Well that's the problem, the noise from the science deniers is so loud and filled with with horrible information that its necessary for public speakers for science like Nye and Tyson to speak up, their job has long ago gone way beyond their specific field of science but with being popularizers of it and in this instance standing UP for science.
Fair enough, in that sense I agree. I think I'm just wishing for a different culture, that's all.
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"You know, that's kinda why I came here, to show that I don't suck that much" ~ Devin Cooley, Professional Goaltender
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Interesting to see the range of reaction to my GMO remarks. One blog proclaimed "Tyson tells Liberals to Chill Out". When in fact I never mentioned anything about politics or political affiliations at all. Other blogs proclaimed that I supported GMOs, asking if I was paid by Monsanto. And in other places, the reaction could only be described as virulent.
I maintain the sense, thrust, and meaning of my comments.
In fact -- apart from my "chill out" quip in the video, which clearly deserved further explanation -- I didn't really vote one way or another on GMOs. You want to distinguish how genes are modified? Okay, then label everything, and create two subcategories of GMO. One that indicates laboratory and one that indicates agriculture. I said this explicitly in my Facebook post.
Furthermore, I never said GMOs were safer or more dangerous. I implied that if you think GMO-laboratory is **inherently** more dangerous to human life than GMO-agriculture you are simply wrong. They both can be bad for the environment. They both can be less healthy. They both can disrupt the local flora and fauna. But both methods wield an awesome power to improve food in every way that matters to humans: yields, appearance, vitamin content, sweetness, resistance to insects, resistance to weather extremes, and so forth.
As in all new foods, transgenic or otherwise, they should be tested for safety. [how many times do I need to say that?] And they should be tested for their effect on the environment. If the regulatory system is failing at this then it should be modified. And if the tests indicate a risk to the health of some humans and a benefit to others, then this should appear on the labeling. By the way, we already do this for peanuts, to protect people from peanut allergies. But there's no talk of banning them.
I note, of course, that we don't do this for wheat - a fully domesticated, genetically modified food. Yet many people suffer from wheat (gluten) allergies. Meanwhile foods that contain gluten display no explicit warnings at all. You just know that you're not supposed to buy and eat that baguette if you suffer from this condition.
Imagine if today, scientists showed you the Aurochs Wild Ox, and said -- "Give us time. In just a few years, we will genetically modify this wild animal, turning it into a different sub species whose sole purpose is to provide vast quantities of milk for humans to drink. They will produce 10x as much milk as did the original animal. But they will require vast grasslands to sustain. And some of you will get sick because you won't be able to digest the lactose. But no need to label this fact. People will just figure this out on their own. The rest of you will be fine. We'll call the result a Holstein Milk Cow."
What would anti GMO-laboratory people say this story? Would they embrace it or reject it? Of course, over the past 10,000 years, this is exactly what we've done to that Ox - or whatever is the agreed-upon origin of the domesticated Cow. Call it GMO-agriculture. If you reject GMOs you fundamentally reject it all.
Finally, I found it odd that people presumed I was taking sides. As an educator, my priority is to make sure people are informed -- accurately and honestly. For the purposes of general enlightenment, but especially before drawing policy or legislation that could affect us all.
I have nothing more to add. Or to subtract. On to other topics for me.
In contrast to most agricultural ecologists, Shiva remains committed to the idea that organic farming can feed the world. Owing almost wholly to the efforts of Shiva and other activists, India has not approved a single genetically modified food crop for human consumption. Only four African nations—South Africa, Burkina Faso, Egypt, and Sudan—permit the commercial use of products that contain G.M.O.s. Europe remains the epicenter of anti-G.M.O. advocacy, but recent polls show that the vast majority of Americans, ever more focussed on the connection between food, farming, and their health, favor mandatory labelling for products that are made with genetically modified ingredients. Most say they would use such labels to avoid eating those foods. For her part, Shiva insists that the only acceptable path is to return to the principles and practices of an earlier era. “Fertilizer should never have been allowed in agriculture,” she said in a 2011 speech. “I think it’s time to ban it. It’s a weapon of mass destruction. Its use is like war, because it came from war.”
