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On May 10 2010 00:56 3FFA wrote:
Argue that SC:BW is far, far better than SCII(this you should already have thought up yourself, if not then your bad at finding stuff to do)
edit: O and TheAntz ideas are great! ^^
i didnt put forward any ideas im just trying to trick him into telling me more jokes =D
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On May 10 2010 00:47 samachking wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2010 00:26 mmp wrote:On May 09 2010 22:06 KwarK wrote:
Make a case against GM crops/livestock created through deliberate selective breeding for traits. + Show Spoiler +You specify that the modification in question is simply the selective breeding of existing species. I think it's ambiguous whether or not you intended to include genetic engineering as an objectionable modification - it is distinct from the vanilla old-fashioned techniques of breeding, but I will assume you meant GM to include direct manipulation of genetic material and traditional (Mendel-style selection) breeding.
In biological engineering, the state of the art gives us the ability to very handily say exactly how much of which proteins we would like to be expressed in a resultant strain. The state of the art also allows us to enumerate and verify that we've gotten exactly what we hoped for in the genetic code. This is the (arguably, but for the sake of this discussion) easy part, and this growing field tackles work of this scale on a daily basis.
The hard part is to now drift in the wake of your alterations and observe precisely how your strain grows and develops. You can introduce GFP into a mouse and have an adorable glow-in-the-dark pet mouse, but this says little about how vulnerable it becomes to nocturnal predators. Nor does it say anything about the resulting biochemistry inside of the rodent - the presence of free radicals, its propensity to any number of rodent-borne diseases, what bacteria it may harbor, its evolutionarily-determined benchmark for homeostasis, and so on, let alone a care for its own health or comfort (that isn't an issue).
Now what does any of this matter to us if we're only interested in eating the damn thing. Well as I've already cautioned, when you alter a creature's biochemistry you put it at risk to new disease, new afflictions, new "corruptions" that if not properly accounted for by the existing health standards can slip through to the consumer unchecked. These standards are not merely invented by an epiphany of scientists or lawmakers, but are adapted as necessitated by changing health risks - to be blunt, in hindsight of a calamitous event (the bovinial spongiform scares in the UK are but one example I can point to).
Unfortunately, standards for food safety can only measure things on the opposite end from where they started: in a laboratory. The growing plant or animal throughout its life stages is the black box in this system and we're in an unnecessary hurry to get this food on our plates without taking a moment to appreciate just what's happening inside that box. Although tests can apply a rubric of diverse criteria to identify a number of things that interest us, its the things you're not testing for that we need to worry about. The fact of the matter is you're dealing with a fundamentally distinct organism than that from which you stenciled.
You must account for the long-term effects of altered genetic code. You must account for the new pests and bacteria for which you've created a host. You must account for any toxins that weren't present previously, or were only at tolerable levels. We've altered the dosage and it will take years, even decades, to identify the most significant effects - these tests could take place in a lab, but it's not in the market's interest to delay profit.
Let's talk about meat. Some people like it rare, they like it juicy, they like it tender - no one puts themselves at greater risk of food-borne illness than this person, and occasionally they pay the price for it because the beef was of poor grade, or the sushi bar served fish past its date, or the kitchen countertop wasn't respected from contact with raw food, or any number of everyday blunders. Obviously you can kill most of the bad things in your food just by cooking them but some people are nonetheless afflicted, whether by a slip-up at the farm, untidiness in the kitchen, or their own desire to consume raw food.
But not all mammals and certainly not all humans react identically to raw meat. Stomach acids, bacteria that have chosen you for a host, and even immune system all play a roll in determining just how safe food is to you individually. And this says very little about people with allergies but I think you'll see that this isn't a trivial matter worth writing off in legislation. In the U.S. I am proud to say that if you have an allergy (perhaps fatal) to certain nuts, you can expect to see in boldfaced font a warning on food labels that will alert you even if the food may have only come in contact with machinery that processed nuts. It's important to recognize that mistakes happen in the kitchen and it's a deathly serious matter.
The risk is there and slip-ups happen all the time. Fortunately our bodies have already adapted in some capacity and some of us (but not all of us) are able to consume many foods in their rawest form. Appreciate this, but only with the lemma that it comes from the long-term adaptation to a fixed set of plants and animals that practice has shown to be acceptable to our health. When culture tells you to eat this food but not that one, it is based on a wisdom of thousands of years of culinary experience - and I want you to imagine what frightful reaction struck the first discover of nightshade and what horrible discomfort it would have imparted on those people. It may look like food, it might even taste good, but fuck it all, this one was evolved to kill me.
Now we've got a grad student in the lab with a hot idea on how we can make a plumper, juicier, nutritious whatever. I trust their methodology and I trust their results - it will be plumper, juicier, sexier, and whatever people happen to want. But the lab work ends when the thesis is done or when the company goes to market. In the United States, needless to say a major player in the biotech industry, the FDA has already made up its mind on GM foods. To put it simply, they've been judged "materially indistinguishable" from natural species and therefore are not subject to any new investigations or restrictions.
I will have to do some further investigation to find out just how the FDA came to this decision, but by the standard I've given you a GM food cannot be indistinguishable from its unmodified counterpart unless it has identical biochemistry - and it's the biochemistry that interests me. To say that they're "materially indistinguishable" is contradictory to the purpose of making a modification in the first place. If I'm eating a plumper, juicier, more nutritious whatever then the answer is clearly sitting right in front of you on your plate. I suggest you read up on this man http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug![[image loading]](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/30/Wheat_yields_in_developing_countries,_1951-2004.png) ![[image loading]](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Wheat_yields_in_selected_countries,_1951-2004.png) You make the argument that they are genetically different, therefore the food is incomparable and could be dangerous and cause allergies/irritate gut bacteria. However, most of the food you eat is the same, an alphonso mango farmed in india is different from one farmed in egypt or the USA, genetically different. It's true that there are some "dangers" associated with GMO allergies, but the benefits far outweigh the few negatives, it's cheaper food, and a much larger food supply, and more durable food, this has helped developing countries a lot, and this man Norman Bourlag won the Nobel Prize for World peace for increasing the food supply in developing nations using his genetically modified wheat. Natural is a pretty stupid word, especially considering the things we farm are not natural, and are selectively breeded to get a certain product quality.
I agree 100% that GM foods have by-and-large been a tremendous success, not just for the businesses that make them but (as you've pointed out) for the hungriest people that stand to benefit directly. But there is actually enough food to feed everyone on this planet already - the problem is one of divide, both geographical and economic (and certainly one of awareness). You only need to look at the excess of some wealthy nations, the movement of harvest from the producers to the consumers, indifference at the asymmetry of this relationship - and I'll tell you that even if a farmer is getting a higher yield thanks to GM, he will make scant enough money to lift himself out of poverty.
It's the same for sweatshop workers that are too poor to even afford the product they assemble en masse. Having better machinery to produce at twice the rate doesn't go far enough to resolving the larger problem.
Aside from simply increasing the biomass produced, another promise of GM foods is the ability to engineer resilience to weather and natural disaster, or to make farming possible in regions previously thought inhospitable. These sorts of advancements go farther (I think) to help people, who would otherwise be migrant to wherever they can grow. This can help to reduce territorial disputes, ethnic clashes, and contest for arable land as a resource. I think that GM foods are a very tangible factor in halting xenophobia, genocide, and war in some of the poorest parts of Earth.
I don't think it's stupid to use the word natural when talking about unmodified species, even ones that have been the subject of selective breeding. I think that Mendel's experiments or the activities of some dog enthusiasts are trivial in the face of millions of years of evolution. But when you step into the lab, you have free reign to play god and choose as much or as little as you like. You can mix things around, see if you like it - in practice minimal necessary change is the most pragmatic way to go about it, but to have total control in this fashion is no more natural than booting up Will Wright's latest game and seeing what you can cook up in an afternoon.
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Protoss is fucking imba - discuss
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mmp i think u're awesome! i would love for you to make a case of natural ability versus luck/dedication in progaming! i claim that the vast majority of people has no chance whatsoever to succeed with a progamer carreer no matter how hard they try, because they lack the talent/intelligence to succeed!
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On May 10 2010 01:31 sArite_nite wrote:
Protoss is fucking awesome - discuss
fixed it for ya.
