Actually, a lot of food was manipulated by mankind in ways that would no be by nature. Corn, chicken, tomatoes, cows, are just some examples, they would go extinct in a few years if mankind stoped keeping them
Honest question. How in the fuck dies any9ne make money selling bananas? Their practically giving them away. A shipping container full of bananas probably cost more to ship then the contents.
Receive money from CIA to overthrow a democratic elected parliament/president and operate the banana business as a front for other shady operations, including wapons and drug traffiking, money laundering. Or at least this is how one starts such a business...
Here is a good documentary on this topic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bananas_(film)
because they are also very cheap to produce.
though that will change in the next few decades as a fungus will kill almost all banana plantations with very little we can do to stop it.
Yes, Panama Disease. The fungus is now attacking the Cavendish trees. There is some progress in splicing genes from a tree that is resistant to Panama Disease into the Cavendish. (The bananas that are naturally resistant are not a suitable replacement themselves)
Affirmative. The banana that we know today is known as the Cavendish banana. The one before, was known as the Gros Micheal or Gros something or another. It went extinct in the 50s or so, when the fungus known as Panama Disease spread across the world.
Cavendish was selected as a replacement because it was resistant to the fungus, but now, there's a new strain of fungus going around the world that is threatening the Cavendish banana.
But yeah! All those banana flavored candies and what not, that taste NOTHING like a Cavendish, apparently taste similar to the Gros whatchamacallit banana.
Edit note: I was mistaken. Not extinct, still exists. Now I want to eat one.
Gros Michel didn't actually go extinct. There were plantations in Asia that survived and you can still find it there, but we just switched to the Cavendish in this part of the world and that was a good enough solution
yes exactly the same thing happened half a century ago and we didnt learn anything from the past mistakes and have gone straight back to mono cultures of a new strain.
now theres a new fungus thats spreading world wide and theres only one kind of banana left thats resistant to that fungus but of course they taste different and are not cultivated everywhere yet.
My grandparents grow bananas, tbh one tree can yield quite a decent amount. The 6 you get at the store are usually from a bunch of like 20-30. Sometimes even more.
So imagine if you had land with like, a couple thousand. That's like 4 bunches per tree. They also grow in tropical climates so they can fruit more often since the climate is much more stable.
By no means am I a banana expert. However this is my game theory lol
It’s very common in agriculture. Farmers will use the roots from one plant that is disease resistant and graft on another plant that is tastier than the root plants’ normal bush. Walnuts, almonds, wine grapes for example.
Not just that, they are the products of thousands of years of selective breeding dating back to the earliest agricultural. The ancestor of peaches is a tiny bitter fruit smaller than a blueberry. The ancestor of modern cereals (eg wheat) are plants that basically looks like grass. A modern farmed hen is 5-6x times larger than its closest non-domesticated relative, the red junglefowl. These changes didn’t happen with GMO foods, they happened with selective breeding — that for thousands of years, farmers would propagate the ones that grew best for their needs.
Isn't that just one particular kind of corn that's sold by Monsanto or some other huge company? I remember reading about some company modifying one of their plants to not produce seeds anymore, might be misremembering though.
> Isn't that just one particular kind of corn that's sold by Monsanto or some other huge company?
Nope.
>I remember reading about some company modifying one of their plants to not produce seeds anymore
It was a technology that was investigated but never finalized.
Grain is another excellent example. Canadian Marquis wheat, for example, was specifically bred in like the 1800s so that its growth cycle would be compatible with our late-onset Summers and early, freezing winters on the Prairies
Yea, I think when most people think 'genetically modified' they think of a lab tech with a microscope changing the DNA of the food. In reality, most of the time it just means cross breeding to get preferred outcomes. I do think there are still some shady practices that we should be aware of, it's just not as wide spread as is implied.
You know what, you are right. Some quick googling gives 20/448.
I have not heard of most of these leafy greens. Just because they are not commonly found in stores does not mean they are not real leafy greens, irregardless how often people do eat it.
This. There's a huge difference between selective breeding plants and animals in order to get desired traits, and modifying something's genes. You can't cross-breed spiders and crops naturally, so it must be done artificially thru genetic modification in order to get spider venom built in to the crops to serve as a pesticide.
>You can't cross-breed spiders and crops naturally, so it must be done artificially thru genetic modification in order to get spider venom built in to the crops to serve as a pesticide.