Like Gandhi, whom she reveres, Shiva questions many of the goals of contemporary civilization. Last year, Prince Charles, who keeps a bust of Shiva on display at Highgrove, his family house, visited her at the Navdanya farm, in Dehradun, about a hundred and fifty miles north of New Delhi. Charles, perhaps the world’s best-known critic of modern life, has for years denounced transgenic crops. “This kind of genetic modification takes mankind into realms that belong to God and God alone,” he wrote in the nineteen-nineties, when Monsanto tried to sell its genetically engineered seeds in Europe. Shiva, too, invokes religion in her assault on agricultural biotechnology. “G.M.O. stands for ‘God, Move Over,’ we are the creators now,” she said in a speech earlier this year. Navdanya does not report its contributions publicly, but, according to a recent Indian government report, foreign N.G.O.s have contributed significantly in the past decade to help the campaign against adoption of G.M.O.s in India. In June, the government banned most such contributions. Shiva, who was named in the report, called it “an attack on civil society,” and biased in favor of foreign corporations.
I don't understand how people can be so against something that they have no real knowledge of. I understand that videos like this select the best responses and ignore the 'informed' person in order to make a point, but the fact that there are so many people who just blindly follow sebsationalist media and mommy blog posts, without doing any research themselves, saddens me. I mean, the one girl says she has no idea what GMOs are but she knows they are bad. How can you know they are bad if you don't know what they are?? It's mind boggling!
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This is why slacktivism is so powerful and dangerous. Its depressing, the worst part is you run into debating people not far from this that seem so confident they are right but when pressed as to explain the dangers of GMO they usually turn to "greedy corportations!" "monstanto evil" "FDA conspiracy, bought out by big business"
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Are people just willing to look stupid to be on TV?
The one's filmed on Hollywood boulevard are just filled with attention seekers/aspiring actors, because they wait around for this type of thing and they know that the lie witness news segments get millions of views.
Looking around the internet appears to be fairly common knowledge that the whole segment is faked anyways. Although if there was a case for one edition of LWN being more organic (ha!) it would be this one, as the answers would be a little more tougher to edit and the idea that most people against GMO's are against them because they sound bad is fairly believable.
Quote:
I’d imagine most people were sceptics anyway — didn’t you often find yourself asking, “Surely no one’s THAT stupid?” — but, as the investigation found, in recent weeks more and more participants from the viral skits have stepped forward indicating that they were in on the joke or that the interviews are just the effects of sneaky editing.
For example, Mashable’s reporters tracked down Colleen McEachern, who featured in last year’s Super Bowl edition of the segment. “It is fake, but it’s all in good fun!”, she told them. “The people being interviewed know that the camera person is kidding.”
Another person who was featured in the famous Coachella video — the most shared installment yet, with over 14 million YouTube views — claimed that the show’s producers “altered her answers”. “It was fake. They replaced some of the band names in post and also used my description of other groups/bands as answers to other questions,” she said.
For anyone who missed it, here's a couple mins from arguably one of the smartest men on the planet:
He brings up artificially selecting desirable traits during cultivation as an example of a GMO and then in less than 5 seconds equivocates it to genetic experimentation in a lab and rhetorically condemns anyone who questions it as someone who questions natural cultivation techniques. I didn't find it particularly intelligent for such a smart guy. He's also wrong about organic apples and he's clearly speaking from assumptions and not experience. Not all GMO is the same, cultivating desirable traits and genetically splicing different species together are entirely different things and the line seems to be blurred.
He brings up artificially selecting desirable traits during cultivation as an example of a GMO and then in less than 5 seconds equivocates it to genetic experimentation in a lab and rhetorically condemns anyone who questions it as someone who questions natural cultivation techniques. I didn't find it particularly intelligent for such a smart guy. He's also wrong about organic apples and he's clearly speaking from assumptions and not experience. Not all GMO is the same, cultivating desirable traits and genetically splicing different species together are entirely different things and the line seems to be blurred.
Can you explain how artificial selection is different from gene modification? I'm asking in terms of impact, as I'm familiar with the difference in process. How is the end result different?
He brings up artificially selecting desirable traits during cultivation as an example of a GMO and then in less than 5 seconds equivocates it to genetic experimentation in a lab and rhetorically condemns anyone who questions it as someone who questions natural cultivation techniques. I didn't find it particularly intelligent for such a smart guy. He's also wrong about organic apples and he's clearly speaking from assumptions and not experience. Not all GMO is the same, cultivating desirable traits and genetically splicing different species together are entirely different things and the line seems to be blurred.