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On May 10 2010 01:22 mmp wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2010 00:47 samachking wrote:On May 10 2010 00:26 mmp wrote:On May 09 2010 22:06 KwarK wrote:
Make a case against GM crops/livestock created through deliberate selective breeding for traits. + Show Spoiler +You specify that the modification in question is simply the selective breeding of existing species. I think it's ambiguous whether or not you intended to include genetic engineering as an objectionable modification - it is distinct from the vanilla old-fashioned techniques of breeding, but I will assume you meant GM to include direct manipulation of genetic material and traditional (Mendel-style selection) breeding.
In biological engineering, the state of the art gives us the ability to very handily say exactly how much of which proteins we would like to be expressed in a resultant strain. The state of the art also allows us to enumerate and verify that we've gotten exactly what we hoped for in the genetic code. This is the (arguably, but for the sake of this discussion) easy part, and this growing field tackles work of this scale on a daily basis.
The hard part is to now drift in the wake of your alterations and observe precisely how your strain grows and develops. You can introduce GFP into a mouse and have an adorable glow-in-the-dark pet mouse, but this says little about how vulnerable it becomes to nocturnal predators. Nor does it say anything about the resulting biochemistry inside of the rodent - the presence of free radicals, its propensity to any number of rodent-borne diseases, what bacteria it may harbor, its evolutionarily-determined benchmark for homeostasis, and so on, let alone a care for its own health or comfort (that isn't an issue).
Now what does any of this matter to us if we're only interested in eating the damn thing. Well as I've already cautioned, when you alter a creature's biochemistry you put it at risk to new disease, new afflictions, new "corruptions" that if not properly accounted for by the existing health standards can slip through to the consumer unchecked. These standards are not merely invented by an epiphany of scientists or lawmakers, but are adapted as necessitated by changing health risks - to be blunt, in hindsight of a calamitous event (the bovinial spongiform scares in the UK are but one example I can point to).
Unfortunately, standards for food safety can only measure things on the opposite end from where they started: in a laboratory. The growing plant or animal throughout its life stages is the black box in this system and we're in an unnecessary hurry to get this food on our plates without taking a moment to appreciate just what's happening inside that box. Although tests can apply a rubric of diverse criteria to identify a number of things that interest us, its the things you're not testing for that we need to worry about. The fact of the matter is you're dealing with a fundamentally distinct organism than that from which you stenciled.
You must account for the long-term effects of altered genetic code. You must account for the new pests and bacteria for which you've created a host. You must account for any toxins that weren't present previously, or were only at tolerable levels. We've altered the dosage and it will take years, even decades, to identify the most significant effects - these tests could take place in a lab, but it's not in the market's interest to delay profit.
Let's talk about meat. Some people like it rare, they like it juicy, they like it tender - no one puts themselves at greater risk of food-borne illness than this person, and occasionally they pay the price for it because the beef was of poor grade, or the sushi bar served fish past its date, or the kitchen countertop wasn't respected from contact with raw food, or any number of everyday blunders. Obviously you can kill most of the bad things in your food just by cooking them but some people are nonetheless afflicted, whether by a slip-up at the farm, untidiness in the kitchen, or their own desire to consume raw food.
But not all mammals and certainly not all humans react identically to raw meat. Stomach acids, bacteria that have chosen you for a host, and even immune system all play a roll in determining just how safe food is to you individually. And this says very little about people with allergies but I think you'll see that this isn't a trivial matter worth writing off in legislation. In the U.S. I am proud to say that if you have an allergy (perhaps fatal) to certain nuts, you can expect to see in boldfaced font a warning on food labels that will alert you even if the food may have only come in contact with machinery that processed nuts. It's important to recognize that mistakes happen in the kitchen and it's a deathly serious matter.
The risk is there and slip-ups happen all the time. Fortunately our bodies have already adapted in some capacity and some of us (but not all of us) are able to consume many foods in their rawest form. Appreciate this, but only with the lemma that it comes from the long-term adaptation to a fixed set of plants and animals that practice has shown to be acceptable to our health. When culture tells you to eat this food but not that one, it is based on a wisdom of thousands of years of culinary experience - and I want you to imagine what frightful reaction struck the first discover of nightshade and what horrible discomfort it would have imparted on those people. It may look like food, it might even taste good, but fuck it all, this one was evolved to kill me.
Now we've got a grad student in the lab with a hot idea on how we can make a plumper, juicier, nutritious whatever. I trust their methodology and I trust their results - it will be plumper, juicier, sexier, and whatever people happen to want. But the lab work ends when the thesis is done or when the company goes to market. In the United States, needless to say a major player in the biotech industry, the FDA has already made up its mind on GM foods. To put it simply, they've been judged "materially indistinguishable" from natural species and therefore are not subject to any new investigations or restrictions.
I will have to do some further investigation to find out just how the FDA came to this decision, but by the standard I've given you a GM food cannot be indistinguishable from its unmodified counterpart unless it has identical biochemistry - and it's the biochemistry that interests me. To say that they're "materially indistinguishable" is contradictory to the purpose of making a modification in the first place. If I'm eating a plumper, juicier, more nutritious whatever then the answer is clearly sitting right in front of you on your plate. I suggest you read up on this man http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_BorlaugYou make the argument that they are genetically different, therefore the food is incomparable and could be dangerous and cause allergies/irritate gut bacteria. However, most of the food you eat is the same, an alphonso mango farmed in india is different from one farmed in egypt or the USA, genetically different. It's true that there are some "dangers" associated with GMO allergies, but the benefits far outweigh the few negatives, it's cheaper food, and a much larger food supply, and more durable food, this has helped developing countries a lot, and this man Norman Bourlag won the Nobel Prize for World peace for increasing the food supply in developing nations using his genetically modified wheat. Natural is a pretty stupid word, especially considering the things we farm are not natural, and are selectively breeded to get a certain product quality. . I don't think it's stupid to use the word natural when talking about unmodified species, even ones that have been the subject of selective breeding. I think that Mendel's experiments or the activities of some dog enthusiasts are trivial in the face of millions of years of evolution. But when you step into the lab, you have free reign to play god and choose as much or as little as you like. You can mix things around, see if you like it - in practice minimal necessary change is the most pragmatic way to go about it, but to have total control in this fashion is no more natural than booting up Will Wright's latest game and seeing what you can cook up in an afternoon.
Good post, and I'm impressed by how much information you can muster, and it's good that you can learn all of this. However, you underestimate the effect of selective breeding, with 10 generations only you can double the lifespan of Drosophila flies, and the majority of dog varieties today are all a result of natural breeding. Evolution did not evolve all these plants we eat right now to be just right for humans, they aren't to serve that purpose at all. Agriculture and cultivation created the plant products we have now, man has made them with the technology of agriculture. Now we currently have a much superior technology that can help us with food that can sustain the people in our planet for a cheaper price. It's not natural you say? Why don't you go to the jungle yourself and get some natural food then, everything we have is processed, we always processed, we now just process food in a more advanced way, and it is better and cheaper for us humanity in general that way.
^__^. Have a look at Debatepedia, it seems like a fun and pretty good resource for this sort of stuff.
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When will dolphins take back the land we stole from them and put all us humans back into the sea?
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On May 10 2010 02:07 3FFA wrote:fixed it for ya.
^_^
MMP bro, what do you think will happen 100 years from now? Will humans die or will we travel in space?
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On May 10 2010 02:08 samachking wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2010 01:22 mmp wrote:On May 10 2010 00:47 samachking wrote:On May 10 2010 00:26 mmp wrote:On May 09 2010 22:06 KwarK wrote:
Make a case against GM crops/livestock created through deliberate selective breeding for traits. + Show Spoiler +You specify that the modification in question is simply the selective breeding of existing species. I think it's ambiguous whether or not you intended to include genetic engineering as an objectionable modification - it is distinct from the vanilla old-fashioned techniques of breeding, but I will assume you meant GM to include direct manipulation of genetic material and traditional (Mendel-style selection) breeding.
In biological engineering, the state of the art gives us the ability to very handily say exactly how much of which proteins we would like to be expressed in a resultant strain. The state of the art also allows us to enumerate and verify that we've gotten exactly what we hoped for in the genetic code. This is the (arguably, but for the sake of this discussion) easy part, and this growing field tackles work of this scale on a daily basis.
