[Thor]

Originally Posted by Bagor

You serious? You question that I can't take blogs seriously from a so called professional when I present to you that they can't even interpret a graph. First documented does not equal first evolved. Not even close. It's garbage. I have better things to do than read and point out the obvious faults in stuff like that. Critically read it for yourself.

You wait a year or so, then ask yourself the question why no-one has challenged the assertion in the literature. Your last quote basically agrees with the assertion that they cause superweeds but has a "yeah but ....."

I hate answering for others, so I asked Andrew to reply to your concerns, here is his response:

Originally Posted by Andrew Kniss writes

Thanks for the note. It is always interesting to see who is reading our blog and the various criticism. I was amused reading through the forum thread. I have only a few comments. Feel free to use as you see fit.
1) there is a certain subset of people who will simply not be swayed from their ideological stance, even when faced with data to the contrary.
2) Herbicide resistant weeds on the weedscience.org website were "documented" where they first "evolved" which is why the terms are both used in the blog post. The weedscience.org website is simply a repository of information. The information is submitted by scientists around the world who are experts in this area. When a new case is submitted, and they only list "soybean" or "vineyard" then it is safe to assume that the new case evolved due to herbicide use in that particular system.
3) the piece by Natasha Gilbert is a Nature News piece, not a peer reviewed research article. It is journalism, not science. She presents no data and cites no peer-reviewed research to support the claim that GM crops have bred superweeds. Because there is none (at least not that I'm aware of). Which is why I wrote the blog post. I wanted to see if the best available data actually supported her claim. It appears the data do not support it.
4) the discussion (or debate) about "superweeds" is almost sure to be fruitless, unless this silly term is defined. Most who are really worried about "superweeds" don't really have a functional definition of the term. Which makes it impossible to discuss the real issues related to herbicide resistance.

Thanks for reading the Control Freaks blog, and we appreciate the note.
Andrew