My opinion continues to be tools like CRISPR and genome editing techniques are just that--tools. Can be used for good or bad purposes depending on your context and bias.
Most people associate these genome modification tools as inherently bad because the first generation of them were tied to herbicide and pesticide resistance. Whether you agree with those applications or not, its clear those tools worked and were extremely powerful. I would personally argue they work too well and the 2nd and 3rd order effects are doing the most damage. But these tools exist in regulatory frameworks that are archaic and rigid and when billions of dollars are on the line companies figure out ways to play in between the lines.
An optimistic person might want these tools to be used to increase taste profiles, shelf-life, nutritional content, range of adaptation, etc. A pessimist probably sees this as a faster way to add more herbicide or pesticide traits to enable those chemicals to be applied.
I'm very bullish on genome editing tech. Lots of these comments are applying 1990s thinking to a 2030 and beyond tech. Akin to 1950s 'futuristic' predictions showing flying cars.
You know, I agree with you, I think there's not necessarily a problem with CRISPR or GMOs or mutagenic selective breeding, or whatever.
But there are real issues: novel introductions make it harder to define how we talk about food safety in general, since almost all of it is based on both a very poor science (nutrition science is a dumpster fire) and long-term use by humans (GRAS) where previous generations were test subjects. The industry around this basically ignores these issues and pretends they don't exist and they label anyone raising issues as "anti-science."
Put another way: industries _usually_ don't end up untrusted because people are crazy, they _usually_ earned it, and GMO big ag has earned it in spades.
It's not just the original go to market being terminator seeds and submarining in patents, or to enable soaking fields with RoundUp, it's also that when people talk about GMOs, they're often talking about transgenic GMOs, things like Flavr Savr and the generally borderline-gaslighting issue around the industry and FDA pretending that labeling food with actual information would be bad (which has come up over and over, not just with GMOs).
There's also the disingenuous approach to pretending that modern genetic engineering is "just" accelerated breeding, which frankly isn't true and mostly relies on the fact that modern breeding uses mutagens to accelerate a process which makes coming up with a useful definition of GRAS quite difficult.
Basically the industry's argument was "GMO is no worse/different than what we've been doing for thirty years that you didn't know about, so it's fine" which, shocking, has kind of fallen flat because it is an outright lie.
Gaslighting is an overused term, but the industry's"it's just selective breeding!" argument is really pretty phony, and that's ignoring transgenic GMOs.
Before I get labeled "anti-science", I'm actually pro GMO, pro-GMO food and so on. But only in a functional regulatory environment, which we do not have at the moment.
All good points. Another topic lost in these debates is _very real alternatives_. People lament fields soaked in glyphosate or neonics. True, there are real problems with these actives. Unfortunately, these chemicals largely replaced _even more dangerous_ chemicals like DDT and other nasty organs-phosphates (I think sarin gas was discovered while searching for pesticides?).
It's unfortunate people don't have complete information and make the assumption of glyphosate/whatever or nothing when that reality never really ever existed.
DDT was never that dangerous. Rachel Carson was simply the Andrew Wakefield of her generation and her sackless colleagues in the field wouldn’t call her out, unlike the medical field coming together to stand up to Wakefield’s racket today. Hell, she had a degree in Marine Science, not Biochemistry.
Eh, slight disagree. DDT at that scale is problematic. No comment on silent spring, but to clearly struck a cord with public perception— real or baseless
The big issue with gene editing is the unintended consequences. Everything is fine now but will it always be that way? We deal with consequences by applying patches. So it's patch after patch after patch until the problem gets so bad that we start over. We can do that with things. But for genes that have spread over a population it will be next to impossible. Good luck to the future generations that will have to deal with the genes that get modified today.
I agree with your core statement of a series of patches to fix things that get deployed, but I'm not so pessimistic we won't have better/faster/more accurate tools to deploy those patches. I generally never want to bet against human ingenuity, despite problems _seem_ unsolvable to our current understanding.
Are you trying to conflate "selective breeding" and "genetic modification" or do you mean "US Americans" when you say "anyone"?
If by "Anyone" you mean "US Americans", then you are probably referring to that vitamin A added GMO "golden banana" that is field tested there. But in that case there would be no need to say "technically in some fashion or another". (EDIT: i must have misinterpreted a single source, there is a lack of secondary sources confirming any large scale availability of this banana in the USA. Sorry! The field test is in Uganda not America)
The banana we are used to (Cavendish, ~99% world export market share) is not a GMO, because that term has a definition and a meaning, no matter how much people try to conflate "selective breeding" and "genetically modified organism".
What you are doing is called "muddying the water" and in general it is not helpful in serious debate, except when you aim for winning an argument, instead of reaching consent or discovering a deeper truth. I am not saying it is invalid to make a comparison between selective breeding and gene editing, highlighting the similarities. Doing that is perfectly fine. What is not ok, in my opinion, is trying to attempt to redefine and twist the words used by the other side of an argument to describe their position such that they can not express their position anymore. Note that sometimes word definitions are vague and reaching a common understanding can look similar to this pattern, but in this case the "technically in some fashion or another" gives the intention away.
Speaking as someone who has genetically modified several organisms, please don't do this.
Genetic engineering is a distinctive and new technique for modifying the genomes of organisms, and the results of genetic engineering are referred to as GMOs.
The rhetorical flourish of decompiling the acronym and pretending it is descriptive rather than nominal does no one any favors. It's disingenuous, and doesn't alleviate someone's distrust of genetic engineering, because they know perfectly well that you know what they meant and are deflecting the conversation.
No, I took the actual definition, and you just don't like it.
Just because other people are ignorant or arrogant, doesn't mean we should cater to their ignorance or arrogance. But it does mean we should make it easier to differentiate the key differences by not re-using the same acronym over and over again.
Instead of calling the 'new methods' GMO's, we should be calling them something else, instead of confusing the dummies. The new techniques folk like you are using should get a whole new acronym to go with it... Not just labelled GMO, yet again.
It just confuses the dummies. And we live in democracies mostly, so you should be concerned about that.
> No, I took the actual definition, and you just don't like it.
You didn’t take the actual definition. Look at the GMO wiki, and the first sentence defines the term in such a way to restrict it to organisms created with more modern techniques. When having conversations with people it’s important to have a shared vocabulary with people. Having a different vocabulary creates miscommunications. It can be especially hard to assume best intent of people are using a non-standard definition because it is a technique purposefully done around scientific and academic jargon to achieve political ends.
> In genetic modification, however, recombinant genetic technologies are employed to produce organisms whose genomes have been precisely altered at the molecular level, usually by the inclusion of genes from unrelated species of organisms that code for traits that would not be obtained easily through conventional selective breeding.
Should I conclude that you're a liar, or very bad at reading your hastily summoned sources.
The banana is a seedless triploid (seeds don't form because they have an odd number of chromosome pairs). This is a common mechanism in fruits to achieve seedless varieties that can then be propagated vegetatively.
The term GMO has functionally lost all meaning to me as anyone can load up a straw man defining it how they need it to be defined at that point in time. Borlaug was a great plant breeder, but some of his inventions ushered in those tricky 2nd and 3rd order effects that I alluded to earlier. Namely, the response of (wheat) crops to synthetic fertilizer and how much synthetic fertilizer is both an economic boom and and environmental quagmire. Interesting debates no doubt
Also lemons, broccoli, and pretty much any modern vegetable or fruit - humans have been selectively growing plants since humans have had the knowledge of how to grow things period.
That by selective growing of plants over thousands of years, we have altered the genetic make up of the foods we consume. While "GMO" is a "new technique", reductively this isn't exactly another dimension compared to over many years isolating and growing things like broccoli and lemons.
Yes, GMO is a new technique to modify food sources away from "naturally occurring processes" - but again things like lemons and broccoli are also not naturally occurring in nature.
Saying declarative short (and virolic) sentences like this also helps no one.