The hard part is to now drift in the wake of your alterations and observe precisely how your strain grows and develops. You can introduce GFP into a mouse and have an adorable glow-in-the-dark pet mouse, but this says little about how vulnerable it becomes to nocturnal predators. Nor does it say anything about the resulting biochemistry inside of the rodent - the presence of free radicals, its propensity to any number of rodent-borne diseases, what bacteria it may harbor, its evolutionarily-determined benchmark for homeostasis, and so on, let alone a care for its own health or comfort (that isn't an issue).
Now what does any of this matter to us if we're only interested in eating the damn thing. Well as I've already cautioned, when you alter a creature's biochemistry you put it at risk to new disease, new afflictions, new "corruptions" that if not properly accounted for by the existing health standards can slip through to the consumer unchecked. These standards are not merely invented by an epiphany of scientists or lawmakers, but are adapted as necessitated by changing health risks - to be blunt, in hindsight of a calamitous event (the bovinial spongiform scares in the UK are but one example I can point to).
Unfortunately, standards for food safety can only measure things on the opposite end from where they started: in a laboratory. The growing plant or animal throughout its life stages is the black box in this system and we're in an unnecessary hurry to get this food on our plates without taking a moment to appreciate just what's happening inside that box. Although tests can apply a rubric of diverse criteria to identify a number of things that interest us, its the things you're not testing for that we need to worry about. The fact of the matter is you're dealing with a fundamentally distinct organism than that from which you stenciled.
You must account for the long-term effects of altered genetic code. You must account for the new pests and bacteria for which you've created a host. You must account for any toxins that weren't present previously, or were only at tolerable levels. We've altered the dosage and it will take years, even decades, to identify the most significant effects - these tests could take place in a lab, but it's not in the market's interest to delay profit.
Let's talk about meat. Some people like it rare, they like it juicy, they like it tender - no one puts themselves at greater risk of food-borne illness than this person, and occasionally they pay the price for it because the beef was of poor grade, or the sushi bar served fish past its date, or the kitchen countertop wasn't respected from contact with raw food, or any number of everyday blunders. Obviously you can kill most of the bad things in your food just by cooking them but some people are nonetheless afflicted, whether by a slip-up at the farm, untidiness in the kitchen, or their own desire to consume raw food.
But not all mammals and certainly not all humans react identically to raw meat. Stomach acids, bacteria that have chosen you for a host, and even immune system all play a roll in determining just how safe food is to you individually. And this says very little about people with allergies but I think you'll see that this isn't a trivial matter worth writing off in legislation. In the U.S. I am proud to say that if you have an allergy (perhaps fatal) to certain nuts, you can expect to see in boldfaced font a warning on food labels that will alert you even if the food may have only come in contact with machinery that processed nuts. It's important to recognize that mistakes happen in the kitchen and it's a deathly serious matter.
The risk is there and slip-ups happen all the time. Fortunately our bodies have already adapted in some capacity and some of us (but not all of us) are able to consume many foods in their rawest form. Appreciate this, but only with the lemma that it comes from the long-term adaptation to a fixed set of plants and animals that practice has shown to be acceptable to our health. When culture tells you to eat this food but not that one, it is based on a wisdom of thousands of years of culinary experience - and I want you to imagine what frightful reaction struck the first discover of nightshade and what horrible discomfort it would have imparted on those people. It may look like food, it might even taste good, but fuck it all, this one was evolved to kill me.
Now we've got a grad student in the lab with a hot idea on how we can make a plumper, juicier, nutritious whatever. I trust their methodology and I trust their results - it will be plumper, juicier, sexier, and whatever people happen to want. But the lab work ends when the thesis is done or when the company goes to market. In the United States, needless to say a major player in the biotech industry, the FDA has already made up its mind on GM foods. To put it simply, they've been judged "materially indistinguishable" from natural species and therefore are not subject to any new investigations or restrictions.
I will have to do some further investigation to find out just how the FDA came to this decision, but by the standard I've given you a GM food cannot be indistinguishable from its unmodified counterpart unless it has identical biochemistry - and it's the biochemistry that interests me. To say that they're "materially indistinguishable" is contradictory to the purpose of making a modification in the first place. If I'm eating a plumper, juicier, more nutritious whatever then the answer is clearly sitting right in front of you on your plate. I suggest you read up on this man http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_BorlaugYou make the argument that they are genetically different, therefore the food is incomparable and could be dangerous and cause allergies/irritate gut bacteria. However, most of the food you eat is the same, an alphonso mango farmed in india is different from one farmed in egypt or the USA, genetically different. It's true that there are some "dangers" associated with GMO allergies, but the benefits far outweigh the few negatives, it's cheaper food, and a much larger food supply, and more durable food, this has helped developing countries a lot, and this man Norman Bourlag won the Nobel Prize for World peace for increasing the food supply in developing nations using his genetically modified wheat. Natural is a pretty stupid word, especially considering the things we farm are not natural, and are selectively breeded to get a certain product quality. . I don't think it's stupid to use the word natural when talking about unmodified species, even ones that have been the subject of selective breeding. I think that Mendel's experiments or the activities of some dog enthusiasts are trivial in the face of millions of years of evolution. But when you step into the lab, you have free reign to play god and choose as much or as little as you like. You can mix things around, see if you like it - in practice minimal necessary change is the most pragmatic way to go about it, but to have total control in this fashion is no more natural than booting up Will Wright's latest game and seeing what you can cook up in an afternoon. Good post, and I'm impressed by how much information you can muster, and it's good that you can learn all of this. However, you underestimate the effect of selective breeding, with 10 generations only you can double the lifespan of Drosophila flies, and the majority of dog varieties today are all a result of natural breeding. Evolution did not evolve all these plants we eat right now to be just right for humans, they aren't to serve that purpose at all. Agriculture and cultivation created the plant products we have now, man has made them with the technology of agriculture. Now we currently have a much superior technology that can help us with food that can sustain the people in our planet for a cheaper price. It's not natural you say? Why don't you go to the jungle yourself and get some natural food then, everything we have is processed, we always processed, we now just process food in a more advanced way, and it is better and cheaper for us humanity in general that way. ^__^. Have a look at Debatepedia, it seems like a fun and pretty good resource for this sort of stuff.
And can a subsequent 10 generations again double the life of the flies? How about 100? Your point is well made that nature is not immutable, its "perfection" only conceivable in a system that doesn't challenge its rules, and I agree that we should challenge it - but these feats are only the tip of the iceberg.
I don't doubt that humans have had an pivotal role in shaping the genetic makeup of numerous organisms that have crossed paths with us. Certainly we control what species live and what species die, but if I walked into the lab and just scrambled amino acids around randomly - I would be busy (with the help of computers) for a long time trying to assemble something as particular as to belong in a dog show. Dog breeders (technically inbreeders) and farmers took what they were given and are looking for wiggle room in the neighborhood of the constraints offered by a Punnett square. You can certainly go places with this method, but it's slow, and nothing like the amino acid shakedown that we're capable of performing.
What I'm trying to get across is that this is radically different from what is done in bioengineering, but there is still a stencil, a template, from which the work originates. If you want to make a bigger orange, you're going to start with an orange and look for ways to alter its life cycle for prolonged growth - little things. You wouldn't be very productive if you started from nothing and tried to rebuild an orange from scratch (even with computational aid), no we're just not there yet - but it is on the horizon. So I believe that there is a reasonable distinction between the natural and unnatural tampering with biology - not to suggest that the unnatural is inherently unlawful (as some environmentalists and opponents of GM foods would believe) - I simply feel that you need to regard the two methods with a full appreciation for their capacity.
Why don't you go to the jungle yourself and get some natural food then, everything we have is processed, we always processed, we now just process food in a more advanced way, and it is better and cheaper for us humanity in general that way.
It's easy to praise the achievements of industrial society, but certainly our ancestors and some people living today have survived not by being callous about what they put into their mouths, because a mistake can mean death. The next time you're out of doors and near "nature", see if you can identify the plants you could eat and the ones you should avoid (it's of course a wasted exercise since the majority are just harmless weeds wherever you live). The whole point of the GM safety argument is that you need to be careful you don't inadvertently reinvent nature's most powerful self-defense mechanism - toxins. And you have good studies and you think your product is safe, that's fine and appears to be working well enough for us so far - but giving a green light without any basis for testing procedures simply because it moos like a cow so it must be the same as a cow... (this is the FDA's stance) to any concoction that comes out of a laboratory is irresponsible no less than it is frightful.
