something NEW* to fight about

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I would not place the need for urgency above caution. Antibiotics are becoming ineffectual due to their widespread use, and it has saved a hell of a lot of people, but if we are looking at 200 years+ of millions people dying of relatively basic infections while we look for an alternative, then maybe they should have always been administered.

On the other hand, if civilization takes a poop based on food, then we won't be doing any further research at all.

I am - again, reluctantly - in favor of using golden rice in famine areas.

I don't like it, but I don't see much choice.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I'M NOT CAIN!

Although I do wish Cain was here. 

Sorry, I meant to refer to Cain's earlier comments, in agreement with yours.

On the other hand, we have only your word that you are not Cain.   

I'm not as smart, or as British Australian.

[Kai]

And since the patent holders are going to give it out freely, it's like the Polio vaccine all over again.

False equivalence.

You're going to have to elaborate.

Polio vaccination does not spread from the person vaccinated.  Plants introduced into an environment can.

While I am reluctantly on board with golden rice, that is because the situation calling for it is DIRE, and the regular plant life in the target regions (ie, equatorial Africa, etc) is already more or less gone.

But just deciding that there can't be unintended consequences in the biological sciences because you WANT a particular result is no fucking different than the Luddites denying any science that disagrees with their values and/or religious beliefs.  IT ISN'T SCIENCE.

Did I fucking say that? NO, I DIDN'T FUCKING SAY THAT. In fact, I admitted that Bt crops and Roundup Ready crops were a shitty solution.

But you are comparing plant and insect life with things that do not reproduce.  Like computers and vaccines.

This situation's risks have more in common with jackrabbits in Australia.  Once you let 'em into the wild, the situation is more or less out of your control.  You can live with the results, or you can go find a spider to swallow to catch the fly.

1. The more complicated the changes you make, the less likely the plants can hybridize.

2. The metaphor was for technology. The creation of transgenic plants is technology. Right now it's in first generation. The solutions are makeshift and shitty.


Let's put it this way. Pests: The heart of the problem is that pests are eating the plants. You can kill the pests with broad spectrum insecticides, which is a hugely harmful process. Or you can insert a gene which kills a much more limited number, which is still not the best solution. The best solution is to make it so the insects don't even recognize the plants as tasty, so they get left alone.

Weeds: These are always a problem, as they steal both nutrients and space from the crops. You can weed, or spray herbicides, or spray herbicides while using a crop plant that is resistant to them, but in the latter two cases you're still spraying shit on the landscape. But plants have found ways to deal with this. Walnut, and many other plants, have created allelopathic compounds which deter plant growth in their vicinity. Same with Eucalyptus. Give your crops a system like this, no more herbicide spraying.

Water/Fertilizer use: Already gone over this. C4 system on rice is in progress.

The point is, the future is weird. These solutions we are agonizing over are new, short term, and likely to be a failure within the next ten years. Why? Because resistance is easy. But more complicated systems make that more difficult.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I'm not saying it's not potentially useful, just that it will be of dubious benefit on its own.

My problem with a lot of GMO food is that it puts more of the control over food into the hands of the people who are largely to blame for much of the situation.

My other problem is with single-generation seeds.  There's a horror story in there.  We've had 3 dark ages, and we have never lost the knowledge gained from the agricultural revolution.  Making seeds that don't make more seeds makes that hideous possibility more likely in the next dark ages.  And there will be a next dark ages, sooner or later.

[Kai]

I'm not saying it's not potentially useful, just that it will be of dubious benefit on its own.

My problem with a lot of GMO food is that it puts more of the control over food into the hands of the people who are largely to blame for much of the situation.

My other problem is with single-generation seeds.  There's a horror story in there.  We've had 3 dark ages, and we have never lost the knowledge gained from the agricultural revolution.  Making seeds that don't make more seeds makes that hideous possibility more likely in the next dark ages.  And there will be a next dark ages, sooner or later.

