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The University of Colorado Boulder has an article up about a paper [open, DOI: 10.1038/s41562-018-0520-3] [DX] published Monday in Nature Human Behavior which finds that U.S. adults:
who hold the most extreme views opposing genetically modified (GM) foods think they know most about GM food science, but actually know the least
The paper's key finding is that:
the more strongly people report being opposed to GM foods, the more knowledgeable they think they are on the topic, but the lower they score on an actual knowledge test.
Interestingly the authors found similar results applied to gene therapy, but were unable prove a similar conclusion when they tested against climate change denialism. This leads them to hypothesize that:
the climate change debate has become so politically polarized that people's attitudes depend more on which group they affiliate with than how much they know about the issue.
It might be instructive to run similar studies in a number of areas such as
Vaccinations
Nuclear Power
Homeopathy
...
Where would you like to see this study done next?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 15 2019, @08:57PM (13 children)
The interesting thing about the GM food debate, to me, is the fact that the uninformed, reactionary, absolute abolitionists - in my view - probably have the more beneficial approach, long term.
Sure, foods like "Golden Rice" will be hugely beneficial (although the current strains of "Golden Rice" don't seem to be living up to the initial hype...) GM scientists are merely accelerating the same processes that selective breeders have been employing for thousands of years; however, selective breeders worked on roughly natural timescales and rarely (never?) had dramatic changes appear within a single generation - never created anything that was too "far out" from existing and more or less understood species.
GM scientists are essentially creating exotic species, most of which will be fragile and short lived in the wild, but... some, especially those along the lines of "roundup ready soybeans" and similar are essentially designed to be difficult to eradicate invasive exotics. We've already seen how troublesome invasive exotics can be: fire-ants, africanized honeybees, jumping carp [youtu.be], kudzu, etc.
Will the benefits of GM in the field outweigh their destructiveness in the wild? I don't think so, but, then, I tend to value wild spaces more than most people. https://www.half-earthproject.org/ [half-earthproject.org]
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday January 15 2019, @09:05PM (5 children)
That doesn't sound like a very serious or scientific analysis of transgenic crops.
Crop plants don't have the rigor to survive the wild very well. And, though I consider this a problem for farmers that mostly serves corporations, most GM crops are 100% sterile. They don't reproduce at all.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 15 2019, @09:18PM (3 children)
If you're interested in depth, serious talk about the value of species diversity, follow the half Earth [half-earthproject.org] link. I'm not in the mood for more than a sound-bite, but the sound-bite on my mind is: billions of years of evolution produced more "value" in the diversity of life than all of mankind's scientific study and development have managed to even begin to understand. Also: the post 1950 population boom is destroying that value faster than science is cataloging it, much less preserving or extending it.
If you are just in the mood for a funny video, you should watch the flying carp, they're funny (unless you're one of the native species they've wiped out.)
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Tuesday January 15 2019, @09:21PM (2 children)
Diversity of life is great for things like natural beauty and thriving ecosystems. It's not so great for, let me check my notes... uh... it says here on my todo list "feed 7 billion people with the least possible farmland"
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 15 2019, @09:34PM
Keep feeding those 7B people with no respect for thriving ecosystems, when they become 70B, or 700B, at some point the solar energy intercepted by the Earth won't be enough to sustain the human bodies. Now, read me fantasies about how the population boom is going to level out, any day now, go on, I've been hearing that one since before I was born.
The "Half Earth" approach is relatively simple: feed the people with half the planet, keep the other half in a relatively wild state - you know, like it was for tens of millions of years before we had our little oil fueled multi-generational orgy. Keep studying, keep developing, science marches on and will do great things; however, without a wild planet backing us up, we're going to implode in a very unpleasant way within a very few generations.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Informative) by c0lo on Tuesday January 15 2019, @11:29PM
Dismiss ecology in favour of growth at your peril. Everybody's peril, actually.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 16 2019, @04:04AM
> Crop plants don't have the rigor to survive the wild very well.
Until they chance mutate, the old way, and do?
Or until they're barely able enough, just like lots of plants which have limited ranges/niches?
Or maybe "very well" doesn't matter: they can survive at all. Life struggles, and will survive and spread.