This isn't the perspective of an outsider, or of someone who grew up skeptical of science (ponder that one for a second). I am in science, I know what goes on in laboratories, and I'm familiar with the deceit that some pharmaceutical companies will engage in to get known bad drugs past the FDA, purely for greed. You must hold people accountable to your standards, because they're not going to be honest with you.
Edit: Wow this debatepedia is amazing! How long has this been hiding out of my sight?
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On May 10 2010 03:19 mmp wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2010 02:08 samachking wrote:On May 10 2010 01:22 mmp wrote:On May 10 2010 00:47 samachking wrote:On May 10 2010 00:26 mmp wrote:On May 09 2010 22:06 KwarK wrote:
Make a case against GM crops/livestock created through deliberate selective breeding for traits. + Show Spoiler +You specify that the modification in question is simply the selective breeding of existing species. I think it's ambiguous whether or not you intended to include genetic engineering as an objectionable modification - it is distinct from the vanilla old-fashioned techniques of breeding, but I will assume you meant GM to include direct manipulation of genetic material and traditional (Mendel-style selection) breeding.
In biological engineering, the state of the art gives us the ability to very handily say exactly how much of which proteins we would like to be expressed in a resultant strain. The state of the art also allows us to enumerate and verify that we've gotten exactly what we hoped for in the genetic code. This is the (arguably, but for the sake of this discussion) easy part, and this growing field tackles work of this scale on a daily basis.
The hard part is to now drift in the wake of your alterations and observe precisely how your strain grows and develops. You can introduce GFP into a mouse and have an adorable glow-in-the-dark pet mouse, but this says little about how vulnerable it becomes to nocturnal predators. Nor does it say anything about the resulting biochemistry inside of the rodent - the presence of free radicals, its propensity to any number of rodent-borne diseases, what bacteria it may harbor, its evolutionarily-determined benchmark for homeostasis, and so on, let alone a care for its own health or comfort (that isn't an issue).
Now what does any of this matter to us if we're only interested in eating the damn thing. Well as I've already cautioned, when you alter a creature's biochemistry you put it at risk to new disease, new afflictions, new "corruptions" that if not properly accounted for by the existing health standards can slip through to the consumer unchecked. These standards are not merely invented by an epiphany of scientists or lawmakers, but are adapted as necessitated by changing health risks - to be blunt, in hindsight of a calamitous event (the bovinial spongiform scares in the UK are but one example I can point to).
Unfortunately, standards for food safety can only measure things on the opposite end from where they started: in a laboratory. The growing plant or animal throughout its life stages is the black box in this system and we're in an unnecessary hurry to get this food on our plates without taking a moment to appreciate just what's happening inside that box. Although tests can apply a rubric of diverse criteria to identify a number of things that interest us, its the things you're not testing for that we need to worry about. The fact of the matter is you're dealing with a fundamentally distinct organism than that from which you stenciled.
You must account for the long-term effects of altered genetic code. You must account for the new pests and bacteria for which you've created a host. You must account for any toxins that weren't present previously, or were only at tolerable levels. We've altered the dosage and it will take years, even decades, to identify the most significant effects - these tests could take place in a lab, but it's not in the market's interest to delay profit.
Let's talk about meat. Some people like it rare, they like it juicy, they like it tender - no one puts themselves at greater risk of food-borne illness than this person, and occasionally they pay the price for it because the beef was of poor grade, or the sushi bar served fish past its date, or the kitchen countertop wasn't respected from contact with raw food, or any number of everyday blunders. Obviously you can kill most of the bad things in your food just by cooking them but some people are nonetheless afflicted, whether by a slip-up at the farm, untidiness in the kitchen, or their own desire to consume raw food.
But not all mammals and certainly not all humans react identically to raw meat. Stomach acids, bacteria that have chosen you for a host, and even immune system all play a roll in determining just how safe food is to you individually. And this says very little about people with allergies but I think you'll see that this isn't a trivial matter worth writing off in legislation. In the U.S. I am proud to say that if you have an allergy (perhaps fatal) to certain nuts, you can expect to see in boldfaced font a warning on food labels that will alert you even if the food may have only come in contact with machinery that processed nuts. It's important to recognize that mistakes happen in the kitchen and it's a deathly serious matter.
The risk is there and slip-ups happen all the time. Fortunately our bodies have already adapted in some capacity and some of us (but not all of us) are able to consume many foods in their rawest form. Appreciate this, but only with the lemma that it comes from the long-term adaptation to a fixed set of plants and animals that practice has shown to be acceptable to our health. When culture tells you to eat this food but not that one, it is based on a wisdom of thousands of years of culinary experience - and I want you to imagine what frightful reaction struck the first discover of nightshade and what horrible discomfort it would have imparted on those people. It may look like food, it might even taste good, but fuck it all, this one was evolved to kill me.
Now we've got a grad student in the lab with a hot idea on how we can make a plumper, juicier, nutritious whatever. I trust their methodology and I trust their results - it will be plumper, juicier, sexier, and whatever people happen to want. But the lab work ends when the thesis is done or when the company goes to market. In the United States, needless to say a major player in the biotech industry, the FDA has already made up its mind on GM foods. To put it simply, they've been judged "materially indistinguishable" from natural species and therefore are not subject to any new investigations or restrictions.
I will have to do some further investigation to find out just how the FDA came to this decision, but by the standard I've given you a GM food cannot be indistinguishable from its unmodified counterpart unless it has identical biochemistry - and it's the biochemistry that interests me. To say that they're "materially indistinguishable" is contradictory to the purpose of making a modification in the first place. If I'm eating a plumper, juicier, more nutritious whatever then the answer is clearly sitting right in front of you on your plate. I suggest you read up on this man http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_BorlaugYou make the argument that they are genetically different, therefore the food is incomparable and could be dangerous and cause allergies/irritate gut bacteria. However, most of the food you eat is the same, an alphonso mango farmed in india is different from one farmed in egypt or the USA, genetically different. It's true that there are some "dangers" associated with GMO allergies, but the benefits far outweigh the few negatives, it's cheaper food, and a much larger food supply, and more durable food, this has helped developing countries a lot, and this man Norman Bourlag won the Nobel Prize for World peace for increasing the food supply in developing nations using his genetically modified wheat. Natural is a pretty stupid word, especially considering the things we farm are not natural, and are selectively breeded to get a certain product quality. . I don't think it's stupid to use the word natural when talking about unmodified species, even ones that have been the subject of selective breeding. I think that Mendel's experiments or the activities of some dog enthusiasts are trivial in the face of millions of years of evolution. But when you step into the lab, you have free reign to play god and choose as much or as little as you like. You can mix things around, see if you like it - in practice minimal necessary change is the most pragmatic way to go about it, but to have total control in this fashion is no more natural than booting up Will Wright's latest game and seeing what you can cook up in an afternoon. Good post, and I'm impressed by how much information you can muster, and it's good that you can learn all of this. However, you underestimate the effect of selective breeding, with 10 generations only you can double the lifespan of Drosophila flies, and the majority of dog varieties today are all a result of natural breeding. Evolution did not evolve all these plants we eat right now to be just right for humans, they aren't to serve that purpose at all. Agriculture and cultivation created the plant products we have now, man has made them with the technology of agriculture. Now we currently have a much superior technology that can help us with food that can sustain the people in our planet for a cheaper price. It's not natural you say? Why don't you go to the jungle yourself and get some natural food then, everything we have is processed, we always processed, we now just process food in a more advanced way, and it is better and cheaper for us humanity in general that way. ^__^. Have a look at Debatepedia, it seems like a fun and pretty good resource for this sort of stuff. + Show Spoiler +And can a subsequent 10 generations again double the life of the flies? How about 100? Your point is well made that nature is not immutable, its "perfection" only conceivable in a system that doesn't challenge its rules, and I agree that we should challenge it - but these feats are only the tip of the iceberg. I don't doubt that humans have had an pivotal role in shaping the genetic makeup of numerous organisms that have crossed paths with us. Certainly we control what species live and what species die, but if I walked into the lab and just scrambled amino acids around randomly - I would be busy (with the help of computers) for a long time trying to assemble something as particular as to belong in a dog show. Dog breeders (technically inbreeders) and farmers took what they were given and are looking for wiggle room in the neighborhood of the constraints offered by a Punnett square. You can certainly go places with this method, but it's slow, and nothing like the amino acid shakedown that we're capable of performing. What I'm trying to get across is that this is radically different from what is done in bioengineering, but there is still a stencil, a template, from which the work originates. If you want to make a bigger orange, you're going to start with an orange and look for ways to alter its life cycle for prolonged growth - little things. You wouldn't be very productive if you started from nothing and tried to rebuild an orange from scratch (even with computational aid), no we're just not there yet - but it is on the horizon. So I believe that there is a reasonable distinction between the natural and unnatural tampering with biology - not to suggest that the unnatural is inherently unlawful (as some environmentalists and opponents of GM foods would believe) - I simply feel that you need to regard the two methods with a full appreciation for their capacity. Why don't you go to the jungle yourself and get some natural food then, everything we have is processed, we always processed, we now just process food in a more advanced way, and it is better and cheaper for us humanity in general that way. It's easy to praise the achievements of industrial society, but certainly our ancestors and some people living today have survived not by being callous about what they put into their mouths, because a mistake can mean death. The next time you're out of doors and near "nature", see if you can identify the plants you could eat and the ones you should avoid (it's of course a wasted exercise since the majority are just harmless weeds wherever you live). The whole point of the GM safety argument is that you need to be careful you don't inadvertently reinvent nature's most powerful self-defense mechanism - toxins. And you have good studies and you think your product is safe, that's fine and appears to be working well enough for us so far - but giving a green light without any basis for testing procedures simply because it moos like a cow so it must be the same as a cow... (this is the FDA's stance) to any concoction that comes out of a laboratory is irresponsible no less than it is frightful. This isn't the perspective of an outsider, or of someone who grew up skeptical of science (ponder that one for a second). I am in science, I know what goes on in laboratories, and I'm familiar with the deceit that some pharmaceutical companies will engage in to get known bad drugs past the FDA, purely for greed. You must hold people accountable to your standards, because they're not going to be honest with you. Edit: Wow this debatepedia is amazing! How long has this been hiding out of my sight?