That has nothing to do with GMOs though. Pretty much every crop plant is a sterile hybrid now.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Let's put it this way. Pests: The heart of the problem is that pests are eating the plants. You can kill the pests with broad spectrum insecticides, which is a hugely harmful process. Or you can insert a gene which kills a much more limited number, which is still not the best solution. The best solution is to make it so the insects don't even recognize the plants as tasty, so they get left alone.

We already know pesticides are a losing strategy.  We should be, as you say, taking an entirely different approach, like sacrificial plants that attract insects away from the plants we want.  Making that plant LESS resistant to pests and MORE attractive.  That way you don't lose the crop and you don't lose the bugs.

Or something.  When you approach A doesn't work, you don't do it MORE, you walk around to the other side of the problem and attempt approach B.

[Faust]

I would not place the need for urgency above caution. Antibiotics are becoming ineffectual due to their widespread use, and it has saved a hell of a lot of people, but if we are looking at 200 years+ of millions people dying of relatively basic infections while we look for an alternative, then maybe they should have always been administered.

On the other hand, if civilization takes a poop based on food, then we won't be doing any further research at all.

I am - again, reluctantly - in favor of using golden rice in famine areas.

I don't like it, but I don't see much choice.

Maybe, or maybe sustaining 7 billion people isn't feasible. It might be, and if so good. But say we hit a famine that was to wipe out a large fraction of the human race, and our choice is to introduce unknowns into the food chain, or to allow the famine to occur.
The latter would be a catastrophe, the former could have the unintended side effect of wiping out the human race by building in some other weakness.

I suppose it's all about balancing the risks. I don't know enough about golden rice to comment.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I would not place the need for urgency above caution. Antibiotics are becoming ineffectual due to their widespread use, and it has saved a hell of a lot of people, but if we are looking at 200 years+ of millions people dying of relatively basic infections while we look for an alternative, then maybe they should have always been administered.

On the other hand, if civilization takes a poop based on food, then we won't be doing any further research at all.

I am - again, reluctantly - in favor of using golden rice in famine areas.

I don't like it, but I don't see much choice.

I'm not even reluctant about the golden rice. It merely takes a nutrient that is available in other food plants, including certain grains, and puts it in a food plant that is already a staple, somewhat mitigating the effects in children of malnourishment from famine conditions. I'm all for it, and honestly in that case while there MAY be unintended consequences, I don't suspect there will be any that are as potentially damaging as the potential downsides of putting a normally soil-bound insect toxin in the aerial parts of a plant.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Maybe, or maybe sustaining 7 billion people isn't feasible.

It isn't, nor is it desirable.  But to allow a die off isn't the solution, even if you can live with it.  Because the starving people will not starve quietly, and they'll drag everyone down with them in an attempt to survive.  The chaos would do far more damage than the famine.  It always does.

Plus, who wants to be responsible for making the Nazis look like pikers?  Population CONTROL is one thing, population REDUCTION is a horror.

[Kai]

Let's put it this way. Pests: The heart of the problem is that pests are eating the plants. You can kill the pests with broad spectrum insecticides, which is a hugely harmful process. Or you can insert a gene which kills a much more limited number, which is still not the best solution. The best solution is to make it so the insects don't even recognize the plants as tasty, so they get left alone.

We already know pesticides are a losing strategy.  We should be, as you say, taking an entirely different approach, like sacrificial plants that attract insects away from the plants we want.  Making that plant LESS resistant to pests and MORE attractive.  That way you don't lose the crop and you don't lose the bugs.

Or something.  When you approach A doesn't work, you don't do it MORE, you walk around to the other side of the problem and attempt approach B.

Or that just creates a source-sink dynamic. You still have to lower the attractiveness of the main crop in correspondence to raising attractiveness of the decoy. The other thing is, crop pests are often generalists, so they have other choices in the landscape. These other choices often act as a sink when the crop isn't available. Brown marmorated stink bugs don't go away if they have no soybeans to feed upon. They just find less attractive food sources.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Let's put it this way. Pests: The heart of the problem is that pests are eating the plants. You can kill the pests with broad spectrum insecticides, which is a hugely harmful process. Or you can insert a gene which kills a much more limited number, which is still not the best solution. The best solution is to make it so the insects don't even recognize the plants as tasty, so they get left alone.