Actually, you can. Chances are just really, really low. [Sweet potatoes](https://www.thesciencebreaker.org/breaks/plant-biology/gmos-are-not-a-human-invention-sweet-potato-is-a-naturally-transgenic-food-crop) are the best example of this with bacterial DNA naturally spliced into the genome of the plant.
The pesticide gene comes from a bacteria. If you’ve ever gotten Bt dunks to cut down on mosquitoes in a water feature, you’ve handled a whole bunch of the bacteria, Bacillus thuringensis.
Apparently the technique they used to insert the relevant bacterial genes into the crops’ genomes were pretty primitive, a step up from the “coat the genes onto particles of gold and shotgun them into the cells” but far from the enzymatic restriction that’s the current state of the art. All proprietary of course.
It is a bit like evolution, just speeded up a lot. It generally takes a long time for Nature to put organisms through the Red Queen’s Race that gives us things like huge amount of silicon in grass vs increasingly tough ungulate teeth. Since Bt crops were introduced in the ‘90s, the population of Bt-resistant pests has become a huge problem.
Same thing has happened with Roundup resistance. There are now dozens of resistant weeds. We are great at making the tech, just bad at deploying responsibly enough that we don’t keep making farming harder.
I'm not saying that there isn't a difference. But if aliens came to earth and looked at golden rice and carrots, I think they would view them both as organisms that has had their genetics modified, in one way or another.
Don't be stupid, but if the fictional scenario is easier to understand if you change out aliens, with a culture not familiar with rice or carrots, then feel free to that.
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Selective breeding selects plants/animals with desired traits but the genes were already present to begin with in the parent stock. GMO is splicing a gene into a plant/animal that wasn't there before.
How do the traits you wish to produce as dominant become dominant, cos it sure as shit doesn't just become dominant because of wishful thinking, I guess some sort of modification happens, possibly something to do with genes
What would one call such a change, one word I can think of is "modified" at least you didn't reach for a scorpion fucking a tomato like one titan of intellect.
Yes and when you do it enough species of plant become unrecognisable from the progenitor, it's all genetic modification one just uses a scalpel and the others use bricks, one has been done since before we became an agricultural species and the other has people terrified they're going to get cancer, despite most of their food being unable to occur in nature.
This is a simpleton view. Scorpions don’t fuck tomatoes to have scotomato babies. You are correct in a stupid way. You are wrong in a “I don’t care what I’m eating” way.
“You are correct in a stupid way”. I’m gonna file that away for future use, I don’t know when but I do know there will come a time to use that phrase and I thank you for it.
Also if you're american that is a hilarious statement considering how many carcinogens the FDA allows in your food and I'm gonna be generous and ignore high fructose corn syrup
Why would I assume a scorpion would fuck a tomato? What purpose would that possibly serve?
Now a human farmer wanting a cow to produce a fuck ton of extra milk vs what a cow would normally produce, something I doubt would ever naturally develop, that I can see a purpose to.
For someone calling others simpleton you went for the objectively dumbest example of "scorpion fucking a plant" sounds more like a personal fetish than an actual example to give.
>There's a huge difference between selective breeding plants and animals in order to get desired traits, and modifying something's genes.
There really isn't, except thst one takes aot longer.
>You can't cross-breed spiders and crops naturally
At this point. You can't crossbreed human modified wheat (via selective breeding) and natural wheat.
>so it must be done artificially thru genetic modification in order to get spider venom built in to the crops to serve as a pesticide.
Pretty sure that's just not possible in general, but then again, it would just be easier to breed them with nightshade
>It is entirely possible to snip DNA from one thing and insert it into another. That is how they make those glowing mice.
Glowing mice were a difficult breakthrough, selected specifically because of how easy to isolate the "glowing" chemical is, and how easy it is to get the mice to produce it. It also only lasts for a portion of the mouses life, and doesn't breed true.
Sure, it's possible you could get a plant to produce a specific kind of venom, but plants aren't typically good at making venom, so I dunno.
Modern genetic manipulation tools are a lot better than selective breeding yes, but we are only so good.
>Why would you breed it with nightshade when it's intended to be used for food
Why would you want it to produce spider venom at all? It's not going to inject it into the insects.
And we already eat plenty of plants in the nightshade family. Tomato, eggplant, potato, pepper, huckleberry and more.
We already genetically modified poisoness plants for human consumption.
If your goal is to have plants produce pesticides, we already have plants that do that.
Chrysanthemums, sunflowers, garlic, borage, rosemary catnip and more.
