Organic farming is less efficient and makes more CO2, why is it important?
Imagine a genetically engineered super-weed which no known herbicide can kill, now imagine it's used as a weapon.
Diversity is #antifragile
As explained before, it doesn't work this way.
@kravietz
I think we're probably going to see it work this way, in our lifetimes...
@cjd No, I mean genetic doesn't work this way. There are cultured plants - either by selection, mutation breeding or CRISPR - and there are plants that evolved in the wild. The former just don't survive in the wild - not because of some engineered terminator genes, but because they are *not fit.* Potatoes or carrots don't really need these massive roots for themselves, it's *us* who need them, and when you leave them in the wild uncultivated they will regress to feral, or disappear completely.
@kravietz
I'm not talking about GMO with good intentions, you know my opinion is that it's dangerous but is a bridge we need to cross.
what I'm talking about is a military creating weaponized crabgrass.
This topic has been discussed a lot, here's a good article:
https://phys.org/news/2017-08-crispr-biological-weapon.html
There are threats which even though they have weapon potential are not used anyway.
There was tons of FUD from Greenpeace about terrorists blowing up nuclear power plant for decades. In reality the only person who ever did that was Green activist idiot, Chaim Nissim, who shot reactor in construction from an RPG to demonstrate the threat is real. He didn't even scratch it, and nobody ever repeated it.
@kravietz
So it's too expensive for terrorists (so far) and nation-state actors all agree never to do it.
Problem is, everybody agrees never to do everything, until the moment it has a chance to change the outcome of a war.
If there's a WW3 it's almost certain to be biological + cyber.
Weapons need to be controllable to win wars, which is why nobody except for Russia and Syria routinely uses chemical weapons - and even that on a small scale.
Nobody uses biological weapons either, probably because they are even more uncontrollable. If you poison your own troops or civilians then you not only suffer losses but actually demoralize your own people.
And because nothing is genetics has sharp boundaries (ethnicity, gender etc) GMO makes a very poor candidate for bioweapon.
@kravietz
Our modern era has been unnaturally peaceful, but you only need to look back 100 years to find plenty of examples of Scorched Earth warfare. People will harm themselves if they think it will harm their enemy more.
@cjd We will see. But GMO food and bioweapons are just as orthogonal as VVR reactors and nuclear weapons so calling to ban foods just because it somehow facilitates production of weapons (and it doesn't) is a bit like calling to ban nuclear medicine so that nobody builds a bomb (and they will, anyway).
@kravietz
Now I understand you're located in Germany and there is a particular case here where Gazprom is using greenwashing to push Germany to reduce domestic power production which will lead to increased dependence on gas.
In this case I agree with you, a few nuclear reactors in a low-population area are far less dangerous than giving Putin money, but it's not the same solution to every problem.
> low-population area
Actually, a coal power plant releases 100x more radioactive elements to the air than a nuclear power power plant. That's because coal contains radioactive elements which are released with fly ash, and it's burned in vast amounts.
Fun fact: this is record from a dosimeter that travelled with a group of students from Paris to defunct Fukushima plant:
I think @kravietz is missing your point.
AFAIK, @cjd claimed that "organic" plants are more resistant to bioweapons, because they aren't a monoculture, and because they're more adapted to the wild.
A GMO plant is fragile, so a bionegineered weed would have no problem killing it, while an "organically" farmed plant will be more resistant to the bioengineered weed, right?
@wolf480pl @kravietz
Nope, organic farmers deal with weeds by literally tilling them under. A herbicide resistant superweed is probably not going to be plow-resistant as well.
Note that "organic plants" are just the same domesticated plants as any other, they just are *planted* in a special way that involves use of some pesticides and herbicides perceived as "natural" but not others.
There's very little difference between say modern GM soyabean and "organic soyabean", the latter meaning an soyabean variety that has been derived using selection or mutation breeding.
Both of which are genetic engineering, just in more random way.
Selection breeding is waiting for a random mutation with the trait you like - e.g. sweeter or larger plant. Then you reinforce the mutation by crossing it with other plants with similar features. Very slow.