Heh, I am agreeing with you on these points. And I think we can both agree that GM foods are great and the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. And there should be proper regulation and proper scientific testing behind them and the possible side effects. You seem to be arguing that the scientists backing these commercial products are inherently bad, however, with proper regulation everything is going to be great. You make the case with Pharma companies, however, remember that it takes 10 years on average to pass a drug from bench to bedside and it takes a couple of million in budget too.
I honestly do not know much about the real science behind GM Crops, and I think I need to get myself educated on it, but it seems to me, that the benefits of crops such as corn far outweigh the "unnatural" disadvantages. It seems like the arguments against GM crops are the same as the arguments against pharmaceuticals, well, the solution is the same too, proper evidence and proper controlled testing that far outweighs the side effects seems to be the solution. I certainly enjoyed talking about this with you.
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On May 10 2010 04:16 samachking wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2010 03:19 mmp wrote:On May 10 2010 02:08 samachking wrote:On May 10 2010 01:22 mmp wrote:On May 10 2010 00:47 samachking wrote:On May 10 2010 00:26 mmp wrote:On May 09 2010 22:06 KwarK wrote:
Make a case against GM crops/livestock created through deliberate selective breeding for traits. + Show Spoiler +You specify that the modification in question is simply the selective breeding of existing species. I think it's ambiguous whether or not you intended to include genetic engineering as an objectionable modification - it is distinct from the vanilla old-fashioned techniques of breeding, but I will assume you meant GM to include direct manipulation of genetic material and traditional (Mendel-style selection) breeding.
In biological engineering, the state of the art gives us the ability to very handily say exactly how much of which proteins we would like to be expressed in a resultant strain. The state of the art also allows us to enumerate and verify that we've gotten exactly what we hoped for in the genetic code. This is the (arguably, but for the sake of this discussion) easy part, and this growing field tackles work of this scale on a daily basis.
The hard part is to now drift in the wake of your alterations and observe precisely how your strain grows and develops. You can introduce GFP into a mouse and have an adorable glow-in-the-dark pet mouse, but this says little about how vulnerable it becomes to nocturnal predators. Nor does it say anything about the resulting biochemistry inside of the rodent - the presence of free radicals, its propensity to any number of rodent-borne diseases, what bacteria it may harbor, its evolutionarily-determined benchmark for homeostasis, and so on, let alone a care for its own health or comfort (that isn't an issue).
Now what does any of this matter to us if we're only interested in eating the damn thing. Well as I've already cautioned, when you alter a creature's biochemistry you put it at risk to new disease, new afflictions, new "corruptions" that if not properly accounted for by the existing health standards can slip through to the consumer unchecked. These standards are not merely invented by an epiphany of scientists or lawmakers, but are adapted as necessitated by changing health risks - to be blunt, in hindsight of a calamitous event (the bovinial spongiform scares in the UK are but one example I can point to).
Unfortunately, standards for food safety can only measure things on the opposite end from where they started: in a laboratory. The growing plant or animal throughout its life stages is the black box in this system and we're in an unnecessary hurry to get this food on our plates without taking a moment to appreciate just what's happening inside that box. Although tests can apply a rubric of diverse criteria to identify a number of things that interest us, its the things you're not testing for that we need to worry about. The fact of the matter is you're dealing with a fundamentally distinct organism than that from which you stenciled.
You must account for the long-term effects of altered genetic code. You must account for the new pests and bacteria for which you've created a host. You must account for any toxins that weren't present previously, or were only at tolerable levels. We've altered the dosage and it will take years, even decades, to identify the most significant effects - these tests could take place in a lab, but it's not in the market's interest to delay profit.
Let's talk about meat. Some people like it rare, they like it juicy, they like it tender - no one puts themselves at greater risk of food-borne illness than this person, and occasionally they pay the price for it because the beef was of poor grade, or the sushi bar served fish past its date, or the kitchen countertop wasn't respected from contact with raw food, or any number of everyday blunders. Obviously you can kill most of the bad things in your food just by cooking them but some people are nonetheless afflicted, whether by a slip-up at the farm, untidiness in the kitchen, or their own desire to consume raw food.
But not all mammals and certainly not all humans react identically to raw meat. Stomach acids, bacteria that have chosen you for a host, and even immune system all play a roll in determining just how safe food is to you individually. And this says very little about people with allergies but I think you'll see that this isn't a trivial matter worth writing off in legislation. In the U.S. I am proud to say that if you have an allergy (perhaps fatal) to certain nuts, you can expect to see in boldfaced font a warning on food labels that will alert you even if the food may have only come in contact with machinery that processed nuts. It's important to recognize that mistakes happen in the kitchen and it's a deathly serious matter.
The risk is there and slip-ups happen all the time. Fortunately our bodies have already adapted in some capacity and some of us (but not all of us) are able to consume many foods in their rawest form. Appreciate this, but only with the lemma that it comes from the long-term adaptation to a fixed set of plants and animals that practice has shown to be acceptable to our health. When culture tells you to eat this food but not that one, it is based on a wisdom of thousands of years of culinary experience - and I want you to imagine what frightful reaction struck the first discover of nightshade and what horrible discomfort it would have imparted on those people. It may look like food, it might even taste good, but fuck it all, this one was evolved to kill me.
Now we've got a grad student in the lab with a hot idea on how we can make a plumper, juicier, nutritious whatever. I trust their methodology and I trust their results - it will be plumper, juicier, sexier, and whatever people happen to want. But the lab work ends when the thesis is done or when the company goes to market. In the United States, needless to say a major player in the biotech industry, the FDA has already made up its mind on GM foods. To put it simply, they've been judged "materially indistinguishable" from natural species and therefore are not subject to any new investigations or restrictions.