> most GM crops are 100% sterile
That would excuse those, somewhat, except that genes from purportedly sterile GM varieties have been found (and sued over!) in fields adjacent to their plots. Ie. they'd mutated to become fertile, or the strain expressed fertility under some conditions, or with some frequency which hadn't been characterized in the lab and test fields.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday January 15 2019, @10:26PM (5 children)
Funny you should mention Golden Rice:
https://slate.com/technology/2013/08/golden-rice-attack-in-philippines-anti-gmo-activists-lie-about-protest-and-safety.html [slate.com]
Be very wary of the anti-GMO crowd.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 16 2019, @12:40AM (4 children)
PETA is a bunch of wackos too, seriously dangerous ones. I worked in a very visible animal research lab that was "hiding in plain sight" in the middle of a major metro area. Everyone involved exercised a great deal of discretion because: A) the lab did important work that helped a lot of people, B) that type of place is horrendously expensive and difficult to set up and takes years to start producing important results, and C) if PETA set their sights on a place like that they could easily get it shut down, not because PETA has any legal, moral, scientific, or other grounds to stand on, just because they can muster a large number of screaming lunatics at will and that sort of thing is extremely bad for business, so much so that the businesses supporting (and benefiting from) the lab would shut it down rather than provide PETA with a platform in the media with which to sling unsubstantiated muck around the place.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday January 16 2019, @04:54AM
That, and they've funded Animal Liberation Front efforts before. ALF in this case isn't a loveable alien life form from the 1980's, but a friggin' terrorist group that has members convicted of arson and bombing and such. And PETA gives those guys money.
Oh, and PETA also kills most of the animals put in its care. That shows you how much they really care about animals.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 16 2019, @08:04AM (2 children)
Agreed, PETA is a bunch of wackos at best. As was pointed out, they kill lots of animals. The documentary cowspiracy plausibly painted them in cahoots with the meat industry. They are a walking contradiction. On the flip side animal research labs are not known for their benevolence toward animals, as documented by Peter Singer in Animal LIberation, who sums up animal testing as a torture industry designed to appease government regulators/grants. So *!@# them. The meat industry isn't much better. Would be nice to have PETA for the meat industry. Call them META? Maybe then I can get a mass produced steak that hasn't been laced with glyphocene, raised in a dungeon, pumped with anti-biotics, and forced to eat grain (which is kind of like humans surviving on bark I think).
The study says that: People with strong opinions tend to be clueless. Next up: water is wet.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 16 2019, @01:06PM (1 child)
Oh no, not at all. Note that I said that the work benefits lots of people.
What I did there involved baby piglets. We would source the piglets from the local Oscar Meyer farm, so - when born into that farm a piglet has a 99.99% chance of becoming bacon, among other things, and a 0.01% chance of taking a quick trip to the lab, getting a shot of ketamine and never waking up again, but in their final hours after the ketamine shot contributing in a small way to human knowledge of physiology and potentially improving future methods of CPR. Of course, our anaesthesiologist no longer practiced on humans - possibly because he had an attention span problem - and I did witness one horrible day when a piglet "went light" on the pentobarbitol (pain killer) while still dosed with pancuronium (paralytic) so you've got an animal on the table with open chest surgical preparations in extreme pain, unable to move due to the paralytic, but physiological signs like heart rate and blood gasses going completely bonkers due to the pain response.
The lab also had a pair of ferrets who had a relatively happy life, except when the new EMTs would come in for intubation training - the ferrets had been intubated thousands of times by inexperienced EMTs learning how to properly get the airway tube going to the lungs, not the esophagus. Not fun for the ferrets on training day, though they did get a chance to bite the EMTs - also a training lesson, humans can do that too... but... when an EMT shows up at your door and you need to be intubated, do you want their first live intubation experience to be on you? Even with the training, intubation errors are still common, and a real problem for the incorrectly intubated patients, but without live training performance is even worse.
The whole place floats on drug research, and they have made several major improvements in the drugs over their decades of operation as a result of the research - that's the driving reason why the place continues to operate. Not fun for the disease model animals which have been specifically bred to have the disease under treatment, but this is how we learn.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 16 2019, @07:32PM
The attitude of: well these piglets would be dead anyway, is a bit naive. I'm guessing Oscar Mayer, just ramped up production to meet their demands. It sounds like you work at one of the more purposeful labs. Animal testing has a purpose, and it sounds like your department is a necessary evil. However, Singer's book suggests that this is not the norm.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 16 2019, @03:59AM
> GM scientists are merely accelerating the same processes that selective breeders have been employing
No. That was the case for 'gamma gene gardens' that produced eg. red grapefruit. But shotgun-and-sample is not what GMO means now, or there would be no problem. The problem is gene transfer from other organisms right now (copy-paste), and is rapidly expanding to include from-scratch gene edit/composition (protein programming). These two are not just faster, they're different, and more powerful.
The difference is categorical. It's akin to the difference between pulling ice from lakes for preserving food, and creating then decompressing and releasing CFCs for coolant. One of these has serious impact - though with a time lag and no physical proximity, making the causal link hard to discern - and is only made possible through a dramatic new technology, and one of these has less impact than a volcano melting a glacier.