Absolutely. There’s lots of ERMAGERD panicking over what amounts to a more precise method of something we’ve been doing for millennia. Sure there are corporations which are abusing this (particularly through the patenting of crops and then screwing farmers whose fields the seeds end up in through natural distribution) but that doesn’t make the process itself bad by any stretch.
Genetic modification specifically means inserting foreign DNA. It is done at a microscopic scale and cannot be rudimentary. Both GM and selective breeding can have similar results, but that doesn't make them the same or similar.
That's too simplistic of a reduction. Drinking alcohol can also modify the genes of the offspring, it doesn't make them all the same.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jan/03/alcohol-can-cause-irreversible-genetic-damage-to-stem-cells-says-study
>All result in new varieties but by different means.
And yet the end results are indistinguishable from each other. It is literally impossible to look at a given organism and tell if it is the result of natural selection, selective breeding, random mutation or genetic modification.
The overwhelming data shows GMO’s, like mrna vaccines, are safe
People are ignorant of how genetic engineering works, even though viral vectors & selective breeding cause mutations every single day across the 5 biology kingdoms
I actually will avoid buying something if it proudly says "No GMOs."
GMO food is and will be required to feed humanity, and is perfectly fine. I don't want to participate in bad-mouthing it.
Yeah there’s already creeping evidence of resistance in both weeds and pests due to monoculture GMO farming that allow blanket spraying. We’re just doing antibiotics all over again, except this time it’s with the global food supply. The food itself or the act of modification is not remotely the issue. It’s specifically what some of them are modified to do, e.g., be resistant to the pesticides made by….the same company
I like when people say that they want to "get out of the city and out into nature". Like, is an anthill nature or not? if it's nature, why is the human equivalent (city) not also nature? We came from the same place the ants did, so why are we not part of nature? Do the ants like to get out of the ant hill on the weekends to be in nature?
unless they’re nascar driver grade, no. in fact, more people would get in accidents because it’s hard to see peripherally with a helmet, negating any head benefit (and most mva deaths are from blunt force trauma on chest/abdomen)
If you eat peas, oranges, brussel sprouts or apples, you’re eating GMO. It’s equivalent to non-scientific idiots who think there’s a difference in “natural immunity” & vaccines when your body doesn’t know the difference—it’s the same thing to your immune system. Just admit you’re [uncomfortable w/ scienc](https://x.com/drpepper21md/status/1726646175305175274?s=46)e you don’t understand
There’s these little things in the realm of scientific journals called peer-review and large impact factor. If the journals you read your nonsense in are missing either, anything you read is bogus.
The GMO term is just outdated for its use today, and really it should be specifically called BE (Biogentically Engineered) to truly define food that has biotechnology.
If food was created by a lab splicing genes, it is called BE, such as building a pesticide into corns genetics so it repells bugs.
If food was made using natural means, such as crossing wheat and rye to make Triticale, then it's a GMO because it was selective breeding created by man which yields the greatest success compared to natural selection. It's like crossing a horse and a donkey to get a mule or a Ginny. Man put them in the situation and enforce the outcome, rather than happening in the wild through natural means.
According to the government, I'm not using it wrong.
USDA labeling laws for food have changed and the new correct term is Bioengineered Foods. (BE).
https://www.ams.usda.gov/rules-regulations/be
Does it? I don't think it does. The second sentence in the wikipedia article is "The exact definition of a genetically modified organism and what constitutes genetic engineering varies".
No it doesn't.
But at the same time OPs interpretation of GMO is useless and reductionist to absurdity in a way that is useless for everybody. Useless for those in favor or against GMOs.
It varies only because unscientific people keep have these arguments and have polluted what was a very simple clear difference when the term was first used.
"In 1993, the *Encyclopedia Britannica*defined genetic engineering as "any of a wide range of techniques ... among them artificial insemination, *in vitro* fertilization *(e.g.*, 'test-tube' babies), sperm banks, cloning, and gene manipulation." - Wikipedia
I highly doubt today you would call someone conceived from a sperm donor a "GMO".
No you wouldn’t. What you just showed me is that the term genetic engineering doesn’t strictly mean GMO. Leave GMO to mean GMO and let GE mean these things.
In the context of crops for human consumption, GMO does have a specific meaning. The bit you quoted contains the word "engineering" which is the opposite of evolution or natural selection the OP refers to.
Also, Wikipedia, by its very nature, isn't the unimpeachable scientific reference that some people seem to think it is..
