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problems with genetic engineering
Farm crops are not natural organisms. They cannot survive in the wild and we
have done every thing from irradiation, mutation with chemical and cross breeding crops that won't reproduce and doubling their chromosomes so they will. All with a great deal less precision and over sight than GM crops. The only case I know of where crop breeding hurt some one was organic squash were they kept keeping the seed from plants most resistant to squash bugs until the toxin was toxic to humans. Using the same unscientific methods that they want to squash GM crops with. Gordon "Walter Epp" wrote in message ... Steve B wrote: I find it difficult to accept the basic anti-GE premise that the way genes happened to have been sorted among organisms by everything from chance bolts of lightning over the primordial organic soup to accidental, or human-generated (but "natural") cross-fertilisations represents "the best of all possible worlds", and that "GE" poses a significant risk of stuffing this up, within a few years, simply because it's "unnatural". This pov appears to presuppose what I call "a supernatural filing clerk" with "good" intentions (essentially a theist view), or an extrordinary efficiency on the part of Darwinian "natural selection." Let's see what we can learn from a little math exercise. If something has only a 1% selection pressure, so in each generation the portion of the population with a given trait is 99% of the portion of the previous generation, and they start out being 99% of the population, then in 1,000 generations, the 99% has been reduced to 0.004%. So if we have genes a, b, c, d such that the combination a & b or c & d fail to work together with only a 1% selective effect on population, then in 1,000 generations you have a population for which over 99.99% have neither a & b nor c & d - in other words, you have a population with a very high degree of correlation among these genes. 1,000 generations is a fleeting blip in evolutionary history. In a million generations the percentage is so infinitesimal that my calculator can't calculate it, the negative exponent is so large. Remember Nature has been doing this for a billion years. Thus almost all of the genes in any natural genome or gene pool have been related to each other and working together (or coevolving if you can't stand a human perspective Jim) for a very very very long time, and modern science is only beginning to get a clue of the web of interrelationships among them. Genomes and population gene pools are ecosystems. The tinkertoy mentality of genetic engineers that presumes you can randomly interchange genes from different places is out of touch with reality. Perfectly natural species taken out of context and inserted into other ecosystems have upset the balance of the ecosystem to become invasive exotics causing major damage, including snuffing out natives and pushing them to the brink of extinction. In the US there has been substantial damage from Kudzu, Dutch Elm disease, Gypsy Moths, and Zebra Mussels; Chestnut blight was catastrophic. The Glassy-winged Sharpshooter is considered a serious threat to California agriculture. The Irish potato blight killed a million people. A little-known fact is that these invaders typically start out as seemingly innocuous and often take decades to be recognized as a serious problem. Mimosa pigra (catclaw mimosa) was a minor weed in Australia for about a century before excluding other plants on a large scale. The Royal Horticultural Society awarded a gold medal for importation of Japanese Knotweed to Britain in the Victorian era, which was subsequently revoked when they realized what a big mistake it was. Now huge sums are being spent in an unsuccessful effort to control it. A study at Cornell University concluded that "nonindigenous species in the United States cause major environmental damage and losses totaling approximately $137 billion a year" (BioScience January 2000). Thus the cost to date of species taken out of context is already over a trillion dollars and no one knows how many more trillions will be incurred before things settle into some equilibrium. Species of Mass Destruction are the number one cause of biodiversity loss in the Great Lakes and are expected to be the leading cause of extinctions in North American freshwater ecosystems this century. Insects and diseases from Europe and Asia have caused damage in 70% of the 165 million acres of forest in the American Northeast and Midwest. Leafy Spurge has reduced the value of some ranch land by 90%. It stands to reason that the consequences of genes taken out of context may well have similar characteristics and similar orders of magnitude to species taken out of context, in which case we're liable to find ourselves decades from now with the Mooshes of the world just beginning to wake up as the evidence of harm becomes so obvious and pervasive it's impossible to ignore even with blinders on, at which point it will be decades too late to prevent incurring costs of trillions of dollars of damages over the ensuing decades or centuries or millenia or ... It has already been documented that a gene inserted by genetic engineering is 20 times more invasive than the same gene acquired by mutation with the natural genetic regulatory system intact. As Brian has posted, natural organisms have over millions of years evolved DNA repair mechanisms without which the error rates would be catastrophically high. Genetic engineering defeats natural repair mechanisms while introducing genetic instabilities. Given that gene pools are already stressed by man-made chemical and radiological mutagens, it may not take a very large increase in disruption from genetic engineering to push some beyond their repair capacity even if it doesn't by itself cause self-destruction (see http://www.i-sis.org.uk/meltdown.php). Most things in the world of life are nonlinear. The fact that you can increase something by x% without significant problems does not mean you can increase by an additional x% without serious problems. For a counter-intuitive example of a way GE can lead to extinction see http://www.organicconsumers.org/ge/frankenfish.cfm Of course Nature will recover in some fashion eventually, but the costs could be not only economic but also the extinction of many species and sickness and death of many people before recovery is accomplished. -- delete N0SPAAM to reply by email |
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