I will have to do some further investigation to find out just how the FDA came to this decision, but by the standard I've given you a GM food cannot be indistinguishable from its unmodified counterpart unless it has identical biochemistry - and it's the biochemistry that interests me. To say that they're "materially indistinguishable" is contradictory to the purpose of making a modification in the first place. If I'm eating a plumper, juicier, more nutritious whatever then the answer is clearly sitting right in front of you on your plate. I suggest you read up on this man http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_BorlaugYou make the argument that they are genetically different, therefore the food is incomparable and could be dangerous and cause allergies/irritate gut bacteria. However, most of the food you eat is the same, an alphonso mango farmed in india is different from one farmed in egypt or the USA, genetically different. It's true that there are some "dangers" associated with GMO allergies, but the benefits far outweigh the few negatives, it's cheaper food, and a much larger food supply, and more durable food, this has helped developing countries a lot, and this man Norman Bourlag won the Nobel Prize for World peace for increasing the food supply in developing nations using his genetically modified wheat. Natural is a pretty stupid word, especially considering the things we farm are not natural, and are selectively breeded to get a certain product quality. . I don't think it's stupid to use the word natural when talking about unmodified species, even ones that have been the subject of selective breeding. I think that Mendel's experiments or the activities of some dog enthusiasts are trivial in the face of millions of years of evolution. But when you step into the lab, you have free reign to play god and choose as much or as little as you like. You can mix things around, see if you like it - in practice minimal necessary change is the most pragmatic way to go about it, but to have total control in this fashion is no more natural than booting up Will Wright's latest game and seeing what you can cook up in an afternoon. Good post, and I'm impressed by how much information you can muster, and it's good that you can learn all of this. However, you underestimate the effect of selective breeding, with 10 generations only you can double the lifespan of Drosophila flies, and the majority of dog varieties today are all a result of natural breeding. Evolution did not evolve all these plants we eat right now to be just right for humans, they aren't to serve that purpose at all. Agriculture and cultivation created the plant products we have now, man has made them with the technology of agriculture. Now we currently have a much superior technology that can help us with food that can sustain the people in our planet for a cheaper price. It's not natural you say? Why don't you go to the jungle yourself and get some natural food then, everything we have is processed, we always processed, we now just process food in a more advanced way, and it is better and cheaper for us humanity in general that way. ^__^. Have a look at Debatepedia, it seems like a fun and pretty good resource for this sort of stuff. + Show Spoiler +And can a subsequent 10 generations again double the life of the flies? How about 100? Your point is well made that nature is not immutable, its "perfection" only conceivable in a system that doesn't challenge its rules, and I agree that we should challenge it - but these feats are only the tip of the iceberg. I don't doubt that humans have had an pivotal role in shaping the genetic makeup of numerous organisms that have crossed paths with us. Certainly we control what species live and what species die, but if I walked into the lab and just scrambled amino acids around randomly - I would be busy (with the help of computers) for a long time trying to assemble something as particular as to belong in a dog show. Dog breeders (technically inbreeders) and farmers took what they were given and are looking for wiggle room in the neighborhood of the constraints offered by a Punnett square. You can certainly go places with this method, but it's slow, and nothing like the amino acid shakedown that we're capable of performing. What I'm trying to get across is that this is radically different from what is done in bioengineering, but there is still a stencil, a template, from which the work originates. If you want to make a bigger orange, you're going to start with an orange and look for ways to alter its life cycle for prolonged growth - little things. You wouldn't be very productive if you started from nothing and tried to rebuild an orange from scratch (even with computational aid), no we're just not there yet - but it is on the horizon. So I believe that there is a reasonable distinction between the natural and unnatural tampering with biology - not to suggest that the unnatural is inherently unlawful (as some environmentalists and opponents of GM foods would believe) - I simply feel that you need to regard the two methods with a full appreciation for their capacity. Why don't you go to the jungle yourself and get some natural food then, everything we have is processed, we always processed, we now just process food in a more advanced way, and it is better and cheaper for us humanity in general that way. It's easy to praise the achievements of industrial society, but certainly our ancestors and some people living today have survived not by being callous about what they put into their mouths, because a mistake can mean death. The next time you're out of doors and near "nature", see if you can identify the plants you could eat and the ones you should avoid (it's of course a wasted exercise since the majority are just harmless weeds wherever you live). The whole point of the GM safety argument is that you need to be careful you don't inadvertently reinvent nature's most powerful self-defense mechanism - toxins. And you have good studies and you think your product is safe, that's fine and appears to be working well enough for us so far - but giving a green light without any basis for testing procedures simply because it moos like a cow so it must be the same as a cow... (this is the FDA's stance) to any concoction that comes out of a laboratory is irresponsible no less than it is frightful. This isn't the perspective of an outsider, or of someone who grew up skeptical of science (ponder that one for a second). I am in science, I know what goes on in laboratories, and I'm familiar with the deceit that some pharmaceutical companies will engage in to get known bad drugs past the FDA, purely for greed. You must hold people accountable to your standards, because they're not going to be honest with you. Edit: Wow this debatepedia is amazing! How long has this been hiding out of my sight? Heh, I am agreeing with you on these points. And I think we can both agree that GM foods are great and the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. And there should be proper regulation and proper scientific testing behind them and the possible side effects. You seem to be arguing that the scientists backing these commercial products are inherently bad, however, with proper regulation everything is going to be great. You make the case with Pharma companies, however, remember that it takes 10 years on average to pass a drug from bench to bedside and it takes a couple of million in budget too. I honestly do not know much about the real science behind GM Crops, and I think I need to get myself educated on it, but it seems to me, that the benefits of crops such as corn far outweigh the "unnatural" disadvantages. It seems like the arguments against GM crops are the same as the arguments against pharmaceuticals, well, the solution is the same too, proper evidence and proper controlled testing that far outweighs the side effects seems to be the solution. I certainly enjoyed talking about this with you.
As have I.
The scientists aren't malevolent. The pressures of deadlines and denial in testing (you'll meet your deadlines whether it's safe or not) and the rational need to balance a budget, all catalyzed by poor leadership and flimsy business ethics. A big company like Pfizer or Merck puts out a ton of wonder drugs (and it costs them hundreds of millions to get through the formalities of getting a drug approved, to say nothing of the investments in talent and machinery), but many companies strain under this burden and let their integrity slip on a product here or there. It comes back in the form of a recall or class action lawsuit and fingers can be pointed everywhere, but it's typically worth the risk. :p
But malevolence isn't the only reason to have safety standards. Remember thalidomide, where only a slight mistake in stereochemistry had profound effects, and no one found out until babies started showing up 9 months later disfigured (if they even made it out alive at all)? The lesson isn't to fear science or shun away from it, but to respect its power even in subtle matters.
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On May 10 2010 04:54 mmp wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2010 04:16 samachking wrote:On May 10 2010 03:19 mmp wrote:On May 10 2010 02:08 samachking wrote:On May 10 2010 01:22 mmp wrote:On May 10 2010 00:47 samachking wrote:On May 10 2010 00:26 mmp wrote:On May 09 2010 22:06 KwarK wrote:
Make a case against GM crops/livestock created through deliberate selective breeding for traits. + Show Spoiler +You specify that the modification in question is simply the selective breeding of existing species. I think it's ambiguous whether or not you intended to include genetic engineering as an objectionable modification - it is distinct from the vanilla old-fashioned techniques of breeding, but I will assume you meant GM to include direct manipulation of genetic material and traditional (Mendel-style selection) breeding.
In biological engineering, the state of the art gives us the ability to very handily say exactly how much of which proteins we would like to be expressed in a resultant strain. The state of the art also allows us to enumerate and verify that we've gotten exactly what we hoped for in the genetic code. This is the (arguably, but for the sake of this discussion) easy part, and this growing field tackles work of this scale on a daily basis.
The hard part is to now drift in the wake of your alterations and observe precisely how your strain grows and develops. You can introduce GFP into a mouse and have an adorable glow-in-the-dark pet mouse, but this says little about how vulnerable it becomes to nocturnal predators. Nor does it say anything about the resulting biochemistry inside of the rodent - the presence of free radicals, its propensity to any number of rodent-borne diseases, what bacteria it may harbor, its evolutionarily-determined benchmark for homeostasis, and so on, let alone a care for its own health or comfort (that isn't an issue).
Now what does any of this matter to us if we're only interested in eating the damn thing. Well as I've already cautioned, when you alter a creature's biochemistry you put it at risk to new disease, new afflictions, new "corruptions" that if not properly accounted for by the existing health standards can slip through to the consumer unchecked. These standards are not merely invented by an epiphany of scientists or lawmakers, but are adapted as necessitated by changing health risks - to be blunt, in hindsight of a calamitous event (the bovinial spongiform scares in the UK are but one example I can point to).