Humans already eat a wide variety of foods as part of their daily diet that have no natural occurrence (lemons, broccoli, many different kinds of meat) - they were specifically bred that way. Some people have concerns about GMO in the same angle - that since for example these cattle are bred to endure climate change and they have no 'naturally occurring' example, there might be something inherently unsafe about them.
Yes, GMO is a new technique, but there is an intelligible way to connect the dots between the GMO and what humans have been doing with our food supply for thousands of years.
I don’t want to argue you should be vegetarian, but I hope at least people might consider eating _much less_ meat. I’m trying to save it for special occasions. It’s not always possible, but I try and do my best.
I do want to argue that you should be vegan. The meat industry is very cruel to animals, and it is nearly impossible to source truly "cruelty free" meat despite marketing saying otherwise. Dairy is far worse, with cows kept in small cages, constantly impregnated to keep producing milk, their calves pulled away from them and slaughtered for veal. Eggs are also horrible, with egg chickens living miserable lives, even "free range" ones, and the male chicks being culled by being thrown into a grinder.
Furthermore, water usage, water table pollution, and greenhouses gasses from animal husbandry are a significant chunk of the pie when it comes to climate change.
The happiest times in my life and the healthiest I’ve ever been are always when I eat mostly meat and very little of anything else.
I don’t care about the emotions of animals at all, and never will. I purposely show my daughter videos of how to slaughter farm animals to try to make sure she has a full understanding of what’s happening so she doesn’t one day realize what “pork” or “beef” means and becomes vegan. Her favorite food by far is steak.
I’m all for others reducing their consumption as hopefully that’ll drop prices so I can eat more meat and feed my children more meat. Which is the only actual end result people who advocate cutting meat consumption will ever achieve.
I don't care (much) about the emotions of animals either, but I also 1) don't have a lust to make them suffer and 2) think the farming of meat is destructive to the environment. If there are tasty, cheap, and nutritious substitutes for meat, I'd gladly eat them instead.
>I’m all for others reducing their consumption as hopefully that’ll drop prices so I can eat more meat and feed my children more meat
You realize that to an extent, the reason why meat is cheap is because of economy of scale and government subsidies, both of which depend on significant/majority of the population to be meat eaters to exist?
> I don’t care about the emotions of animals at all, and never will.
This comes across as proudly sociopathic. The line between the human animal and any other is arbitrary and blurry and about to get much more so. I think it’s healthy to understand your own body and recognize the importance meat has in your diet, and if that comes at the cost of the suffering of animals, that might be a price you’re willing to pay. But to lump all animal suffering together as ignorable is really a red flag for an empathy deficit that is worth examining.
I want to argue that you should neither eat meat or an vegetarian diet, especially if either is produced through artificial fertilizers. As an Baltic ocean diver I am almost daily reminded of the destructiveness caused by farming, and I continuously witness the horror of asphyxia when low oxygen water get flown near the areas I dive, and when the visible-from-space algae bloom occurs. Artificial fertilizers is such a huge problem that practically every single fresh water lake in Europe is considered damaged by eutrophication. Sourcing food free of that is a major step to reducing ones personal climate footprint.
Eggs are actually great if you have your own flock of chickens. They work almost for free in keeping grass down without requiring fossil fuels or complex machinery. They are almost perfect in handling food waste, and they can reduce harmful insects and weed without using any herbicide or pesticide. For insects they are likely less cruel than poison, and do not spread the poison to bees or birds. They also fertilizer the garden in a very natural way. A fairly small flock can easily maintain the need of eggs for a small family, often producing so much that you want to give it away to friends and relatives.
A bit of an anecdotal but when the natural gas prices went up after Russian invasion of Ukraine, one food product that got hit hard was fresh tomatoes. Farming them during off-season is very energy intensive and so require a lot of electricity, which in most countries mean a lot of fossil fuel. Even if you use renewables, that is energy that would otherwise go to to displace fossil fuel. It is indirect, but fresh tomatoes is right now connected with fossil fuel and war. Meat is also effected, but analysts seem to argue that people can easier switch over to farm more animal feed than they can fix the energy dependence on Russian fossil fuels. People could stop eating fresh vegetables when its off season...
I don't think this is common practice. My dairy knowledge is somewhat dated, but they they're usually kept in large corrals (possibly crowded) with many other cows.
You may be thinking of the stanchions they're put into for milking, but they're only put in those during the actual milking process, which only takes a few minutes with modern milking machinery.
Usually they're fed something tasty while being milked... makes it easier to get them to go into the dairy barn.
That’s a valid position. However the reality many people I’ve found will be more open to eating less meat than going full vegan. If in the end you reduce meat consumption, it’s a win
Tried it (by my own suggestion) as a supportive boyfriend for a week. Absolutely not. The food tastes awful and is so unfulfilling as well. Every single bit of it. Nice boutique vegan restaurants, homemade vegan, following highly rated recipes online, “you can’t even tell it’s vegan!!” alternatives from the store.
All of it absolutely gross and of questionable nutritional value, both overall and to men’s health especially but also women. I finally discovered, for example, the source of my then-girlfriend’s bouts of faintness and nausea: her vegan diet. Supplementing with vitamins improved things overnight. But something feels very, very wrong about that.
There’s also the type of person that tends to be vegan. I’m sorry but when the scene is filled with people who believe veganism, male feminism, effeminate traits, inherent weakness due to diet, and voting for Bernie is a personality trait, I don’t walk… I run.
I’d like to argue for eating healthy and sustainably produced animal protein.
Commercial meat is really bad for the environment, but you don’t have to eat that.
Animals are evolved to make the most of vegetables that humans can’t eat. There are sustainable sources that we can use to eat beef, pork, chicken, lamb, etc.
I try and do my best by eating local sources that I know are well produced. I don’t hunt, but would one day like to.
Unnecessary violence that is sustainable is still unnecessary violence. You don't need to eat any animals to thrive, so choosing to do so is simply choosing to induce suffering for ephemeral, meaningless pleasure.
I never found a satisfactory answer to this question: if we stop eating domestic animals, they won't frolic forever in an idyllic wilderness - they'll just stop existing, completely. Do you prefer them not existing, to being eaten by people?
And once you've answered - how would you feel about hyper advanced aliens coming to our corner of the universe and being horrified of all the pain and misery on earth, with a finger on a button that'll painlessly stop us from existing.
Yeah we should stop breeding animals into existence only to live short and unimaginably cruel lives. They won’t go extinct though, if that’s what you mean. There will always be cows and chickens and pigs. Just far far fewer.
The huge difference between your hypothetical and reality is that the aliens are actively committing genocide and im merely a proponent of not forcefully impregnating more animals to get them pregnant so I can profit off them.
If human beings were kept in conditions like those we find animals and at the same scale, and the aliens came and were horrified then I’d beg them to press the button that stops humans from being raped and impregnated at mass scale solely for the babies to be processed.
Animals die violently regardless of human actions. If you want to prevent violent, painful deaths, you should be going around the forest euthanizing animals.
That’s because it’s a logical appeal. The argument is: Eating meat causes suffering to the animal. Eating meat is unnecessary for a human life. Eating meat causes unnecessary suffering.
In an argument, if you're trying to convince the other person to support your beliefs, you wouldn't use clearly biased sources like you did here. I have no argument with you specifically but just pointing it out for the future that people will dismiss any biased sources you give them, which is probably not what you want the outcome to be in an argumentative fashion.
You mean Kaiser Permanente? And Harvard Medical School? And The American Institute for Cancer Research? And the British Dietetic Association? And the Mayo Clinic?
The site you linked is affiliated with vegan causes, is it not? Just because the sources are from those institutions does not mean they aren't cherry picked for that specific cause. I can also quote journals with conclusions justifying omnivorous consumption as well [0] but those would be just as cherry picked.
Mate, the website is just a collection of links to the actual research. I’m being asked for sources, I give tons of very credible sources, and your retort is to just claim that now they are cherry picked?
Sure, we can ALWAYS find a source that supports whatever claim we want to make. But let’s look at the general scientific consensus.