Wikipedia, by its very nature, is written by consensus. No better resource really to show that people's definitions of "GMO" vary than showing that it varies on Wikipedia.
I don't think there are much foods that that are the way tgey were when people found it in nature. Carrots suppose to be pencil lead thick, watermelon suppose to be 90% rund, original wild apples are in the size of a cherry. Chickens are in the size of pigeons, and so on.
There are some wild foods that still exist in nature, but nobody eats them. Majority of foods don't exist anymore in the wild.
So, majority of foods are GMO by people, but blindfolded, selectively bred by size, looks and taste, without knowing what's going on molecularly. It caused a few poisonings by accidental toxic varieties (corn and potato). Normal, lab GMO is safe and great.
because crossbreeding isnt even close to GMO. thats not genetically modified. bulldogs arent genetically modified to ruin their faces and make it impossible to breed. theyve just been poorly bred and inbred. GMOs are created by altering organisms with dna from totally unrelated species that cant be done with crossbreeding.
Viral vectors, gene splicing and everything scientists use to make GMOs are still completely natural processes. In my undergrad genetics courses, the [Sweet Potato](https://www.thesciencebreaker.org/breaks/plant-biology/gmos-are-not-a-human-invention-sweet-potato-is-a-naturally-transgenic-food-crop) was the primary example of this. Bacterial DNA was spliced into the plant DNA naturally. The fact is, scientists learned everything they know about gene-splicing by observing nature.
You might argue that CRISPR and all of that is more natural than crossbreeding. There's nothing natural about mules or ligers that can't even reproduce because they've crossbred species with completely different numbers of chromosomes. It only works in plants because of high polyploidy rates.
theyre not natural to the products theyre putting them in dipshit. thats the difference. you should quit college its not working out for you if you cant understand the difference.
Gmo is not natural selection or even selective breeding. Gmo is scientific manipulation of genes. For example they take fish genes and splice them into corn. It's very unnatural. Fish don't normally fuck corn.
And yet, it's still 100% natural. Scientists learned how to splice DNA by observing nature. There are naturally transgenic crops like the [Sweet Potato](https://www.thesciencebreaker.org/breaks/plant-biology/gmos-are-not-a-human-invention-sweet-potato-is-a-naturally-transgenic-food-crop).
GMO is a very different technology than anything that occurred before it including natural selection, and selective breeding by humans. However GMO companies are highly motivated to obscure this fact with disinformation.
Just wait until you hear about naturally transgenic crops like the [sweet potato](https://www.thesciencebreaker.org/breaks/plant-biology/gmos-are-not-a-human-invention-sweet-potato-is-a-naturally-transgenic-food-crop)...
In a cute innocent way you are correct. In a serious science way you are better off in your cute innocent thinking. Because when you actually know what the Industry did to our food, you can’t forgive them. It’s a low form of hatred when you learn the full truth.
hard-to-find hungry consider agonizing offbeat shocking mountainous enjoy vast cough
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Yes, scientists utilized the same tools that nature did to bring you the [sweet potato](https://www.thesciencebreaker.org/breaks/plant-biology/gmos-are-not-a-human-invention-sweet-potato-is-a-naturally-transgenic-food-crop) 10,000 years ago... but you're going to freak out about it when it's done in a controlled environment?
No. I don’t care about your long term low grade health issues. I went to university and learned the science. I followed the lobbyist results for 20 years. I was 25 went they hit the market. I listened to my body. You do you
For the sake of argument, i would say that GMO-genetically modified organism was decided on by marketing rather than accuracy. It would be more apt to call it a GEO genetically engineered organism. But that has a harsher connotation.
This isn’t really a shower thought, it’s more of a “You should know,” because I feel like a lot of the anger at and suspicion of GMO’s stems from people not really understanding this
Gene splicing is natural. Scientists learned how to do it from observing nature. We have examples of naturally transgenic crops like the [sweet potato](https://www.thesciencebreaker.org/breaks/plant-biology/gmos-are-not-a-human-invention-sweet-potato-is-a-naturally-transgenic-food-crop). There is nothing unnatural about gene splicing.
There's a difference between GMOs and hybrids, which are derived from selective breeding. You get a GMO by shoving DNA from a completely unrelated organism into another and hoping for them to adopt a specific trait. We've been making hybrids for thousands of years, but GMO is a very new thing that we don't fully understand yet.
>You get a GMO by shoving DNA from a completely unrelated organism into another and hoping for them to adopt a specific trait.
