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
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.
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?
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.
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.