The overwhelming majority of research indicates that veganism is perfectly healthy. That’s what I linked! Your single journalistic summary of summary about non-causal associations between meat eating and depression don’t undo the general scientific consensus.
In a nutshell, obesity and sugars are the killer regardless if they are vegetarian calories or animal calories. Second comes minerals that effect blood pressure, and third its peoples need for vitamins. A healthy diet is one that avoid health risks.
Fiber rich food and fish is linked with lower weight gain.
Sugar is linked with tooth decay and obesity, especially that white stuff that get produced by plants.
A diet need to balance vitamins and minerals based on how active the individual is.
No alcohol, no drugs, no tobacco, no coffee, no added sugar or fructose to water. If its an stimulant then there is risk for harm.
A healthy diet should be diversified and balanced.
None of the important things you mentioned are difficult on a vegan diet, so I’m confused as to what your point is.
You mentioned that there are associations between fish and lower weight gain, but that’s sort of irrelevant because I’m not making the claim that you can’t be healthy while eating animals (though many doctors do!)
I agree that all those things are important. So optimize for them and avoid eating animals.
None of the important things are difficult on a diet with animal parts. That is the point you are missing. The rules for a healthy diet only require it to be diversified and balanced so that a person get a healthy amount of calories, proteins, fats, minerals and vitamins. Health studies has not demonstrated any difference if a person get obese through too much bread, too much bacon, or too much sugar. Health studies has shown however that too much sugar has a very high risk for obesity since sugar can easily trigger over eating.
If we were to rank the world worst food product in terms of causing health problems for humans, sugarcane and sugar beet would list at the top. Animal products is in comparison fairly healthy. After sugar the next would likely be corn, as in high-fructose corn syrup. Much of the worlds insulin resistance and obesity is directly caused by those two vegetarian grown products!
If we look to historical diets that killed the largest number of people, outside the context of sugar, it would be diets where people only ate potatoes, rice or corn. Those diets has a risk of missing essential vitamins and during wars there were major epidemics from unvaried diet that focused on those vegetarian options. People who ate meat during those periods was generally more healthy as their diet was more varied and balanced.
If one want to optimize for health, optimize for a diversified and balanced diet that addresses risk associated with weight gain and insulin resistance. Cut out candy, beer, sugar drinks, potato chips, cereals, cheese puffs (corn coated with cheese powder), wine, and so on. All vegan food (except for the coat on the corn), all food that is terrible for health.
No discussion that uses statistics to prove a point should exclude the use of the same statistics. Vegan diet is associated with better health. A vegan diet is also associated with being female, high education, young, never married, normal and underweight BMI, and without any chronic conditions. How much is cause and effect is a bit more complex.
Again, I don’t see how any of this is relevant to the discussion. I’m not making the argument that non-vegan diets are unhealthy. My claim is that vegan diets can be perfectly healthy.
You seem to think that I’m claiming that veganism is optimal for health. I’m not.
I believe vegan diets are detrimental to health, I consider being healthy necessary for human life. I realize vegans like to imply the opposite but not only has the evidence been unconvincing, but I frankly have never met a healthy looking vegan in real life.
Not that any actual evidence or true rational argument has been provided by such parties in this comment chain. Appealing to emotion and agressively stating what you want to be true are simply not conductive to a productive argument.
Vegans are pretty vocal so it’s pretty easy to identify them. It’s like the CrossFit of diet regimens in that they self announce quite a bit.
I’m sure there are some quiet vegans, and it’s possible that I just don’t know people well enough to know whether they are vegan. I’ve met dozens of vegans over he years and friends with many. As I’m friends with them, I’m aware of their health issues or lack of health issues.
Ignoring the fact that you still would have clue who you meet is a healthy vegan because why the hell would that come up casually when meeting random people throughout the day, your belief is the opposite of every major nutritional and dietetic association around the world. I linked to the collection of those official stances elsewhere in the thread.
That means that not only do you claim to have a better understanding of nutrition than those organizations and the thousands of nutritionists and scientists they represent, but you are able to determine your correctness by merely talking to the vegans you’ve met.
That means you’re able to also trivially determine if someone’s health issues are caused directly by veganism, rather than merely present in a vegan.
That is a level of delusion and arrogance I genuinely cannot comprehend.
There are plenty of examples of people who lived normal lifespans without using electricity, without modern medicine, without central heating, without running water...
Someone is asking you to consider not supporting animal abuse, and you’re making the case that using electricity is comparably bad. That’s worth just calling out and appreciating for a moment.
> Someone is asking you to consider not supporting animal abuse, and you’re making the case that using electricity is comparably bad.
The arguments are exactly the same, despite your attempt to spin it.
The original argument was that a) eating meat is not necessary to human life, b) eating meat harms animals, c) therefore, you should stop eating meat.
My recasting of your argument is a) using electricity is not necessary to human life, b) using electricity harms animals, c) therefore, you should stop using electricity.
What is the difference between these arguments? Be specific.
And I don't really care if you "call me out". I don't bully. Sorry.
Providing safe, efficient nutrients is not unnecessary suffering. I believe it is necessary. And animals can be slaughtered in humane ways with minima suffering (eg, halal, kosher, and other methods).
Animals can process inarable land and turn it into nutrients. I can have a cow graze on land that can’t grow edible food for humans and turn it into edible food. That’s efficient.
On the other hand, even if you want to regularly eat meat, between public land hunting and raising rabbits and chickens, the ability to take the production of the meat you eat into your own hands is a lot more accessible than you might think. Even if you live in an urban setting.
From the 12+ Years on HN I know this is an unpopular opinion.
I dont like GMO / Genome-edited cattle / food or crops. Even if it could theoretically occur through a natural breeding process. You can cross breed all you want. GMO is not cross breed as many on HN somehow believes last time we had this discussions. You can do Data Science and other controlled environment in providing better yield as in EUR ( Or specifically the Dutch ). And we may soon have Cattle labeled as GMO / Genome-Edit Free as selling point, as US likes to do with Antibiotic Free and Growth Hormones free labels. Part of the reason why EU has never been keen on US Beef import.
To add some other context, US Beef export rank third in export volume and first or second in export revenue.
You don't provide any argument for why you dislike GMO food here. What bothers you so much about GMO food?
The fact is that humans have been breeding plants and animals to increase efficiency and palatability for thousands of years, and GMO is the next technological step.
GMO, as a technique, is not inherently bad. However, one common use case is to create pesticide resistant plants, which allows for higher pesticide usage, especially as resistance develops to the pesticide increases: https://enveurope.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/2190-471...
Basically, if you’re fine with your kids ingesting higher levels of pesticides, then go for it!
What about plants with insect genes to make them resistant to pests and thus require less pesticide? It seems like you are against specific applications of GM where we should be using it to reduce the presence of harmful things a we don’t want our kids eating.
Pesticide resistance plants mean a lot less CO2.is.emitted running plows through the earth. Soil that doesn't get disturbed with all those plows also holds absorbed CO2 better. While it is more chemical used, they generally harmless.
While it's important, CO2 isn't everything. The use of pesticides (and monocrops) leads to dramatic loss of biodiversity, and that is an environmental disaster.
The amount of pesticide and herbicide used of crops is an environmental disaster on it's own. There is mounting evidence that glyphosate is responsible for increases in cancer and birth defects, lower fertility rates, and is implicated as a likely partial cause for celiac disease.
This topic is complex and multi-variate. Focusing only on one (whether that’s CO2 or pesticide usage) is not going to lead to generally productive debate.
We might both agree that pesticide usage alone should have a negative coefficient on whatever global fitness function we consider, but that a usage of zero pesticide is still sub-optimal.
I lived in a farming community most of my life and I haven't seen a plow dragged behind a tractor in over thirty years. No idea what you are talking about. Everyone is doing no-till, which includes dumping shit tons of nasty chemicals (created and shipped at great CO2 costs) all over the land and in the air. Living next to these fields, you experience allergies, sinus problems, watery eyes and other random problems depending on the person. Even harvest season is torture--from the dust alone. Anyone living next to a farm or eating the crops coming out of them is investing harsh chemicals. Half the things we do in the US are banned throughout the world. It results in greater yield for sure, but not without cost.
