Dr Jane Goodall: supporters of GM food deluded & ‘anti-science’ (backs new anti-GM book)

[jeff47]

262. A gene coming from an octopus or spider isn't relevant. You're looking for what the gene does

Let's say the gene happens to make tomato skin less likely to bruise. I can get the same results by inserting a gene, or by selecting less-bruise-prone plants. In both cases, I have modified the DNA of the tomato plant to do what I want. And in both cases, I can very radically alter the plant - the ancient ancestor of corn is nothing like what was farmed in the Americas in the 1600s.

Also, genes cross species boundaries often. It's called "swine flu" because it has incorporated genes from pigs into the virus. There's a host of retroviruses that evolved to do this kind of thing 100% naturally. (We don't use them to make GMOs because they are too hard to control.)

Nature is not a pretty, idyllic meadow. Nature is a brutal war involving mass use of chemical and biological weapons to commit genocide. And we can't even come close to the weapons nature has made. The deadliest chemical weapon humans have made is Vx nerve gas. The deadliest chemical weapon Nature made is botulism toxin, which is about 100 times deadlier than Vx.

Toxic waste dumps? All of the oxygen in our atmosphere is toxic waste - it was deadly to everything except cyanobacteria when cyanobacteria began dumping it into the environment. It now makes up 20% of our atmosphere, a scale far beyond the biggest toxic waste dumps humans ever made. It utterly decimated all life that existed at the time.

That's not to say man-made is better or safer or nicer. It isn't. Nature is just a lot messier than many of us like to believe.

"is NOT NATURAL" is not an argument. It's a fallacy meant to maintain the status quo. After all, the anti-LGBT people spend a lot of their time arguing it "is NOT NATURAL" too.