet you believe that we fully understand the consequences of modifying plant DNA to add features like glyphosate resistance? The fact, is we don't understand the relationship between food, the human body, and good health. I'm very afraid of our unscientific GMO processes.

duncan_bayne 11y ago

> It should be incumbent upon those tinkering with complex systems to provide proof of non-harm. It should be incumbent upon those demanding proof of a negative to explain how that might work in practice.

msandford 11y ago
You're right, better dismantle the FDA post-haste since a solid half of what they do there is make sure that things don't harm people.
- mirimir 11y ago
  They try. But they're hugely understaffed. And they get conned a lot.
- duncan_bayne 11y ago
  Unrelated to the issue of trying to prove a negative - can you demonstrate where the US Constitution allows the Federal Government to set up the FDA in the first place? Some of what the FDA does is good and proper. But it's unconstitutional for the Federal Government to do it.
  - duncan_bayne 11y ago
    Downvotes don't count as demonstrating ;-P
- duncan_bayne 11y ago
  http://warisboring.com/articles/super-glue-built-planes-nukes-and-saved-soldiers-lives/ http://warisboring.com/articles/super-glue-built-planes-nuke... Also, they delay life saving medicines for decades.
unclebucknasty 11y ago
It's no different than categorically stating that something is safe, simply because evidence of harm is yet to be found. See thalidomide, tobacco, DDT, and a host of others. So, to the extent that both sides are being "unreasonable" in demanding proof, the difference is that we are moving forward with one side's thesis. In doing so, we are exposing people en masse to the risk of their being wrong.