Nobody has used a plow in 30 years because they are such an environmental disaster. Chemicals are the answer. Some CO2 is used for chemicals, but not nearly as much as a plow would use, and that is before we look at the other disasters of the plow.
Dust from harvest causes allergies, but don't blame it on chemicals. Well other than everything is a chemical.
This is probably something I can google, but could you point me to some info about why the plow is a disaster? It seems like one of those things that made it possible for a huge increase in the number of people not starving before it became a disaster.
I imagine it has something to do with erosion, but I'd like to know more, and you seem to have a position on the topic.
Tilling effectively kills the soil and micro organisms in the soil over a long period of time. It takes a lot of work and time to add life back into dead soil on historic farms where tilling was commonly used.
For CO2, it takes a lot of energy to move that soil.
For the soil itself, it brings up subsoil which has microorganisms that work better in low air enviornment (because that is what they are from) and move the near surface microorganisms down below where they don't get the air they need. It also breaks up organic matter making them break down faster (into CO2 if there is O2 available, and the turning just added a bunch). Also all those broken roots no longer hold the soil in place. so the soil will erode much faster.
Erosion is part of it, but even if the soil wouldn't erode the loss of organic matter is still a big deal.
The genetic changes you get with direct gene manipulation are qualitatively different from those that arise through artificial selection. You won't get fish or tobacco genes in a cow from selectivd breeding. To constantly repeat this trope and claim that they are the same is intellectually dishonest.
There's always unknown unknowns and by now those have been reduced significantly for GMOs. Any reason to think the risk in this case might be higher than the benefits? Are you sure you are not overestimating the unknown unknown risk just because GMO sounds scary?
What is the epistemological framework you use to identify possible sources of unknown unknowns and bound their harms? In the absence of any framework you basically have a sort of nihilistic solipsism.
I think the most widely accepted framework here suffices. The emperical framework.
Cross breeding occurs slowly and is a long-used process. The long-used means there is ample evidence suggesting cross-breeding results in safe food.
The fact that cross breeding happens slowly gives any safety issues a long time to reveal themselves before it becomes wide-spread. Thus it makes sense that cross-breeding yields fewer unkown issues by the time its widespread. Essentially, early warning are built in, even for latent issues.
Good question. There is no way to bound the possible harm, but I'd there are solid alternatives then it becomes less desirable. A good example of this is the covid vaccine: this time, the risk of unknown vaccine complications is worth it.
As an aside, I admire the HN crowd reasoning capacity, but it always amazes me that almost no one is upfront and say we as a society love the taste of beef and are willing to risk environmental and possibly health issues for it. It would be a much more productive discussion if we were honest about it instead of discussing whether we need bigger cows.
Why are you not worried about the unknown unknowns in literally any other area? Like, using microwave ovens, having TV broadcast signals, or wearing silk?
Personally I'm reasonably confident that any significant adverse health effect would have been found by experiments by now, so Bayesian reasoning tells me any unknowns that are still unknown are probably negligible.
Large corporations across many industries have a history of identifying the harm from their products, hiding the studies, and then lobbying in the opposite direction of the findings. In short, intentional criminal behavior, shielded by regulators--who they control indirectly.
Monsanto is infamous for contaminating non-GMO crops on neighbour farms then suing the neighbour for growing the GMO variety, and for "drift" of their special herbicide which happens to destroy neighbour farm crops - for which the only solution is, you guessed it, buy Monsanto GMO varieties to grow instead of the non-GMO varieties you wanted to grow.
>Monsanto is infamous for contaminating non-GMO crops on neighbour farms then suing the neighbour for growing the GMO variety, and for "drift" of their special herbicide which happens to destroy neighbour farm crops - for which the only solution is, you guessed it, buy Monsanto GMO varieties to grow instead of the non-GMO varieties you wanted to grow.
1. in the context of this discussion (ie. GMO cows) this is basically a non-issue. GMO sperm isn't going to "drift" from one pasture to another.
2. Can you substantiate that claim? The Wikipedia article lists a bunch of cases where the farmers were intentionally trying to breed monsanto seeds, which is different than the narrative you presented, which imply farmers being sued for accidental contamination.
Til the GMO bull gets into your heifer's pen, or onto your land for a few days.
There used to be range wars over "strange breeds" much less gene-edited breeds where I grew up, where the cows still largely wander federal land and get rounded up seasonally.
On the first claim, looks like you're right and I learned something. It is interesting to see the Canada Supreme Court were split 5-4 on the Schmeiser decision and did not award any damages to Monsanto, (but that doesn't mean they believed the second year of crop growth was by accidental contamination).
On the second claim, it's briefly described in Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_legal_cases#Dicamba). The second claim isn't about GMO spreading directly, but rather about how you may have no choice but to grow the GMO variety (and pay for it, and lose revenue if you were growing something more profitable) when in the neighbourhood of other farms growing it, which has a similar practical effect on individual farmers regarding "you’re still free to go back to non-GMO varieties".
Lengthier article here (https://investigatemidwest.org/2020/12/04/buy-it-or-else-ins...) "‘Buy it or else’: Inside Monsanto and BASF’s moves to force dicamba on farmers" [...] [...] "His neighbors who spray dicamba are frustrated with him, he said. There’s an easy solution to avoid damage, they tell him: Buy Monsanto’s seeds" [...] "As the damage has continued, he said, more and more of his clients are “feeling bullied into” buying the dicamba-tolerant crops. Others tell him, they have to spray dicamba or else they can’t control the weeds."
>On the second claim, it's briefly described in Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_legal_cases#Dicamba). The second claim isn't about GMO spreading directly, but rather about how you may have no choice but to grow the GMO variety (and pay for it, and lose revenue if you were growing something more profitable) when in the neighbourhood of other farms growing it, which has a similar practical effect on individual farmers regarding "you’re still free to go back to non-GMO varieties".
>Lengthier article here (https://investigatemidwest.org/2020/12/04/buy-it-or-else-ins...) "‘Buy it or else’: Inside Monsanto and BASF’s moves to force dicamba on farmers" [...] [...] "His neighbors who spray dicamba are frustrated with him, he said. There’s an easy solution to avoid damage, they tell him: Buy Monsanto’s seeds" [...] "As the damage has continued, he said, more and more of his clients are “feeling bullied into” buying the dicamba-tolerant crops. Others tell him, they have to spray dicamba or else they can’t control the weeds."
I agree that this situation is bad and monsanto was in the wrong. However, I don't agree with the characterization of this as a GMO problem. The problem as I see it is that one party (the farmer spraying dicamba) is harming another party (the farmer that's not using monsanto seeds). In other words, a tort. This is something that the legal system protects against, and the article mentions that the injured farmer has won a lawsuit, so it seems like everything's working as intended. Blaming it on GMO doesn't really make sense. If GMOs weren't involved, and the pesticides merely poisoned the drinking water, that wouldn't magically make the situation okay.
Ok. Show me something that would be a food but for "delayed bad things". Like, delayed by decades or even years. Just so we're clear, nutritional deficiencies aren't of any interest.
As far as I'm aware this angle is FUD.
If we want to apply the same standard to pesticides I'm not sure any high ground exists. That said, whatever effect they have on mortality appears to be miniscule given the trends over the last century.
The problem with trans fats seems to be a matter of degree rather than kind. See the note on palm oil on Wikipedia. Also note that deaths attributable to coronary artery disease, the quantifiable thing linked to trans fat consumption, are hugely decreasing over the period where trans fats became common, suggesting again it's not a high order bit.
If we consider this in the context of GMO it sure seems like FUD to me.
On your second point, you are basically saying 'more profit' is the reason that farmers are choosing them. I personally am not interested in farmer profit when choosing what to eat.
>I personally am not interested in farmer profit when choosing what to eat.