Mutation breeding is artificially inducing random mutations with carcirogens or radiation. Out of 1000 irradiated seeds 900 don't sprout, out of the 100 that sprouted you get one with the trait you like, the rest goes to a bin. Much faster.
Both selection and mutation breeding are based on random mutations - some factor, like radiation, randomly breaks DNA in seed in hundreds of places, and one of them results in a mutation you like. You have no idea what the other changes did to the plan though.
This is how most modern varieties of cannabis are made by the way.
In CRISPR ("GMO") you know precisely which gene does what and you just modify those genes you need, for example to change color or sugar content or whatever. You don't touch other genes because you don't need to.
Also CRISPR is not the same thing as "cloning".
They are just normal seeds that you can grow, collect news seeds, plant again and use selection breeding to modify them further.
There was a significant amount of shitstorm after Monsanto came up with an idea of making their plants infertile, and then Greenpeace simultaneously complained that Monsanto is preventing farmers from growing their seeds *and* that fertile plants will "contaminate nature".
All that is now in the past:
https://agfax.com/2014/12/03/arkansas-look-ma-no-tech-fees-round-up-ready-soybean-variety-released/
Basically, if we resorted to programming analogies which everyone understands here - you have a program with a bug and you try these approaches:
* you shuffle the program code randomly, compile and test millions of times until the bug is fixed - this is mutation breeding
* you sit back and wait for a random bit flip in the code to bring you closer to the bugfix - this is selection breeding
* you debug program, find the bug and fix it using vim - this is CRISPR
Natural selection is probably the most stringent functional testing you can imagine for a copy of DNA build.
Generally genetics is extremely interesting and inspiring topic - on one hand you have very effective error recovery and redundance in DNA, at the same time you have purposeful DNA recombination of inherited genetic material to ensure resilience against *future* change of external conditions.
How this even works never stops amazing me...
But why would you want them to become diverse - this could only lead to them *losing* the traits you want? Once you got a variety you want, you just stick to it and breed the hell of it.
Monoculture is a separate problem - it certainly bad for environment if you cut 100 km2 of forest and plant only soya or wheat there. But it's just as harmful if you plant organic, Bt or whatever else variety, as long as it's single plant.
@kravietz @cjd
well, let's split traits into 3 categories:
a) those I want
b) those I do not want
c) those I don't care about / they don't seem to do anything
Any permutation of the traits (c) works equally well, right?
So why settle on one, if we could have multiple, to reduce the likelihood that a single bug will affect all my wheat instead of affecting every n-th plant?
What do you mean by "any permutation works equally well"?
@kravietz @cjd
I meant combination.
I mean, for every trait of type (c), I the plants could have it or not have it, and it doesn't make a difference.
Let's say there are 4 of these traits, C1, C2, C3, C4. And then 2 traits I want: A1, A2. and 2 I do not want: B1, B2.
A plant like this:
A1A2C1
is as good as a plant like this:
A1A2C3C4
right?
Yes, precisely - this is why selection breeding works at all, as in Mendel experiments. Trait is an observable characteristic resulting from expression of a specific gene - so I guess you could just as well say A1,A2 are the genes you're interested in and C* are all others. B could be genes that express in some alkaloid that gives the plant bitter taste (or worse).
Ok now this makes sense. I guess it's mostly because even if *we* don't personally care about the "C" genes, the plant does. So while we for example we want the A1 to give us more sweet taste, we still assume the plant will have stem, green leaves and all that stuff coded by these "C" genes. So we just want to change the A part but leave C largely untouched - which is not possible with mutation breeding but possible with CRISPR.
So here comes the concept of permaculture - which is not about leaving your wheat to mix with weeds (because you no longer have wheat), but about mixing sections of various plants in a clever way that helps both plants, and the wildlife and pollinators etc. But nothing prevents you from growing GMO plants in permaculture either.
@kravietz
Ahh but I didn't, not in this thread :D
Like I said, GMO for good reasons is something we, as society, need to tame, but we need to do so carefully. Same for nuclear energy.