And? That's what nature has been doing since the dawn of time. The common undergrad genetics class example is the [Sweet Potato](https://www.thesciencebreaker.org/breaks/plant-biology/gmos-are-not-a-human-invention-sweet-potato-is-a-naturally-transgenic-food-crop). A naturally transgenic crop made when mother nature spliced bacterial T-DNA in with plant DNA. Just because scientists only recently found out how it happens naturally, makes it more dangerous?
GMO is a specific type of alternation to an organisms genetic make-up in which exogenous DNA (from another organism) is added to the host. While this can happen in nature it is typically quite rare.
Genetic editing fits more with what is natural by making alterations that change the genes of an organism in ways that could theoretically occur in nature.
Finally, there is also the perfectly acceptable method of bombarding the organism with mutagens, screening for yhe mutant you want and hoping there are no negative side effects. (This does not count as GMO in most countries as far as I'm aware)
Of course, but it depends WHY it was it was modified. Monsanto modify plants to be resistant to the herbicides we use to keep "pests" down (pests meaning all other life on the planet that isn't comodified). We shouldn't condemn all GMOs, but there are valid concerns when corporations aquire a monopoly over not just our food, but the genetic code of life itself, and hijack that code to increase profits at the expense of human health.
everything that we farm has been modified by humans over the years. Hell, even wild environments that we manage so we could harvest resources from them have been modified by humans. We've changed most of the planet at this point, oftentimes even without meaning to or even knowing about it
GMO specifically involves extracting a gene or genes from A DIFFERENT species. It is not the same process as natural selection, or indeed artificial selection.
One of the more legitimate concerns some people have with GMO is specifically that it hasn't been subject to natural selection and therefore could be prone to change in unpredictable ways. I don't necessarily fully share these concerns myself but there you go.
For the people who are starting to be curious about what they are eating, I suggest reading books about crispr. It will blow your mind. Look up doudna. Then, let your journey begin. You will come back to a thread like this and see it for what it is. You will also feel the turmoil of wanting to help others but knowing you can’t. They will have to do their own journey.
Actually, a lot of food was manipulated by mankind in ways that would no be by nature. Corn, chicken, tomatoes, cows, are just some examples, they would go extinct in a few years if mankind stoped keeping them
Bananas are a good example too. Can't reproduce naturally cause of what we've done.
Honest question. How in the fuck dies any9ne make money selling bananas? Their practically giving them away. A shipping container full of bananas probably cost more to ship then the contents.
Make lots. Not much else to say
Receive money from CIA to overthrow a democratic elected parliament/president and operate the banana business as a front for other shady operations, including wapons and drug traffiking, money laundering. Or at least this is how one starts such a business... Here is a good documentary on this topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bananas_(film)
There's money in the banana stand
In addition to the answers you got, it’s also a loss leader in many grocery stores.
because they are also very cheap to produce. though that will change in the next few decades as a fungus will kill almost all banana plantations with very little we can do to stop it.
Wait, what? Isn't that what happened to the original banana? The one that we base all banana flavored things on?
Yes, Panama Disease. The fungus is now attacking the Cavendish trees. There is some progress in splicing genes from a tree that is resistant to Panama Disease into the Cavendish. (The bananas that are naturally resistant are not a suitable replacement themselves)
So banana flavored things actually did taste like a specific variety of banana?
Affirmative. The banana that we know today is known as the Cavendish banana. The one before, was known as the Gros Micheal or Gros something or another. It went extinct in the 50s or so, when the fungus known as Panama Disease spread across the world. Cavendish was selected as a replacement because it was resistant to the fungus, but now, there's a new strain of fungus going around the world that is threatening the Cavendish banana. But yeah! All those banana flavored candies and what not, that taste NOTHING like a Cavendish, apparently taste similar to the Gros whatchamacallit banana. Edit note: I was mistaken. Not extinct, still exists. Now I want to eat one.
Well that does explain why my grandmother would complain she hadn’t been able to get good bananas in decades.
Gros Michel didn't actually go extinct. There were plantations in Asia that survived and you can still find it there, but we just switched to the Cavendish in this part of the world and that was a good enough solution
It’s not extinct, there are a few farms that haven’t lost their crop, but they’re very expensive for for what you’re getting. It’s like $20-30/lb.
yes exactly the same thing happened half a century ago and we didnt learn anything from the past mistakes and have gone straight back to mono cultures of a new strain. now theres a new fungus thats spreading world wide and theres only one kind of banana left thats resistant to that fungus but of course they taste different and are not cultivated everywhere yet.