That's fine. You're free to buy the conventional version if that's the case. However, market pressures will likely bring down the price, which mean some of the profit/savings are passed onto you.
Everything is totally fine until it bites hard enough to beat the marketing and legal campaigns run to promote and protect it. "Totally fine" is simply the orthodox professional position towards new potentially lucrative practices. Because it is a burden on the career opportunities to those who think otherwise.
Putting cattle remains in cattle feed was fine until CJD was discovered, mass producing CFCs was fine until the chemisty of the ozone damage was understood. More chemists assured leaded petrol was fine and the few who complained were attacked... this list is huge. Its totally fine to mass produce plastics still. So to assure the generally well informed about the safety and wisdom of a technological proposition - you would need to be able to carry more detail than just adding 'I am a related professional - this is fine'
This is a pretty poor form of argument. You can't just make blanket statements like this without evidence.
What evidence do you have that our understanding of CRISPR and genetic modification today is on par of our understanding of CFCs and CJD in the 20th century?
It's like saying that we shouldn't release any new drugs because of the thalidomide catastrophe.
I did reply to a blanket statement based on a bare claim of professional expertise - and with examples to plentiful historical evidence of premature confidences in technological understanding. There is no evidence that this fallibility has not carried into this century.
My argument was not like saying "we should never do anything like this because of past grave accidents in comparable novel products and practices" It was to be measured and wary of bare professional and institutional assurances.
Regarding the characteristics of plants and animals that we should feed to our children and mass rear in our environment - I am of the mind that the characteristics should be as well evidenced by the long history of life as we can afford.
> premature confidences in technological understanding
CRISPR-Cas9 (the method used here) was first successfully used seven years ago. According to the article, the meat may go to market in two years pending a safety review. So that's nine years from lab to table. How soon is too soon? What makes you think doing it now would be premature as opposed to ten years from now?
> It was to be measured and wary of bare professional and institutional assurances.
From where would you like to get assurances? Do you have to conduct the study yourself?
> Regarding the characteristics of plants and animals that we should feed to our children and mass rear in our environment - I am of the mind that the characteristics should be as well evidenced by the long history of life as we can afford.
That's all well and good till climate change reduces arable land and we have to extract as much as we can from the remainder.
Which is totally fine, but unfortunately that position is neither informed by any specific evidence, nor informed by a principled understanding of the technology in question (which is where deferral to expertise can come in handy).
You should note that there's a difference between an appeal to authority fallacy, and deferral to expertise, and while the former is fatal to any logical argument, the latter is an entirely appropriate and useful heuristic: https://thelogicofscience.com/2015/03/20/the-rules-of-logic-...
Allow me increase your principled understanding of GMO safety - anyone that thinks that any technology is safe, should be kept away from it. All technology confers capabilities and all capabilities can be misapplied accidentally or negligently in the pursuit of private advantage. Fire is not safe, you have to be safe with fire.
What determines the safety of any commercial application of technology is regulation. No technology is safe - don't lose contact with fundamental facts in the coarse of trying to maximize your argumentation and technological expertise.
Thank you for taking the time to explain this to me, this is totally new information to me and I had never considered that technology and tools could be misused. My understanding of biology has now been improved. /s
So he needs to provide proof but you don’t? It’s fine for you to use a slippery slope argument and straw man combined but he needs citations? Interesting.
I happen to be a biochemist by training (12 years of postsecondary including cancer research for my MSc) who is completely outside the field. I'm working as a software engineer for non-bio-related companies. I have no intention of going back to pipetting liquids around all day.
So yeah, for what it's worth, zero potential conflict of interest whatsoever.
So you just doubled down on basing your assurance solely on the strength of your own experience pipetting liquids around all day. The safety of GMO food is not even overall determinable by whatever biochemical insights you might have, unless you somehow feel that problematic GMOs simply could not be created accidentally or unscrupulously. The safety of GMO produce is dependent on the performance of regulatory bodies, not the raw capabilities of the latest approved technologies.
For me the idea that a company can claim intellectual property rights to a genome sounds pretty awful. To be fair, I don't know if that's a real threat or not, but I could totally see it happening.
Yeah I agree, but I also feel the same way about software patents.
I think it’s important to distinguish that objection from health scares, technophobia and such: imagine if the public’s objections were targeted at the real problems instead, how much more productive it would be!
That gives me a pretty cynical idea: the companies pushing GMOs should start funding and supporting groups who are vocal about the claimed adverse health effects of GMOs. That opposition is easy to argue against in public debate, and the resulting noise conveniently drowns out the real problems. Controlled opposition I think it's called.
Not surprisingly, I've learned about this concept from the Russian government.
I believe that's exactly what they are doing. They're drowning the big political issues of their model into the noise produced by the scientifically debatable issues. Ultimately, it's about bringing back up a feudal regime that can't be bypassed.
Sounds like poe's law? "wow these radical activists have some really extreme positions! could it be that these are people that sincerely hold extreme positions? nah they must be the 'controlled opposition' hired by the elites to bring 'back up a feudal regime that can't be bypassed'!"
Nothing so obvious. Yes, these people aren't hired or paid in any way, they are authentic in their positions. And they also get media attention because extremes bring clicks, rational political discourse is otherwise "boring". Power dynamics already regulates away most credible opposition so incumbents only have to nudge things here and there.
Yes, but posting "They're totally fine" is hardly distinguishing those problems.
If you are going to use your credentials to explain why you do not have a problem with GMOs, but then put in a blanket "Everything is fine" vibe... that doesn't do justice to the problems.
The problem with GMOs isn't the GMO itself - it is the practices that surround them. Patents, pesticides, and the resulting monoculture in large agricultural operations.
I will agree to that! But also every GMO is different, so IMO it makes no sense whatsoever for people to be "anti-GMO" in general, or even to have "GMO-free" labels on foods, but I would respect someone who was against a very specific use of GMO. And I do think it makes sense to have disclosure labels for products that use specific herbicides or pesticides.
Unfortunately, regulation of this sort of thing, at least in Canada and the US, is a complete joke and a confusing mess that doesn't serve anyone's best interests.
I am commenting on GMOs and GMOs only, I am not commenting about the safety of chemicals. GMO products themselves are biosimilar/essentially-equivalent to non-GMOs.
I think being opposed to the spraying of fields by whatever herbicide or pesticide is a legitimate position, but it's a distinct problem. Yes, I realize that they often come together, but that is not necessarily the case.
You can easily have a GMO that has nothing to do with pesticide or herbicide resistance, in fact there are plenty of those, and they unfortunately all get lumped into the same category in public discourse.
And even in the worst case, where a GMO's purpose is to be used alongside a herbicide such as glyphosate... It's not clear that the alternative is any better. In fact most other categories of herbicides are way more hazardous (note that I am not a herbicide expert, but I do know a thing or two about them). I don't want to defend any bad companies, and I don't know what the solution is, but one thing I know for sure: feeding everyone is actually super complicated.
I personally interpreted the GP and grand-GP commenter's statement as "there is nothing wrong from a health perspective about consuming GMO products", not "there is nothing wrong with the utterly bonkers legal convolutions surrounding GMO seed control".
In my opinion, health-wise and biochemically its fine
The patent situation, market capture, and change in biodiversity are issues secondary to the issues most are generally worried about when consuming and purchasing GMO foods and could be fixed with changes in law/regulation rather than having to do with whatever proteins the organism is expressing
Seriously though, biochemists seem to have more authority on this subject than a farmer. Some farmers study and are knowledgeable about genes and chemistry and whatnot. But without further information, just being a farmer doesn’t give you much more insight on the safety of GMO.
I am not a big fan of idea of GMO beef ether, not because I fear it will be dangerous but because I fear it will taste like crap and be unhealthy for the cows. Today they will make the cows hair shorter so they stay cooler for when they edit them tomorrow to grow an extra couple of hundred pounds of rapidly grown muscle.
Further your assertion by discussing the real concern: uncertainty.
It seems to take generations for health problems with novel products that humans ingest to materialize.
