@cjd Prefer a bioRxiv preprint? Here you go, it's even linked from the blog:

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.10.430488v1.full.pdf

@cjd

> we need a centrally planned top-down

Your personal straw-man? Who said anything about "centrally planned"?

Farmers in India have 60% of their crops eaten by pest and have to flood it with pesticides to even collect something.

They ask smart guy on local uni to come up with a pest-resistant crop.

The university does it, everyone is happy.

Oh, apart from Greenpeace who prefers (sitting in their A/C office in NY) to starve, as "there's generally too many people".

@kravietz
Ok so you an I are aligned in being strongly against the "there are too many people" motherf****ers. I myself don't have strong enough words for them.

Now problem with GMO crops is it's kind of like virus research, if all goes well then everything is great. If something goes wrong then result could look like COVID-19. We need to make progress on both fronts but we also need to be extremely careful not to blow the world up doing it.

@cjd

> Now problem with GMO crops

No, the problem with GMO crops is people's lack of understanding how genetics works. All this "viral growth" bullshit was completely invented by the likes of Greenpeace and has zero scientific base.

Any domesticated crops, including transgenic, are extremely sensitive and don't survive without cultivation, specifically because they are modified for specific traits *we* need, but not the plants.

It's the weeds who are evolution survivors.

@kravietz
Invasive species are a problem right now, even without people creating new ones.

But invasive species we understand and have systems for controlling. Hybridization and selective breeding likewise are reasonably safe because they're just so slow. All of these things we have a lot of experience with.

We need to get there on nuclear power, GMO, and stuff like viral research. But it's a long road and people running around yelling "No Risk, Trust Science" aren't helping.

@cjd

This "slow and safe" is just another fallacy. Modern plant breeds, from foods to decorative flowers, are not made by decades of slow Mendel-like selection. They are produced by mutation breeding:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_breeding

Most cannabis varieties in sale today were also produced using radiation or chemical mutagenesis.

You can't imagine a more aggressive method of breeding than radiation or chemical mutagens, yet it's been around for almost a century now.

@cjd

This is precisely why I recommended "Whole Earth Discipline" in the very beginning, as it discusses all these misconceptions and fallacies in great detail, with solid scientific base, as anything else in the book. Any further discussion can be more efficiently replacing by you just scanning through chapters 5-6 of the book.

@cjd I am sorry, but your comment shows that you are behind modern science on the topic, IMHO. If you do not want to go over research papers I can suggest exploring archive numbers of Scientific America especially these talking about CRISPR-Cas9. I am sure Science Friday covered these in depth over the years too. That being said, the problem of modern GMO are patents. /cc @kravietz

@copyme @cjd

Patents are a popular Monsanto scare, which ignores the fact that patents 1) aren't global, 2) GMO-related patentes applied to very specific techniques used in producing new breeds, 3) most of Monsanto patents expired back in 2000, 4) traditional breeds are protected by IP laws too, 5) nothing prevents you from releasing your GMO seeds into public domain, just as Golden Rice did

@cjd

And people have done that *forever,* literally since the beginning of domestication of animals and crops.

All of them were genetically modified using various techniques. None of the fruits or vegetables you buy in store today or plant yourself are actually found in the wild.

Without thousands of years of genetic modification, we'd be still eating worms and leaves, with infant mortality of 30% and life expectancy of 30 years, rather than writing code.

@cjd @kravietz yes also we need solutions that actually work , like #nuclear and #gmo not organic and #renewables ''There is this persistent idea that we need a centrally planned top-down solution to save the world''