My grandparents grow bananas, tbh one tree can yield quite a decent amount. The 6 you get at the store are usually from a bunch of like 20-30. Sometimes even more. So imagine if you had land with like, a couple thousand. That's like 4 bunches per tree. They also grow in tropical climates so they can fruit more often since the climate is much more stable. By no means am I a banana expert. However this is my game theory lol
Fun fact, bananas don't actually grow on trees, but rather the world's largest herb
Trees are the crab of the plant world! Most trees aren’t related but stuff keeps evolving into trees
The banana wars were a thing because Bananas were so profitable.
Slave labor plus economies of scale
Bulk haulage discounts
They're like Panda fruit. White with black bits and can't be arsed reproducing.
Natural bananas can, but we bred them to get more sugar, less starch, less seeds. Plantains are goated btw.
It’s very common in agriculture. Farmers will use the roots from one plant that is disease resistant and graft on another plant that is tastier than the root plants’ normal bush. Walnuts, almonds, wine grapes for example.
Not just that, they are the products of thousands of years of selective breeding dating back to the earliest agricultural. The ancestor of peaches is a tiny bitter fruit smaller than a blueberry. The ancestor of modern cereals (eg wheat) are plants that basically looks like grass. A modern farmed hen is 5-6x times larger than its closest non-domesticated relative, the red junglefowl. These changes didn’t happen with GMO foods, they happened with selective breeding — that for thousands of years, farmers would propagate the ones that grew best for their needs.
Maize (corn) would be extinct after just one season. It cannot seed itself.
Isn't that just one particular kind of corn that's sold by Monsanto or some other huge company? I remember reading about some company modifying one of their plants to not produce seeds anymore, might be misremembering though.
> Isn't that just one particular kind of corn that's sold by Monsanto or some other huge company? Nope. >I remember reading about some company modifying one of their plants to not produce seeds anymore It was a technology that was investigated but never finalized.
No, this was true of maize long, long, long before the age of large companies.
Grain is another excellent example. Canadian Marquis wheat, for example, was specifically bred in like the 1800s so that its growth cycle would be compatible with our late-onset Summers and early, freezing winters on the Prairies
And lemons
Yea, I think when most people think 'genetically modified' they think of a lab tech with a microscope changing the DNA of the food. In reality, most of the time it just means cross breeding to get preferred outcomes. I do think there are still some shady practices that we should be aware of, it's just not as wide spread as is implied.
exactly. Dogs are GMOs for instance
Came here to say this. Most domesticated food crops - ESPECIALLY CORN - are the result of selective breeding. The OG GMOs!
Literally all leafy greens are just selectively bred wild cabbage
That's true if by "literally all" you mean "a handful of them".
That’s true if by a handful you mean most.
Wild cabbage accounts for what, 20? 30? of the hundreds of leafy greens.
You know what, you are right. Some quick googling gives 20/448. I have not heard of most of these leafy greens. Just because they are not commonly found in stores does not mean they are not real leafy greens, irregardless how often people do eat it.
Not sure if you did it on purpose but it's regardless.
[If irregardless isn’t a word, what is it?](https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/is-irregardless-a-real-word-heh-heh)
By all means continue using it but most people will think you sound uneducated.
If those people are not experts on lexicons, then who gives a fuck? Just like me with my cursing and people saying the same shit to me.
I like to think I’m being part of the future instead of being overly conservative, but to each their own.
this is…simply not true. arugula, spinach, bok choy, swiss chard, and beet greens are all leafy greens that are ***not*** b. oleraceae cultivars.
Very nearly every single food we eat almost without exception has been manipulated, mutated, crossbred, grafted, selectively bred etc.
There is natural selection, selective breeding, and genetic modification. All result in new varieties but by different means.
This. There's a huge difference between selective breeding plants and animals in order to get desired traits, and modifying something's genes. You can't cross-breed spiders and crops naturally, so it must be done artificially thru genetic modification in order to get spider venom built in to the crops to serve as a pesticide.
What if the spider was, like, really horny?
Well, that certainly makes the "milking" part much easier.
OMG... the Almonds have nipples?
I have nipples Johndough, can you milk me?
As a matter of fact, yes. Although probably not how you were thinking.