We have millennia of experience with cross breeding, animal husbandry, etc.
Why trust these salesmen of genetically modified organisms, the same gentlemen who gleefully introduce pesticides into the environment, when we know that traditional hybrid crops and selectively-bred livestock provide ample nourishment?
Is optimizing for per-acre yields at the risk hazard the environment and human health worthwhile?
To avoid malthusian traps we do need per-acre yields to be higher and higher. Increasing yields is not just about farmers profits, also about feeding the world.
That does not mean it is a good idea to trade long term damage for short term yields. But yields are still important.
>To avoid malthusian traps we do need per-acre yields to be higher and higher. Increasing yields is not just about farmers profits, also about feeding the world.
This is illogical. The only places that experience excessive population growth are those that haven't developed their basic agricultural sectors and rely on labor intensive subsistence farming which means having children who work on your farm is not a drag on your household. The reason why those people do subsistence farming is actually quite ironic, because they cannot afford to run commercial farms as those would have to compete with hyper optimized western farms so instead every poor nation is forced to sell its raw resources and cash crops and then buy food from developed countries.
You can't sustain a population on vanilla but since western and asian countries cannot compete on e.g. coffee or vanilla production in Madagascar that nation can use the proceeds to import rice. The problem isn't an inability to grow rice, after all, people do subsistence farming and live off it their entire life.
That depends in large part on whether a world population of 8B can be fed at the lower per-acre yields.
If the alternative is “everyone eats, but food is a little more expensive”, that’s OK. If the alternative is “billions live with insufficient food and 100s of millions die”, then I think the balance of the risk equation shifts.
There are actually very few GMO crops available commercially. Mostly corn and wheat. The "No GMO" label is meaningless for most products that don't use these ingredients
Yup. I would say at this point 99% of the cheese consumed by Americans is produced with GMO bacterial rennet. I've contacted maybe a dozen cheese producers and they've told me the same thing. It's not just about lower cost, but that is the biggest factor, one producer told me it's also about bacterial rennet being much more consistent and predictable.
Other have also commented, but this is mostly a marketing ploy. Non-GMO is not a regulated term and most things we eat have do not have a 'GMO' alternative.
Organic is the regulated term. Again, GMO is not a regulated term. The fact you see companies using it to try and extract a premium is the result of marketing, not a defined technical certification.
> Even if it could theoretically occur through a natural breeding process. You can cross breed all you want.
I'm no fan of GMO products either, but the whole point is that it gets you there faster , and in a more predictable way, than doing cross-breeding. Economics at work.
In Belgium we have cows specifically breaded for meat, which are called "dikbil" =(fatbutt). It's extremely unnatural, so I'm very afraid what kind of monstrosity the industry can come up with when using gene manipulation.
Most livestock, fruits, grains and vegetable that exist today and we buy in our store shelves are all the result of selective breeding by humans over the last 100-200 years. More recently as the science and ability to do selective breeding has improved. Genetic manipulation is going to accelerate something that is already happening. For me genetic manipulation of livestock and grains is not as problematic as the western/richer countries patenting genes and making poor countries pay through the nose for it.
> Most livestock, fruits, grains and vegetable that exist today and we buy in our store shelves are all the result of selective breeding by humans over the last 100-200 years.
More like thousands of years.
Also, before humans were selectively breeding, animals were “unconsciously breeding” e.g. fruits by eating the tastiest ones and thereby spreading their seeds.
I don't fully agree with that timeline, at least not when you consider it more broadly.
My granddad was a farmer (he was born around 1920). Back then, animals were still treated fairly well, and the animals themselves were also still natural. The real industrialization of livestock came after that, when he was already retired.
Having raised and killed animals all of his life, he actually wasn't too fond of how animals were raised and treated after that. For sure he regarded all specifically bred animals as unnatural.
The real question is how far do you take selective breeding.
Do you want chickens that can't stand on their own legs? Olden days: no, currently: yes.
Do you want cows so fat that they can't naturally give birth to calves? Olden days: no, currently: yes.
How do you breed animals? Oldens days: put the male together with the female. Currenly, jerk of the male and inject the semen in the female.
It's all industrialized. And what selective breeding has to do with how animals are treated? Everything. Unless you claim chickens too fat for their legs, cows too fat to give birth, etc, has no impact on their well being.
Denmark have been breeding pigs to have a higher amount of piglets, but it makes the death rate higher, about 25.000 piglets die a day, and the pre-wean mortality rate is ~21%.
We're also exporting the technology and knowledge of breeding pigs.
My grandfather was a farmer, and at his old age he bought such a chicken. He was amazed and astounded that within a few weeks it became so big it couldn't stand on its feet anymore.
Would count this categorically as one of the ways we do not want to be using technology in the context of climate change, as it’s bypassing the negative feedback loop that already wasn’t strong enough to prevent us getting to this point in the first place.
But if the loop is eventually not strong enough to have negative effects, why should we reinforce it? I am quite optimistic that the climate change crisis will be eventually resolved by the combination of engineering to restore the environment and adapting our existing technologies to damage it less (like it’s already happening). Humans are very adaptive.
What happens when human adaptivity outpaces our species’ ability to accurately perceive and adequately understand the impact of our own adaptivity?
We seem to be becoming increasingly reliant upon technology which is increasingly untested to solve problems that are increasingly a result of this adaptivity. It’s a vicious cycle in which humans identify a problem but lack the necessary perspective to identify and solve the root cause of the problem so we end up with inadequate solutions that mostly prolong and exacerbate the original problem rather than actually solving it. Adaptivity aside, I just don’t think humans are at a point in which we possess the necessary perspective for us to safely engage in large scale commercial genetic modification of life without it backfiring on us in some horribly spectacular way.
At the risk of us getting too abstract here, the trouble with said loop being weak is that it is difficult to link our actions and their impact on our environment. It is weak because the forces in question operate on a very long time scale, and the system hasn’t self corrected as early as one would hope.
We are indeed very adaptive! It’s simply a case of us adapting our behaviour to mitigate the consequences, rather than just adapting to live with them.
I think we should go a step further and self-flagulate, honestly. Seriously though, this quote made me laugh: "the gene-edited cattle are the same—as far as a consumer is concerned." They should peek in on the anti-vaccine crowd for a glimpse at consumer reality. I'm sure more than a few normies are going to want to see this on the label as well.
"the gene-edited cattle are the same—as far as a consumer is concerned."
For me, that statement invokes thoughts of "counterfeit cattle". By that logic, there's no harm to the consumer when someone sells a knock-off purse or watch, as long as it functions the same as the original. Taken a step further, there's no harm in stealing from someone if the victim doesn't know they've been robbed.
I'm not against using advances in technology to feed more people. I believe the suffering of a hungry human outweighs the suffering of that human's potential next meal. I don't think it's wrong or immoral for a lion to eat an antelope.
But I do believe honesty and openness are important. I want consumers to be able to make educated decisions on what they consume. It should be easy for someone who can afford an all-organic diet to purchase products that are in fact organic.
It will take some time for the public to take notice and create a meaningful movement against that thing. For nuclear, it took about 35 years before we saw public protest that was more than just three potentially mentally unstable folks raving about the end of the world.
The nuke protests just managed to line Russia’s pockets with German treasure and lead to more coal deaths, so perhaps it’s an apt comparison, but not the one you’re looking for.
I want to know what exactly was changed to help them "endure climate change" because to me it sounds like bullshit designed to create a proprietary cow genome with a pretty story to sell it.
Also 'endure climate change' is so grossly ironic.
Instead of factoring in the costs of our actions, engineer ways to lower price and feed more demand -> and thus creating more methane, forest destruction, emissions from feed, huge waste of water, and all the gas shipping it a continent away.
If people won't reduce their beef consumption, maybe we can crispr out some methane (seems not possible just based on chemistry but who knows?). Or maybe just let the real price with externalities lower consumption.
But genes to appear to modulate gut microbiota composition on other animals, so it's not impossible that there is some genetic modification (to cattle) that would have the desired effect.