Unfortunately, standards for food safety can only measure things on the opposite end from where they started: in a laboratory. The growing plant or animal throughout its life stages is the black box in this system and we're in an unnecessary hurry to get this food on our plates without taking a moment to appreciate just what's happening inside that box. Although tests can apply a rubric of diverse criteria to identify a number of things that interest us, its the things you're not testing for that we need to worry about. The fact of the matter is you're dealing with a fundamentally distinct organism than that from which you stenciled.
You must account for the long-term effects of altered genetic code. You must account for the new pests and bacteria for which you've created a host. You must account for any toxins that weren't present previously, or were only at tolerable levels. We've altered the dosage and it will take years, even decades, to identify the most significant effects - these tests could take place in a lab, but it's not in the market's interest to delay profit.
Let's talk about meat. Some people like it rare, they like it juicy, they like it tender - no one puts themselves at greater risk of food-borne illness than this person, and occasionally they pay the price for it because the beef was of poor grade, or the sushi bar served fish past its date, or the kitchen countertop wasn't respected from contact with raw food, or any number of everyday blunders. Obviously you can kill most of the bad things in your food just by cooking them but some people are nonetheless afflicted, whether by a slip-up at the farm, untidiness in the kitchen, or their own desire to consume raw food.
But not all mammals and certainly not all humans react identically to raw meat. Stomach acids, bacteria that have chosen you for a host, and even immune system all play a roll in determining just how safe food is to you individually. And this says very little about people with allergies but I think you'll see that this isn't a trivial matter worth writing off in legislation. In the U.S. I am proud to say that if you have an allergy (perhaps fatal) to certain nuts, you can expect to see in boldfaced font a warning on food labels that will alert you even if the food may have only come in contact with machinery that processed nuts. It's important to recognize that mistakes happen in the kitchen and it's a deathly serious matter.
The risk is there and slip-ups happen all the time. Fortunately our bodies have already adapted in some capacity and some of us (but not all of us) are able to consume many foods in their rawest form. Appreciate this, but only with the lemma that it comes from the long-term adaptation to a fixed set of plants and animals that practice has shown to be acceptable to our health. When culture tells you to eat this food but not that one, it is based on a wisdom of thousands of years of culinary experience - and I want you to imagine what frightful reaction struck the first discover of nightshade and what horrible discomfort it would have imparted on those people. It may look like food, it might even taste good, but fuck it all, this one was evolved to kill me.
Now we've got a grad student in the lab with a hot idea on how we can make a plumper, juicier, nutritious whatever. I trust their methodology and I trust their results - it will be plumper, juicier, sexier, and whatever people happen to want. But the lab work ends when the thesis is done or when the company goes to market. In the United States, needless to say a major player in the biotech industry, the FDA has already made up its mind on GM foods. To put it simply, they've been judged "materially indistinguishable" from natural species and therefore are not subject to any new investigations or restrictions.
I will have to do some further investigation to find out just how the FDA came to this decision, but by the standard I've given you a GM food cannot be indistinguishable from its unmodified counterpart unless it has identical biochemistry - and it's the biochemistry that interests me. To say that they're "materially indistinguishable" is contradictory to the purpose of making a modification in the first place. If I'm eating a plumper, juicier, more nutritious whatever then the answer is clearly sitting right in front of you on your plate. I suggest you read up on this man http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_BorlaugYou make the argument that they are genetically different, therefore the food is incomparable and could be dangerous and cause allergies/irritate gut bacteria. However, most of the food you eat is the same, an alphonso mango farmed in india is different from one farmed in egypt or the USA, genetically different. It's true that there are some "dangers" associated with GMO allergies, but the benefits far outweigh the few negatives, it's cheaper food, and a much larger food supply, and more durable food, this has helped developing countries a lot, and this man Norman Bourlag won the Nobel Prize for World peace for increasing the food supply in developing nations using his genetically modified wheat. Natural is a pretty stupid word, especially considering the things we farm are not natural, and are selectively breeded to get a certain product quality. . I don't think it's stupid to use the word natural when talking about unmodified species, even ones that have been the subject of selective breeding. I think that Mendel's experiments or the activities of some dog enthusiasts are trivial in the face of millions of years of evolution. But when you step into the lab, you have free reign to play god and choose as much or as little as you like. You can mix things around, see if you like it - in practice minimal necessary change is the most pragmatic way to go about it, but to have total control in this fashion is no more natural than booting up Will Wright's latest game and seeing what you can cook up in an afternoon. Good post, and I'm impressed by how much information you can muster, and it's good that you can learn all of this. However, you underestimate the effect of selective breeding, with 10 generations only you can double the lifespan of Drosophila flies, and the majority of dog varieties today are all a result of natural breeding. Evolution did not evolve all these plants we eat right now to be just right for humans, they aren't to serve that purpose at all. Agriculture and cultivation created the plant products we have now, man has made them with the technology of agriculture. Now we currently have a much superior technology that can help us with food that can sustain the people in our planet for a cheaper price. It's not natural you say? Why don't you go to the jungle yourself and get some natural food then, everything we have is processed, we always processed, we now just process food in a more advanced way, and it is better and cheaper for us humanity in general that way. ^__^. Have a look at Debatepedia, it seems like a fun and pretty good resource for this sort of stuff. + Show Spoiler +And can a subsequent 10 generations again double the life of the flies? How about 100? Your point is well made that nature is not immutable, its "perfection" only conceivable in a system that doesn't challenge its rules, and I agree that we should challenge it - but these feats are only the tip of the iceberg. I don't doubt that humans have had an pivotal role in shaping the genetic makeup of numerous organisms that have crossed paths with us. Certainly we control what species live and what species die, but if I walked into the lab and just scrambled amino acids around randomly - I would be busy (with the help of computers) for a long time trying to assemble something as particular as to belong in a dog show. Dog breeders (technically inbreeders) and farmers took what they were given and are looking for wiggle room in the neighborhood of the constraints offered by a Punnett square. You can certainly go places with this method, but it's slow, and nothing like the amino acid shakedown that we're capable of performing. What I'm trying to get across is that this is radically different from what is done in bioengineering, but there is still a stencil, a template, from which the work originates. If you want to make a bigger orange, you're going to start with an orange and look for ways to alter its life cycle for prolonged growth - little things. You wouldn't be very productive if you started from nothing and tried to rebuild an orange from scratch (even with computational aid), no we're just not there yet - but it is on the horizon. So I believe that there is a reasonable distinction between the natural and unnatural tampering with biology - not to suggest that the unnatural is inherently unlawful (as some environmentalists and opponents of GM foods would believe) - I simply feel that you need to regard the two methods with a full appreciation for their capacity. Why don't you go to the jungle yourself and get some natural food then, everything we have is processed, we always processed, we now just process food in a more advanced way, and it is better and cheaper for us humanity in general that way. It's easy to praise the achievements of industrial society, but certainly our ancestors and some people living today have survived not by being callous about what they put into their mouths, because a mistake can mean death. The next time you're out of doors and near "nature", see if you can identify the plants you could eat and the ones you should avoid (it's of course a wasted exercise since the majority are just harmless weeds wherever you live). The whole point of the GM safety argument is that you need to be careful you don't inadvertently reinvent nature's most powerful self-defense mechanism - toxins. And you have good studies and you think your product is safe, that's fine and appears to be working well enough for us so far - but giving a green light without any basis for testing procedures simply because it moos like a cow so it must be the same as a cow... (this is the FDA's stance) to any concoction that comes out of a laboratory is irresponsible no less than it is frightful. This isn't the perspective of an outsider, or of someone who grew up skeptical of science (ponder that one for a second). I am in science, I know what goes on in laboratories, and I'm familiar with the deceit that some pharmaceutical companies will engage in to get known bad drugs past the FDA, purely for greed. You must hold people accountable to your standards, because they're not going to be honest with you. Edit: Wow this debatepedia is amazing! How long has this been hiding out of my sight? Heh, I am agreeing with you on these points. And I think we can both agree that GM foods are great and the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. And there should be proper regulation and proper scientific testing behind them and the possible side effects. You seem to be arguing that the scientists backing these commercial products are inherently bad, however, with proper regulation everything is going to be great. You make the case with Pharma companies, however, remember that it takes 10 years on average to pass a drug from bench to bedside and it takes a couple of million in budget too. I honestly do not know much about the real science behind GM Crops, and I think I need to get myself educated on it, but it seems to me, that the benefits of crops such as corn far outweigh the "unnatural" disadvantages. It seems like the arguments against GM crops are the same as the arguments against pharmaceuticals, well, the solution is the same too, proper evidence and proper controlled testing that far outweighs the side effects seems to be the solution. I certainly enjoyed talking about this with you. As have I. The scientists aren't malevolent. The pressures of deadlines and denial in testing (you'll meet your deadlines whether it's safe or not) and the rational need to balance a budget, all catalyzed by poor leadership and flimsy business ethics. A big company like Pfizer or Merck puts out a ton of wonder drugs (and it costs them hundreds of millions to get through the formalities of getting a drug approved, to say nothing of the investments in talent and machinery), but many companies at time strain under this burden and let their integrity slip on a product here or there. It comes back in the form of a recall or class action lawsuit and fingers can be pointed everywhere, but it's typically worth the risk. :p But malevolence isn't the only reason to have safety standards. Remember thalidomide, where only a slight mistake in stereochemistry had profound effects, and no one found out until babies started showing up 9 months later disfigured (if they even made it out alive at all)? The lesson isn't to fear science or shun away from it, but to respect its power even in subtle matters.