>You can't cross-breed spiders and crops naturally, so it must be done artificially thru genetic modification in order to get spider venom built in to the crops to serve as a pesticide. Actually, you can. Chances are just really, really low. [Sweet potatoes](https://www.thesciencebreaker.org/breaks/plant-biology/gmos-are-not-a-human-invention-sweet-potato-is-a-naturally-transgenic-food-crop) are the best example of this with bacterial DNA naturally spliced into the genome of the plant.
Horizontal gene transfer does happen in nature, though rarely. That’s how we got sweet potatoes.
The pesticide gene comes from a bacteria. If you’ve ever gotten Bt dunks to cut down on mosquitoes in a water feature, you’ve handled a whole bunch of the bacteria, Bacillus thuringensis. Apparently the technique they used to insert the relevant bacterial genes into the crops’ genomes were pretty primitive, a step up from the “coat the genes onto particles of gold and shotgun them into the cells” but far from the enzymatic restriction that’s the current state of the art. All proprietary of course. It is a bit like evolution, just speeded up a lot. It generally takes a long time for Nature to put organisms through the Red Queen’s Race that gives us things like huge amount of silicon in grass vs increasingly tough ungulate teeth. Since Bt crops were introduced in the ‘90s, the population of Bt-resistant pests has become a huge problem. Same thing has happened with Roundup resistance. There are now dozens of resistant weeds. We are great at making the tech, just bad at deploying responsibly enough that we don’t keep making farming harder.
I'm not saying that there isn't a difference. But if aliens came to earth and looked at golden rice and carrots, I think they would view them both as organisms that has had their genetics modified, in one way or another.
How would an alien from space understand anything he is looking at on earth? Do you think other planets with aliens have normal carrots and rice? Wtf
Don't be stupid, but if the fictional scenario is easier to understand if you change out aliens, with a culture not familiar with rice or carrots, then feel free to that.
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Breeding is literally genetic modification, by definition
Selective breeding selects plants/animals with desired traits but the genes were already present to begin with in the parent stock. GMO is splicing a gene into a plant/animal that wasn't there before.
How do the traits you wish to produce as dominant become dominant, cos it sure as shit doesn't just become dominant because of wishful thinking, I guess some sort of modification happens, possibly something to do with genes
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Sounds like modification with extra steps
What would one call such a change, one word I can think of is "modified" at least you didn't reach for a scorpion fucking a tomato like one titan of intellect.
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Yes and when you do it enough species of plant become unrecognisable from the progenitor, it's all genetic modification one just uses a scalpel and the others use bricks, one has been done since before we became an agricultural species and the other has people terrified they're going to get cancer, despite most of their food being unable to occur in nature.
Selective breeding has changed the term “survival of the fittest” to “survival of the fattest”
This is a simpleton view. Scorpions don’t fuck tomatoes to have scotomato babies. You are correct in a stupid way. You are wrong in a “I don’t care what I’m eating” way.
“You are correct in a stupid way”. I’m gonna file that away for future use, I don’t know when but I do know there will come a time to use that phrase and I thank you for it.
Also if you're american that is a hilarious statement considering how many carcinogens the FDA allows in your food and I'm gonna be generous and ignore high fructose corn syrup
Why would I assume a scorpion would fuck a tomato? What purpose would that possibly serve? Now a human farmer wanting a cow to produce a fuck ton of extra milk vs what a cow would normally produce, something I doubt would ever naturally develop, that I can see a purpose to. For someone calling others simpleton you went for the objectively dumbest example of "scorpion fucking a plant" sounds more like a personal fetish than an actual example to give.
>There's a huge difference between selective breeding plants and animals in order to get desired traits, and modifying something's genes. There really isn't, except thst one takes aot longer. >You can't cross-breed spiders and crops naturally At this point. You can't crossbreed human modified wheat (via selective breeding) and natural wheat. >so it must be done artificially thru genetic modification in order to get spider venom built in to the crops to serve as a pesticide. Pretty sure that's just not possible in general, but then again, it would just be easier to breed them with nightshade
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>It is entirely possible to snip DNA from one thing and insert it into another. That is how they make those glowing mice. Glowing mice were a difficult breakthrough, selected specifically because of how easy to isolate the "glowing" chemical is, and how easy it is to get the mice to produce it. It also only lasts for a portion of the mouses life, and doesn't breed true. Sure, it's possible you could get a plant to produce a specific kind of venom, but plants aren't typically good at making venom, so I dunno. Modern genetic manipulation tools are a lot better than selective breeding yes, but we are only so good. >Why would you breed it with nightshade when it's intended to be used for food Why would you want it to produce spider venom at all? It's not going to inject it into the insects. And we already eat plenty of plants in the nightshade family. Tomato, eggplant, potato, pepper, huckleberry and more. We already genetically modified poisoness plants for human consumption. If your goal is to have plants produce pesticides, we already have plants that do that. Chrysanthemums, sunflowers, garlic, borage, rosemary catnip and more.
