I may be late to this party, but I want my big Monsanto check anyway

I knew it*!!!

*There’s a link there to my comment on PZ’s post.

But. . . they changed the plant’s genetics . . . nobody’s ever done that ! Oh wait.. they have… how many varieties of roses are there? orchids ? cattle, Banana ?
should we force United Fruit Co. to put “This banana is a food created by genetic modification” ? You know, the difficult to do GM that comes of many generations of selective breeding ? Oh, but somehow that’s “Natural”.

@3 DLC- The common yellow banana is a MUTATION! It appeared in the early 1800s (possible origin is Mauritius) and was considered good enough to clone.

When you slice bananas into your cereal, you are eating cloned, mutated fruit! Ewwwwww!

I take back all the insulting things I’ve ever said about you.

I would have thought the term GM as used today implied changing the genes of plants in some manner not available through nature (cross breeding pollinating etc). For example inserting a gene that produces an insecticide into your potatoes so at least you can be sure when you die you won’t be eaten by caterpillars.

Being against the idea of GM on principal does seem a little retrograde. Being against the idea that companies like Monsanto will turn crops that were open source to copyrighted monocultures with unpredictable results, especially when we are to be dependent on the company to report anything bad, does seem worth fighting against.

Michael Pollan has a very healthy attitude: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/18/michael-pollan-discusses_n_203954.html

Considerably more nuanced than the gung-ho pro GM attitudes I see here and on PZs blog. I personally thought some of those other anti GM groups had a point. I think it would be good to see GM food labeled. If thy are really good and good for you that will be a plus. If not that will be minus. You can choose. Now you have no idea.

Todd W.:

No, no, no. As Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron clearly demonstrate, the common yellow banana was created exactly like that by God. I mean, it fits nicely in the hand, with the ridges lining up to the knuckles. It has an easy-open tab. And, it basically unzips. Oh, and it is long and narrow so it fits easily in the mouth.

You don’t know anything, do you?

Posted by: Todd W.

And yet, the coconut is so demonstrably awkward in the hand, has no obviously-designated access point, and far from unzipping, has to be forcefully broken into; plus, it’s round and wide and doesn’t fit in the mouth at all. One might even say, poorly designed.

God: incompetent schiz.

And yet, the coconut is so demonstrably awkward in the hand, has no obviously-designated access point, and far from unzipping, has to be forcefully broken into; plus, it’s round and wide and doesn’t fit in the mouth at all. One might even say, poorly designed.

In addition, falling coconuts kill many more people than do sharks. I have personally had a close call with a falling coconut. I heard a thud behind me and saw a coconut lying on the path right where I was walking.

Thanks for the plug, Orac! I’ll be sure to tell them to send your ‘payoff’ right away. Still living at Orthanc Tower Drive? Did you want it in gold bullion or souls?

Thank you everyone who is taking the time to vote. We’re doing great, but things could always change in the next 27 hours. Let’s push it to 1,000 votes!

I’m a plant person. It really does my heart good to see anti-GMO crankery getting more of the thrashing it rightfully deserves. You might not notice this, Orac, but they share a lot in common with vaccines (and alternative medicine), at least in the terms of arguments used against them.

First, there’s the toxin gambit. That’s the first thing every anti-GMO person says. There is the claim that GMOs are toxic, however, not once is said toxin ever mentioned. They will never tell you what is actually toxic. Also, no chemical pathways for the creation of the alleged toxin are given, nor is a genetic cause of the toxin ever given. Nope, just like how alties think herbs work because they’re herbs (not an active ingreadient), GMOs are toxic without a causative agent.

But of course, no one is ever anti-GMO. Nope, they’re pro-safe GMO. They want more testing. Hey, sound familiar? Green our Vaccines, anyone? Some will come out and say it, but most try to pretend they’re rational moderates. Sound like a certain Stealth anti-vaccinationist?

They also try to mix good fact in with bad, just like the anti-vax crowd will mix good advice about diet and exercise in with woo. For example, they’ll often cite the problems of monoculture as a reason GMOs are bad, or say that we should use crop rotation. Everyone knows that monoculture is has risks (remember the Irish Potato Famine? No GMOs involved), and that crop rotation can improve soil quality and yield, but these are both practices that have nothing to do with the topic at hand. It’s just like how, sure, avoiding fatty and sugary foods and going for a daily jog are good medical advice, but that doesn’t have anything to getting vaccinated.

And of course, we plant folks also have our own type naturopathy that absolutely abhors GMOs, just like alternative medicine in general recommended you not get vaccinated, only we call ours organics, which, like I mentioned above, is a combo of good advice and unproven (and low yield) argumentum ad naturam. Norman Borlaug, greatest human being who ever lived, once estimated that if the whole world used organics, we could only feed 2/3 of the population, and yet, its proponents detest the spread of GMOs into poorer regions, and want to instead have their agricultural woo become the primary method of farming (tough luck to the over 2 billion people who would have to starve). Sound like Homeopaths Without Borders, people whose actions have caused diseases to become endemic to the UK, and raving loons who think vaccines in Africa are going to, I don’t know, do something bad?