Another alternative is GMO feed that contain some of the same nutrients as seaweed. Gene transfer might be easier between seaweed and feed then seaweed and cow
That information, alongside a comparison photo, is available in the first (very short) paragraph. The modification is to have them grow much shorter hair in order to tolerate heat better.
I dont mean to sound condescending here, but it would have taken you 2-5 seconds to find the answer to your question. This comment is an example of bad internet discourse.
However! I agree that the who-owns-the-genes question is interesting.
The optimist in me hopes this really is a quality of life improvement for the cattle. The pessimist in me fears this a way to begin patenting livestock.
This is exciting for the obvious reasons of helping make meat production more sustainable and making meat more affordable. It's also incredible that we have this technology and we're putting to uses with obviously prosocial benefits.
I'm worried that we will reject climate change mitigations because of tradition or religious views. I hope we can change culturally to make it possible to survive for the next century.
This might be an unpopular opinion here but if this puts more beef on the table or at a lesser price, bring it on. I love beef. I want more people to have access to good quality beef at a competitive price. The pandemic for me saw meat in general double in price on average. I can't in good faith consume corn, tomatoes, tobacco, or even broccoli while saying I don't support GMO. It is not the same but it also is not an entirely unrelated concept. As an engineer we are taught to analyze and overcome and to me this is nothing different.
if you have literally no concern about the suffering of animals, then it's a good thing. If you think that the suffering of animals outweighs people's preferences (not needs, you can thrive on a vegetarian diet) then this is absolutely not good. I'm happy to see high prices for beef, and would be happy if everyone was priced out of eating it. As second best, I'd be happy if people at least considered the suffering that went into their food production and chose to reduce that consumption even if they feel they cannot eliminate it.
This is probably gonna sound a bit dystopian, but would you eat beef if we eliminated suffering with CRISPR? I don't get to talk to a lot of vegetarians/vegans so honest question.
I don't know. My moral intitutions and reasoning fall apart if you remove suffering from the equation. By that logic it would also be okay to farm and eat humans if we eliminated their ability to suffer using CRISPR. What would you think of that? I don't even know where to start.
> Yet u write this probably on an iphone or whatever computer where rate minerals where harvested by slaves who died doing so.
This is the lowest effort meme argument commonly found in any animal rights discussions.
Yes there are problems in the world. My choice of phone makes barely any difference ethically; thus I must leave society behind, lest im banned from arguing about anything at all? No, you evaluate what you have power over and act accordingly. I have access to all my nutrition in plat based food, so that's what I eat. I can afford and am able to use a Fairphone, so I do that. Defeatist comments like yours don't drive discussion nor help anyone, but those too lazy or accommodated to re-evaluate their impact on the world.
That'd be an okay but irrelevant to meat eating point if I was against supply chain transparency and stopping slavery. I am very much happy to see anyone who has enslaved anyone going to prison for the rest of their life though, and I'm very happy for companies to find alternative sources to warlords and corrupt banana republics.
If you invent an animal that is designed to grow muscle tissue for harvesting and isn't sentient nor suffers, you've solved lab meat, in an organic container. While many vegns grew a distaste for meat, that would indeed satisfy the vegan principle of eliminating suffering.
However, the reason farm animals are so cheap is because they are conscious, autonomous meat machines that you can order around easily.
* You do enter into another question here about whether brain dead or deeply disabled people are ethical to be eaten. Most people would say no.
I would, but I think the premise is unrealistic. The term “suffering” itself is pretty vague and undefined. You might be thinking of just removing pain receptors in the brain or something, but there are many more sources of suffering than just pain.
I respect your choice, and hope some day the work we see here can open doors to a lab grown alternative that eliminates the suffering so that you also can experience the joy of a ribeye, bone-in with a compound butter and runny egg.
I also eat meat, so not going to play the saint here.
But it seems you have absolutely no remorse of what happens to those animals that end up on your plate. Or you do and try to cover it up by playing the tough guy.
I try to cut back on meat as much as I can. I also enjoy some ribs, but I don't eat meat every day. And when I do, I try to stick with fish or poultry.
I suggest you watch some slaughterhouse videos, so you know what those animals have to go through to end up as tasty meat on your plate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTenibfTutI . Please watch it all up until the end.
If you still have no remorse, you are for sure a psychopath.
Acute suffering and fear tends to last longer, subjectively, for humans. Psychological time stretches. Perhaps slowing it down is a more accurate portrayal of the animal's experience than not doing so.
I agree. I think eating meat is abhorrent, and genetically mutilating animals even more so. Selective breeding is one thing, but this opens the doors to all kinds of ‘design gene’ questions that I don’t think the world is ready for, or ever should be.
How is selective breeding good?
There are dog breeds that have respiratory problems all their lives.
CRISPR should open the door to genetic improvements without genetic diversity loss
The breathing issues found in certain breeds of dogs aren't from diversity loss. Rather, the breathing issues are caused by the traits being bred for. Pugs, for instance, are bred to have small noses, so small that they restrict airflow. CRISPR could exacerbate the desire of breeders to express physical characteristics in dogs without considerations for the impact of those changes on the well-being of the dog.
Not true for everyone. I have a specific health issue and to ingest the necessary daily intake of proteins solely through non-meat source would mean ingesting a lot more carbs that I can handle for a day.
Also explain how would CRISPR increase the suffering of animals?
I don't think they were claiming that it increases suffering. But it doesn't decrease it either. We should at least decrease suffering, or ideally, eliminate it. CRISPR does not constitute any progress in that regard. If anything, it gives more people more excuses to continue supporting the suffering.
That is correct. Ideally we will move to lab grown meat or just lab grown edibles/drinkables that contain all the nutrients you need and you get to choose the ratio of nutrients for each meal.
My thinking was that it allows us to continue to improve yields without corresponding costs being paid by the consumers. In other words, people will just keep buying huge quantities of cheap meat. I do not consider this a good thing because meat is a luxury. In this case, it's keeping meat cheap(er) despite screwing the planet with climate change.
as long as you take vitamins B12, D and some iron, you should be fine.
but having been meat eaters for 2.4 million years will be hard to shake off.
if anything eating beef will increase in the future as more and more people rise to the “middle class”. we should probably take this into consideration and it’s implications, no matter how you feel about the subject.
People bring this up, but like, is eating dog okay? Even if you say yes, is factory farming them okay? Is eating human okay? No - just because we may have had meat in our diet for millions of years doesn't mean we have to choose the most advanced life to factory farm and eat. We certainly have more reservations against eating certain kinds of meat than can be explained purely from an evolutionary perspective - and that aspect should be expanded to cover more species. Plenty of Westerners will be outraged when the Japanese slaughter a whale but seem fine with the immense suffering in the farms in their own country. I don't think this can be reconciled if people knew just what actually went on.
I'll note that personally I don't shame people for eating meat - that's just not a nice way to live and leads to immense resentment. I do think people are making the wrong choice here though.
The virtue signaling is strong here. Humans have been eating animals forever. It played a large part in our evolution. It's a normal part of life. Wringing hands over it helps nobody.
This is just pure naturalistic fallacy. We have done plenty of terrible things for millions of years (rape, murder, war) but having done those for millions of years is no real justification for their continuation.
You're 100% right about this. What's going on right now with mass slaughter of animals will hopefully end one day soon and be looked back on as the darkest time in the Earth's history.
But the race to the bottom has shown that quality goes out the window. People will eat garbage if it's cheap and companies will cut any corners they can to get the price down.
Corn fed factory meat doesn't taste at all the same as grass fed organic free-range.
I'd rather pay quadruple for a piece of meat and only eat it once a week than the crap we get for cheap every day.
> I wonder if the average consumer will be as disgusted and turned off by the idea of eating genetically modfied meat as I am.
To me that sounds like being turned off by it containing dihydrogen monoxide. That is kind of a shame because the "patented life" angle is a real, serious problem worth attention but bundling it with shallow/trivial criticism like "turned off" (it literally tastes the same) makes it easy to dismiss.