Two things:
1. He's correct about Apples. Crab apples are the only apples indigenous and naturally grow able in North America, and wild (in modified apples) are palm size. Red delicious is one of the most modified apples.
2. He responded to those anti-GMO people who didn't like that video. That reaponse can be found in the following link (along with quotes from scientific organisations regarding the safety of GMOs), and I've quoted a bit for you.
Quote:
The science is quite clear: crop improvement by the modern molecular techniques of biotechnology is safe … The World Health Organization, the American Medical Association, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the British Royal Society, and every other respected organization that has examined the evidence has come to the same conclusion: consuming foods containing ingredients derived from GM crops is no riskier than consuming the same foods containing ingredients from crop plants modified by conventional plant improvement techniques.
Quote:
And right now, the evidence is overwhelming that GMO crops are safe for humans and for the environment (and if you're going to bring up glyphosate, Roundup, then that's a different conversation, it's no longer about GMO's). And the evidence that GMO plants are harmful is pitifully weak.
One opens the societal door for gene splicing, cloning, transhumanism, genetic modification and eugenics where the other does not.
Philosophy and morality probably not a favorite topic of people around here. I anticipate you want scientific studies about the detrimental effects but it's a relatively new area of science with many universities in Canada illegally studying cloning. I've first hand experience witnessing in labs the cloning biochemists perform knowingly in defiance of the law. From my point of view it's unwise, genetic manipulation isn't a thing I find easy to overlook and find the equivocation to trait selection overly hasty.
Can you explain how artificial selection is different from gene modification? I'm asking in terms of impact, as I'm familiar with the difference in process. How is the end result different?
I've just read the last couple of pages and there seems to be a lot of simplification of the issue leading to in-definitive conclusions. So, time for me to do the same!
Artificial selection maintains desired traits within a species. Cross species breeding is rare, and frequently leads to a dead end as post selection results are often sterile. The process is slow, taking many generations, which by it's nature removes unreliable traits, because the subjects simply do not survive.
Gene modification does not preclude introduction of genes from an alternate species, and post modification breeding or seeding is possible. The process is quick and controlled, and natural elimination of the new traits can be sidestepped through manipulation of the environment.
I might be completely wrong, but my third hand knowledge is clearly at it's peak.
My personal interest in corporations like Monsanto has turned into a hobby. I looked up all of the different ways 'corn' can be listed in an ingredients label, and then I look at all of the items in my grocery basket, and wonder why 'corn' has to be in 90% of them. Corn is in everything.
My personal interest in corporations like Monsanto has turned into a hobby. I looked up all of the different ways 'corn' can be listed in an ingredients label, and then I look at all of the items in my grocery basket, and wonder why 'corn' has to be in 90% of them. Corn is in everything.
Corn is in everything because the US government heavily subsidizes the growing of corn so it is a cheap reliable supply of starch and sugar that can be broken down into base components and recombined into anything.
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Corn is in everything because the US government heavily subsidizes the growing of corn so it is a cheap reliable supply of starch and sugar that can be broken down into base components and recombined into anything.
This might also be the root of why people are so concerned with what kind of corn it is and what it's properties are. I eat a really nice steak about once a month, and I'm very interested in it's quality. I want to know as much as I can about it, and know I'm going to enjoy a good meal. I can't avoid eating corn several times a day, and I have no idea where, how, or what it's made of.
I'd kind of like to know, and have the choice of selecting, the product with GMO 'nectar of life and source of happiness' instilled, or GMO 'goat spleen'. Modified vs. organic aside, I really do like to know the varying quality of my food.
For that reason, I'll always support any additional detail in labeling.
This might also be the root of why people are so concerned with what kind of corn it is and what it's properties are. I eat a really nice steak about once a month, and I'm very interested in it's quality. I want to know as much as I can about it, and know I'm going to enjoy a good meal. I can't avoid eating corn several times a day, and I have no idea where, how, or what it's made of.
I'd kind of like to know, and have the choice of selecting, the product with GMO 'nectar of life and source of happiness' instilled, or GMO 'goat spleen'. Modified vs. organic aside, I really do like to know the varying quality of my food.
For that reason, I'll always support any additional detail in labeling.
If you are eating food with broken down corn solids of various forms you first concern shouldn't be whether or not that corn is gmo or not. You should be far more concerned how they took all nutrients out of the corn and left it as basically a predigested carb.