Heh, Thalidomide was pretty nasty and was one of the worst pharma incidents ever. Btw, I'm curious, what are you currently studying/majoring in?
I'm only in my first year in university, but I plan into doing research. I don't have a full idea on the scope of research and development integrity yet though. Drug development is a pretty intense process though, less than 10% of drugs being developed reach the market place even after all the years of development and the insane amount of money put into them(we're talking half billion here). Ethics should always be put first, but I guess having tenure or getting your paycheck come before ethics under pressure.
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On May 09 2010 22:52 x2fst wrote:
Make a point in favor of settlers land rights in countries with displaced indigenous populations like the USA or Australia.
"Might is right" seems to work well enough for history - the more might, the more right. In the short run would-be critics are late to learn and late to act. In the long run it is easy to find fault but it's a mute point: the natives are dead, they have no voice; the interlopers are here to stay, so get used to it.
I don't think anyone can own the Earth, it's a notion that only becomes possible in a legitimized government that values property rights. If you have all of a continent to yourself you can make room for a few more people. In theory there's enough to go around. Being their first doesn't mean you own it, it just means you've been using it longer than anyone else. Kind of like waiting in line for a drink at a water fountain, it's everyone's public good and not yours to hog.
But in practice settlers tend to claim more than their stake or they are bigots or they are wasteful and destructive. I would say that then they've invalidated their rights to fertile land; but they still have a right to a barren desert and the right to receive a lesson in conservation because if not they're a danger to the ecosystem and the humans around them have a right to remove them from this ecosystem - so settlers have no right to demand more from others when they're already debtors.
Interestingly enough, this free spirit notion that the Earth belongs to everyone perfectly accommodates the settler that knows how to use land better than the native. He says, "You're not tapping into the resources that are here and don't appear to have much interest of understanding how, so move aside. Let me show you how it's done." The native protests that he needs the land to hunt and harvest - the settler responds that the energy generated by a hydroelectric dam amounts to greater worth than decades of harvested goods, the native could sell the electricity at a profit and live comfortably forever, and so on. Clearly if the settler stands to make more good on it, why not give it to him?
But then there's the issue of a native that says, "I don't want your money or your values. I want my way of life, and you've intruded upon it. No I won't move, because my people have a great history on this land and our spirits are connected." It's at this point that I'd recommend the settler leave, because the contingent actions will be neither polite nor moral. If the settler stays then it ought to be in the spirit of the previous utilitarian argument. Take what you can, share it, and take very little more - but a standoff seems inevitable and this is just the settler's stupidity for leaving home in the first place.
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On May 09 2010 23:38 iaguz wrote:
The US government planned the 9/11 attacks, planned detonation man.
The second part is easy, but the first is difficult. I accept your challenge... (in progress)
On May 09 2010 23:44 4iner wrote:
Make a case that our sense of morality is culturally acquired, not innate.
Edit: Also, make a case that it's innate, not culturally acquired.
This is notwithstanding your complete omission of the external/divine/other. I'll read this as nurture vs nature.
You've practically answered this by stating it both ways, exposing its cyclic nature. Since any moral that is in the culture had to derive from some source: which is it, the innate or the culture itself? This recursion is based in the innate, since there is no culture before your very existence, unless you'll entertain the supposition that we derive culture from the very structure of our being, essentially making innateness and culture one and the same.
Given what we now know about the human brain, particularly in regards to spatial reasoning as a process that in fact occurs in the three-dimensional space of the neurons - that geography and structure matter (it's not just a motherboard folded up into a convoluted form), I would argue that yes, because our behavior and emotions are dictated by the structural and physiological nature of the brain, culture is both an element of and composition of the innate.
And we can recurse with the chicken and the egg as far back as you like until you find an ancestor whose brain doesn't match your definition of innate or until you find an ancestor species whose culture was radically different so that it doesn't match your definition of culture. It's left to your semantics but the two walk hand in hand otherwise.
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On May 10 2010 01:31 sArite_nite wrote:
Protoss is fucking imba - discuss
In what matchup? I'll take TvP, both sides.
(1) TvP is impossible for Terran to win
Let's categorize the elements of Starcraft into micro, macro and strategic knowledge. Micro and macro are concepts that only matter when we're talking about humans and their imperfections. The other factor is information, but observers or scan sweeps, pylons or ebays - the information is out there for either play to seize.
Micro: Protoss micro amounts to only two interesting things: diffusing mines (and dealing with mines in general) and reaver micro. The first is only enabled by the fact that the Terran has already bestowed no less amount of micro putting those deadly mines where they cleverly lie. And the second is just hard countered, it can have a place in some rare circumstances - but it really should be considered a refuted unit and a refuted strategy aside from some rare circumstances.
Macro: Do I really need to say anything on this? Didn't think so.
Strategy: Every step of the way, Protoss has more comprehensive map scouting and only loses map control through the selection of a strategy that voluntarily waives that offer. Strategies that attempt to put Terran in an early game or mid game lead often come with a disproportionate economic cost or constitute a significant risk to DTs or robo tech.
I conclude that when the players are human and of similar capacities, Protoss has every advantage they could want.
(2) TvP is impossible for Protoss to win
Lift the burden of micro and macro, allow computer AI to have perfected these (or Flash and Jaedong merge into SS2 Flashdong) thus leaving only strategic play. The Terran race clearly has stronger firepower and versatility at its disposal in the form of biomechanic Upmagic style play. And this isn't to say that some reasonable hybrids of bio and mech couldn't exist as fluidly as they do in TvZ - they simply haven't been explored by progamers on account of the tremendous difficulty it takes to masterfully control large numbers of infantry on multiple fronts and closed-mindedness.
The key is negating recall. Until Terran has a strong answer to recall, be it ghosts or mass dropships or lifting all of your factories and making a mobile base - you need to deal with the fact that your new minerals are not where your supply depots and factories were originally built, and the Protoss is going to exploit this inadequacy.
And here's another thought:
There also has not been enough exploration of "post-apocalyptic" strategies. This is anything that seeks to leave your opponent mined out or distance mining (possibly in exchange for your own resources) but puts you in a stronger endgame position. Contrast this with a clean decisive defeat and you see it's just barely winning but in a deterministic fashion. You see this is chess a lot. When you're ahead but mate appears distant, you trade pieces and make sure you've studied your end game encounters because there's going to be a lot of chasing around the board - pawns suddenly become valuable again, and the existence of a draw looms if you're careless. When you see games of Starcraft that reach this sort of endgame (Light going for wraiths against observers on Match Point, goliaths vs battlecruisers in late TvT), you get the feeling like this game could have been decided by one more/fewer scan, by one more/fewer observer, or one more combat unit would have made the difference. I don't think these outcomes are as uncommon as they may appear, especially if you try to invent such a situation - attrition when you're ahead, prepare for a lategame army. This is an evolution in the strategy of Starcraft that unfortunately we haven't seen more of and may never see truly mastered.
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I hope i will get into diamond league this year
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Without reading the rest of the thread... friend issues are always on my mind...
And I'm thinking of how class grade distributions affect people above and below the curve. (assignments, curves, etc... ). And Then I'm gonna try to apply it.
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EPT