We already know pesticides are a losing strategy.  We should be, as you say, taking an entirely different approach, like sacrificial plants that attract insects away from the plants we want.  Making that plant LESS resistant to pests and MORE attractive.  That way you don't lose the crop and you don't lose the bugs.

Or something.  When you approach A doesn't work, you don't do it MORE, you walk around to the other side of the problem and attempt approach B.

This is starting to sound suspiciously like polyculture, a farming method that works on small-scale farms and is primitive, in the sense of being very old, but proven.

It is typically dismissed as being "inefficient", but what that actually means is that it isn't adaptable to subsidy-driven factory-farming.

[Faust]

Maybe, or maybe sustaining 7 billion people isn't feasible.

It isn't, nor is it desirable.  But to allow a die off isn't the solution, even if you can live with it.  Because the starving people will not starve quietly, and they'll drag everyone down with them in an attempt to survive.  The chaos would do far more damage than the famine.  It always does.

Plus, who wants to be responsible for making the Nazis look like pikers?  Population CONTROL is one thing, population REDUCTION is a horror.

No, I wasn't suggesting it either. But when it does happen, those are the choices that are going to be presented. The higher risk with more unknowns will be the path taken and it will end up being a fingers crossed solution.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Maybe, or maybe sustaining 7 billion people isn't feasible.

It isn't, nor is it desirable.  But to allow a die off isn't the solution, even if you can live with it.  Because the starving people will not starve quietly, and they'll drag everyone down with them in an attempt to survive.  The chaos would do far more damage than the famine.  It always does.

Plus, who wants to be responsible for making the Nazis look like pikers?  Population CONTROL is one thing, population REDUCTION is a horror.

No, I wasn't suggesting it either. But when it does happen, those are the choices that are going to be presented. The higher risk with more unknowns will be the path taken and it will end up being a fingers crossed solution.

I can tell you what will actually be done when things get that bad, but you probably don't want to hear it.

[Faust]

Maybe, or maybe sustaining 7 billion people isn't feasible.

It isn't, nor is it desirable.  But to allow a die off isn't the solution, even if you can live with it.  Because the starving people will not starve quietly, and they'll drag everyone down with them in an attempt to survive.  The chaos would do far more damage than the famine.  It always does.

Plus, who wants to be responsible for making the Nazis look like pikers?  Population CONTROL is one thing, population REDUCTION is a horror.

No, I wasn't suggesting it either. But when it does happen, those are the choices that are going to be presented. The higher risk with more unknowns will be the path taken and it will end up being a fingers crossed solution.

I can tell you what will actually be done when things get that bad, but you probably don't want to hear it.

I'm going to look at Syria and say I suspect it's several years of inaction and talking about a solution, until the suffering becomes so unbearable that there is little left to do and a token gesture is thrown to make it look like something was done but it will be too little and too late?

[Faust]

Let's put it this way. Pests: The heart of the problem is that pests are eating the plants. You can kill the pests with broad spectrum insecticides, which is a hugely harmful process. Or you can insert a gene which kills a much more limited number, which is still not the best solution. The best solution is to make it so the insects don't even recognize the plants as tasty, so they get left alone.

We already know pesticides are a losing strategy.  We should be, as you say, taking an entirely different approach, like sacrificial plants that attract insects away from the plants we want.  Making that plant LESS resistant to pests and MORE attractive.  That way you don't lose the crop and you don't lose the bugs.

Or something.  When you approach A doesn't work, you don't do it MORE, you walk around to the other side of the problem and attempt approach B.

This is starting to sound suspiciously like polyculture, a farming method that works on small-scale farms and is primitive, in the sense of being very old, but proven.

It is typically dismissed as being "inefficient", but what that actually means is that it isn't adaptable to subsidy-driven factory-farming.

What makes poly culture so inefficient, is it that conventional automated farming means can't be applied?