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As Judith said, I
had misgivings about this newletter. I thought it was poorly
written, scattershot, heavily biased, and employed a scare-mongering
kind of style. Only a few of the references are to peer-review
sources; most others are references to the author's own publications or to
other anti-GM sources. To
me, this undermines the surety of what they report and their
conclusions.
Having said that,
I do think that many of the issues they raise are potentially quite important.
Just to pick one: I think the notion of genomic "fluidity" is a very important
and serious concern if what they report is true. The stability of the lineage as
represented by the genomes of subsequently-reproduced systems (i.e.,
offspring) does not seem to be guaranteed by the stability of the
initially-modified system: I suppose this means that individual system stability
and evolutionary system stability show themselves to be two distinct
issues/problems, and that the former does not in any way confer or entail the
latter. Perhaps this problem may be related to the fact that the
ontology of the transgenic system - the way in which the mutation was initially
"installed" into the organism - is a distinctly different process than the
ontology - the ontogenesis - of the offspring?
It is also not
clear to me if it is known what kind of effects various environmental pressures
have on the GM genomic stability. Is it the case that this genomic fluidity
arises only due to issues related to internal organization, or do environmental
influences (also) induce these unusual genomic instabilities in the
lineage? If the latter, then this to me would mean that GM products would have
an almost untenable position: there could be no assurance by any GM manufacturer
that subsequent generations loosed in real-world ecosystems would conform - even
generally - to their initial specifications.
I think GM in
general is terribly unwise. Aside even from all the possible dangers
GM-products may introduce, the GM route only exacerbates the trend toward
planting monolithic strains of crops. If there are lessons from biology,
then one is certainly that if a strain of a food is created that repels certain
pests, then it also thereby creates a niche opportunity for some new pest(s) to
exploit that niche. Going from planting field upon field of a single strain
to planting field upon field with a single GM strain just leads us down that
infinite regress inherent in mechanistic solutions to complex problems. I
tend to think that old-fashioned cross-breeding and sowing of a multiplicity of
varieties and strains are far safer ways to limit massive infestations or
other crop failures. The economics of this approach are an issue, but I am not
convinced that it is a severe one. Whether produce are sorted after picking
for sale by variety, or are sold as mixed varieties, will likely depend on the
particular item and market. But I can imagine that in alot of cases the
mixed varieties could actually be marketed as a
premium entity: in the way that organic foods are marketed nowadays,
and the idea of buying a bag of potatoes (or carrots or beans,
etc.) where each potato looked identical to the others could
become less appealing to consumers in the future - where uniformity
becomes identified by the consumer with a product being less
"natural".
Regards,
Tim
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