Just like the anti-vaxxers, they also like to go for the creepy angle. Your vaccine has aborted babies in it! You’re a lab experiment! Your tomato has fish in it! This is Frankenstein! Neither are true, but they sound spooky. And there’s the mixing of valid concerns with sheer woo. There’s no reason to think all GMOs are good. No man made thing ever is. There was a GE bean in Australia that really was toxic, that’s true. But the researchers in charge identified the toxin, and the chemical pathways that formed the toxin, and had very good scientific reason for why everything happened, then they abandoned that line and started a new one to fix the problem. There was a GE soybean that had a gene that produced Brazil nut proteins, and consequently, would have hurt people with Brazil nut allergies. Both of these were purely experimental. Likewise, vaccines can, have, and do hurt people. There have been instances of vaccines with one problem or another that have been harmful, right? And in both cases, the anti-GMO/vaxxers will use this as ‘proof’ that GMOs/vaccines are too dangerous. And it has the unintended problem of making any valid problem look stupid. If a legitimate problem with GE crops or vaccines came up, how would the average person recognize it among all the unscientific madness?

There’s also the appeal to long term effects, or as I like to call it, the Plus Five Argument. In other words, we must wait until the current number of years researched plus five before anything should be done. Just like with vaccines, some people say we don’t know the long term effects of GMOs on our health, but we’ve been eating them for years and there has been no problem, and there is no evidence to think that one day everyone is going to fall over dead because of it. We’ve been eating food that has been slow modified via breeding, or even modified with mutagens (where do you think seedless watermelons come from?) for all our lives. But they still say that GMOs cause problems. Why, the disease of the day rates have been rising, of course! Correlation and causation problems with disease diagnosis, remind you of a certain anti-vax argument involving autism?

And of course, there is a direct connection between GMOs and health quackery. I’m sure you’ve seen it on NaturalNews.

I’m sure there’s more similarities thanks to the Unified Theory of the Crank, but you get the picture. I always say to myself that in the future GMOs will have the acceptance they deserve, but looking at the state of vaccination, that’s doubtful. Like alties and anti-vax cranks, all anti-GMO people aren’t all bad. Sure, some are too far gone to save, but most, I think, are just mislead by bogus reports and scare mongering. Anti-GMO sentiment is here to stay, but genetic engineering has as much potential as agriculture itself, all the way back when man first formed agrarian societies out of the hunter-gatherer tribes. This has the potential to allow us to more food on less land with less water in harsher conditions, produce medicines for the cost of seed and water, or mimic virtually anything that evolution has produced, and hopefully someday, create our own novel traits. With world population growing at the rate it is, we simply can’t risk turning our back on science. We need a science based society. I believe that in the coming decades this technology will be critical to the success of the human race, just like vaccines were critical in stabilizing societies by eliminating the worst of diseases. Maybe not this decade, maybe not the next, but exponential population growth will eventually catch up with our conventional agricultural methods, and if we don’t have something ready by then, it’s really going to hit the fan. This anti-GMO fear is the same type of fear that would have enabled smallpox to still ravage this world had we not acted, and in this case as well, we can’t let irrationality and fear stop us from acting before its too late.

From Silent Spring, 1962: “A truly extraordinary variety of alternatives to the chemical control of insects is available. Some are already in use and have achieved brilliant success. Others are in the stage of laboratory testing. Still others are little more than ideas in the minds of imaginative scientists, waiting for the opportunity to put them to the test. All have this in common: they are biological solutions, based on understanding of the living organism they seek to control, and of the whole fabric of life to which these organisms belong. Specialists representing various areas of the vast field of biology are contributing – entomologists, pathologists, geneticists, physiologists, biochemists, ecologists – all pouring their knowledge and their creative inspirations into the formation of a new science of biotic controls.” — Rachel Carson, an environmentalist of some note. Too bad so many anti-biotechnology praise her writing without understanding it.

Party Cactus, that is one huge straw man you created there. I bet if you planted beans outside your door you would be able to climb up to a castle in the sky the next day.

There are many of us, including Michael Pollan, who are not against the idea of GM, but think right now in the hands of the big companies like Monsanto it is not really doing that much good. Patenting everything, and not even allowing independent researchers to publish research they might run on your crops, is really a bad way to have advancement in science.

You might like to check this out:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/18/michael-pollan-discusses_n_203954.html

“Pharma companies, and in particular vaccine manufacturers, pay me more than enough to keep me able to stay in my sweatpants all day churning out anti-alt-med screeds”

True, the seed/agrochemicals business is chump change compared to pharma, but one has to diversify one’s porfolio and not be dependent on just one Evil Conspiracy(tm) for payola. Anybody know whether the pro-GMO conspiracy has good dental benefits?

Thanks for the post and for supporting biofortified!