In which a Maori beekeeper explains that he doesn't want any unnatural GM modified rats to offend the spirits, while laboriously smoking bees out of their hive to take their honey...

@kravietz did you ever think that the spirits can be ok with some stuff and not with other stuff?

@xj9 It's not really about spirits, but about a selective definition of "natural"

@kravietz

"natural" and "unnatural" are usually proxies for "familiar/understood" and "unfamiliar/not understood". there is also "artificial" vs "natural" which is usually delineated by a thing's origin being human or not.

you are stuck on some semantics that are not important to the question at hand. all of these distinctions are arbitrary. the real issue is one of familiarity. we don't know how gene drives will behave in the wild. we know some very specific and powerful bits of information. we know how to make a gene drive, but we lack the wisdom to predict how it will behave in a large ecosystem.

we are very powerful beings, but we are young and shortsighted. if we aren't careful, we could easily make this planet very difficult to live on. we certainly *should* do and experiment with "unnatural" things, but scope and context need to be taken into account. we have no backup or test planet to work with and no real knowledge of existing in a truly hostile environment for extended periods of time.

@xj9

Everybody is eating these today even though the radiation-induced mutations were completely random in their effects and might have modified much more genes than just those intended.

Now, when we came up with a very precise surgical techniques like CRISPR that are safer than anything known before a bunch of undereducated activists or scientific crooks like Seralini are fighting them as "unnatural"...

@kravietz @xj9 what crop has CRISPR made safer? how?

@hushroom @xj9

"During the past seventy years, mutation breeding led to more than 2250 plant varieties (Maluszynski et al. [4]; Ahloowalia et al. [5]). 70% of these varieties were released as directly induced mutants, and the other 30% from crosses with induced mutants. The use of chemical treatments was relatively infrequent, but gamma rays were frequently used (64%), followed by X-rays (22%) (Ahloowalia et al. [5])." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2218926/

@kravietz @xj9 I asked if this technique is actually useful for agriculture. humans actually were doing efficient agriculture for centuries before radiation experiments, and had genetic material that was optimized for their cultivation techniques and also yielded well above wild species.

I am not against the concept of any of these high tech genetic modification techniques but from reading on developing agriculturally productive genetics, precise genetic modification isn't a useful technique. using a hex editor is rarely the best way to produce a computer binary you want. of course there are exceptions, like university of hawaii's papayas.

I am against "patents" on genetics,
I am against doing the same idiotic arrogant "THIS TIME we really fully understand the ecosystem *introduces species/chemical and makes things worse*
i am also against any intentional use of even low tech methods that create F1 sterile hybrids

@hushroom @xj9

> humans actually were doing efficient agriculture for centuries

It wasn't really too efficient if in 19th century people were still dying of hunger due to poor harvest or pest.

Part of the Green Revolution of 20th century was creation of high-yield crops, which allowed to increase yield from the same amount of arable ground tens of times.

It's not efficient agriculture either if people are getting blind in Asia due to vit A deficiency...