Of course there are issues with mere humans editing creatures, and true, coarse-grained crispr editing could result in unintended consequences.
But our ethics committees see nothing wrong with this. And as my morality depends on what ethics are commonly said to be ethical, this is a decision I am delighted to accept. And think of all the invalid children this will help!
Sure, I'm not clear on what has been edited here. Nor do I understand the legal implications of the editing, where a corporation is now considered to be a patent holder in a living cereus.
And I'm not sure what the future holds for people, even though I have read talk that dna was changed by vaccines (not just rna). Surely, corporations wouldn't argue that they have a legal interest in people, and that their interests need to be accounted for?
No, this is great news. Onwards and upwards into the brave new world! And special thanks to the FDA who have bravely represented the best interests of humanity, refusing to kowtow to corporate interests. I only sleep as well as I do thanks to my wonderful government and its 3-letter agencies! Good job.
I sure hope that these cows can reproduce without the authorization of a mega corporation.
Everyone loves talking about how their genetic engineering technique is the best and that at worst it is only as bad as selective breeding yet they completely dismiss the fact that you cannot apply selective breeding on a lot of these GMOs.
Everyone forgets the missing methane output from the nearly extirpated bison population. Cattle in north america are only slightly more numerous than the peak bison population.
Probably less because we are feeding the cheapest source of feed to cows, not what they can digest the best. The food that your body fails to digest will be digested in the big intestine which can lead to bloating.
> A number of past studies have found lower greenhouse gas emissions associated with the feedlot system. One reason is that grass-fed cows gain weight more slowly, so they produce more methane (mostly in the form of belches) over their longer lifespans.
> We are too many people on the earth for the resources that we are naturally given.
The same old rant that we hear for like 100 years now "when we reach 1 billion people everyone will starve", "peak oil is just around the corner (back in the 70s)", and all this kind of bullshit.
Resources are plentiful as long as you are ingenious when it comes to harvesting them.
Why are we breeding cattle which has modified genes for not sweating ?
You say resources are plentiful but apploud (?) modified cattle so they don't sweat, so they don't pollute and so we all can keep eating meat. You really don't see a flaw in that ?
Of course we are too many people. Denying that is really naive.
And yet another the average person living in any developed country (also to a lesser but still significant degree in all of countries) is much better off, in almost every conceivable way, than his ancestors were when the total world population was only a few hundred million people.
If you’re primary concern is the welfare of humans (not saying it should be) rather than wildlife and natural ecosystems there almost no evidence which would suggest that an increase in global population results in a lower QoL for an average person.
The number of humans that can live on this planet simultaneously is a function of technology.
If we all lived like hunters and gatherers, the population limit would be a mere few tens of millions.
Conversely, if we imagine arbitrary technology, the maximum population that can live simultaneously and sustainably on this world is somewhere in the trillions.
Technology such as the stuff you’re trying to use as evidence there’s too many of us, is in fact the technology that allows there to be more of us.
It's also a function of the finite resources available to us. You also need to factor in that we don't have arbitrary technology and never will. There will always be limits to our technology. I think the gist of the GP argument is something like:
Our use of technology is using increasing amounts of our planets resources (e.g. land), and is often questionably ethical (exploiting the other creatures we share our planet with). At which point you have to ask the question: is an expanded human population worth that cost?
Sure, and if I’m talking to someone who claims e.g. the economy can grow forever I’d make a similar point myself.
But we don’t have trillions of people yet, and the difficulty of supporting the current population sustainably is more one of organisation than technological inability — much closer to irrigating and enclosing in greenhouses Nevada, Utah, and Arizona [0] than it is to colonising Mars. (I’m told greenhouses are way more productive than open air farms, just not cost effective in most cases; the example given by proponents is the Netherlands).
> is an expanded human population worth that cost?
To whom? I’m vegetarian and pushing myself in the direction of veganism, partly because of ethics. Ethics are however are relative, and many humans only care about other humans. Heck, given that the nature of the rich inner world often called “self-awareness” or “consciousness” is not yet sufficiently well defined to even be testable, such people may even be correct. I’m not even sure at what threshold to stop caring myself — lobster brains aren’t very complex, and bivalves (despite being animals) don’t even have brains: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bivalvia#Nervous_system
[0] for illustration purposes only; this is almost certainly a suboptimal set of locations.
>In the meantime, approximately 793 million people are starving around the world, according to the U.N. That makes up about 11 percent of the population.
> Resources are plentiful as long as you are ingenious when it comes to harvesting them.
Resources are also plentiful until they're not. The idea that people have been saying that resources are running out for a long time is not evidence that they are infinite.
You'd have to be quite ingenious to maintain the fossil fuel supply indefinitely through your harvesting tactics, unless the tactic you use is to slow to a stop.
American oil peaked and then declined almost exactly as expected, and only saw a second growth phase when a new category of resources became exploitable.
IMO, given the scale of everything in the USA, it’s more luck than anything else that the world is getting sufficiently cheap renewables and batteries on the right schedule to avoid peak oil actually harming civilisation in general and the USA catastrophically — the principle is a valid one, and in a hypothetical alternative world where global reserves had been half what they were, American rural areas would have had a much harder time than European equivalents adapting to electric power and long distance transport in the 70s.
Even if we were to accept that fact as stated (I don't, but let's assume we do..)
What are you proposing, exactly? It sounds like "address the real problem" here means you are suggesting killing people off. That definitely doesn't seem like a good answer.
China tried the one child policy, and it didn't turn out very well. The second order effects were pretty awful, and will be felt for generations.
What would you suggest the path forward to less population is?
Based on how we exploit our resources and the amount of people that are wealthy enough to live a good-standard life, we are definitely too many people on earth.
Of course I don't suggest killing people, why would you even suggest such a thing ?
I suggest people start to educate themselves and eachother. Instead of having kids, adopt. Instead of eating meat 5 days a week, eat it twice. Start using a bike and not a car.
But people don't think about the consequences for the next generations, and "we are empowered to have our own kids etc". People really don't give a fuck about the state of the world as long as they can get what they believe they are entitled to through life. And that's a problem.
Start accepting that and start accepting the how exploit what we have dear and have been given as being part of the world.
We are way too many people for all of us to live decent life's.
> Based on how we exploit our resources and the amount of people that are wealthy enough to live a good-standard life, we are definitely too many people on earth.
hi. you would be surprised to find out this is a myth that started in the 70s. it has been disproven time after time, decade after decade. and still people fall for it :)
I think you're right about the outcome, but unfortunately I think it's inevitable. The increasing population allows the government to print money now, knowing that future tax revenue will make up for it. It's a source of power that doesn't easily go away. Any attempt to resist population growth, such as by paying people to NOT have children, would go against the entire pyramid scheme.
Having less/very few children would be an awful if we care about the next generation. You’d end up with much larger proportion of older people in the total population. This would result in a massively increase in per capita healthcare expenditures and a decrease in productivity. And guess who is going to pay for all that?
Worldwide (which is more relevant here), the absolute poorest of the poor, the people that would look up enviously to the accumulated wealth of a rough-sleeping westerner with a shopping trolley, are getting richer.
Most people associate these genome modification tools as inherently bad because the first generation of them were tied to herbicide and pesticide resistance. Whether you agree with those applications or not, its clear those tools worked and were extremely powerful. I would personally argue they work too well and the 2nd and 3rd order effects are doing the most damage. But these tools exist in regulatory frameworks that are archaic and rigid and when billions of dollars are on the line companies figure out ways to play in between the lines.
An optimistic person might want these tools to be used to increase taste profiles, shelf-life, nutritional content, range of adaptation, etc. A pessimist probably sees this as a faster way to add more herbicide or pesticide traits to enable those chemicals to be applied.
I'm very bullish on genome editing tech. Lots of these comments are applying 1990s thinking to a 2030 and beyond tech. Akin to 1950s 'futuristic' predictions showing flying cars.