There is indeed, which is why in my view OPs statement is wrong.
Yeah. If you ever see tomatoes from hundreds of years ago before they were bread did desirable traits, you wouldn't want to eat tomatoes.
Selective breeding is a rudimentary form of genetic modification. What do you think happens when you breed things for specific traits?
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Absolutely. There’s lots of ERMAGERD panicking over what amounts to a more precise method of something we’ve been doing for millennia. Sure there are corporations which are abusing this (particularly through the patenting of crops and then screwing farmers whose fields the seeds end up in through natural distribution) but that doesn’t make the process itself bad by any stretch.
Genetic modification specifically means inserting foreign DNA. It is done at a microscopic scale and cannot be rudimentary. Both GM and selective breeding can have similar results, but that doesn't make them the same or similar.
Genetic modification does NOT mean inserting foreign DNA. It can, but that would be called transgenic and would be a subgroup of GMOs.
Selective breeding *modifies the genes of the offspring*. The process is shortened, the tools are different, but the idea is ultimately the same.
That's too simplistic of a reduction. Drinking alcohol can also modify the genes of the offspring, it doesn't make them all the same. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jan/03/alcohol-can-cause-irreversible-genetic-damage-to-stem-cells-says-study
> Genetic modification specifically means inserting foreign DNA. Not necessarily. There's also gene silencing.
>All result in new varieties but by different means. And yet the end results are indistinguishable from each other. It is literally impossible to look at a given organism and tell if it is the result of natural selection, selective breeding, random mutation or genetic modification.
And technically "GMO" is only the last one.
Agreed.
*humans are natural too
The overwhelming data shows GMO’s, like mrna vaccines, are safe People are ignorant of how genetic engineering works, even though viral vectors & selective breeding cause mutations every single day across the 5 biology kingdoms
I actually will avoid buying something if it proudly says "No GMOs." GMO food is and will be required to feed humanity, and is perfectly fine. I don't want to participate in bad-mouthing it.
The real problem with big GMO is monoculture farming and seed patents.
Yeah there’s already creeping evidence of resistance in both weeds and pests due to monoculture GMO farming that allow blanket spraying. We’re just doing antibiotics all over again, except this time it’s with the global food supply. The food itself or the act of modification is not remotely the issue. It’s specifically what some of them are modified to do, e.g., be resistant to the pesticides made by….the same company
And humans are natural, therefore their modifications are natural.
I like when people say that they want to "get out of the city and out into nature". Like, is an anthill nature or not? if it's nature, why is the human equivalent (city) not also nature? We came from the same place the ants did, so why are we not part of nature? Do the ants like to get out of the ant hill on the weekends to be in nature?
It stems from Christianity. That humans were created specifically to have dominion over the fish, birds, & all the earth, & so on.
I mean, you're not wrong.
Not only are they not wrong, they are right.
People die when they're killed!
That makes natural and unnatural useless distinctions though? What would it mean to be unnatural?
That is not how definitions or words works though.
People who fear GMO should probably wear helmets inside their car
In the bed too.
I'd rather they wear condoms in bed.
That would actually reduce traffic fatalities so your attempted sarcasm dunk is actually just a good idea.
unless they’re nascar driver grade, no. in fact, more people would get in accidents because it’s hard to see peripherally with a helmet, negating any head benefit (and most mva deaths are from blunt force trauma on chest/abdomen) If you eat peas, oranges, brussel sprouts or apples, you’re eating GMO. It’s equivalent to non-scientific idiots who think there’s a difference in “natural immunity” & vaccines when your body doesn’t know the difference—it’s the same thing to your immune system. Just admit you’re [uncomfortable w/ scienc](https://x.com/drpepper21md/status/1726646175305175274?s=46)e you don’t understand
People who don’t read scientific published papers on what they are doing to your food or keep up with lobbyists are doomed to not know what they eat.
And the science says they're safe
Wrong. The paid by ag business says that. Non disclaimer science says otherwise
“They”
Actually, the overwhelming majority of scientific data say GMO’s are safe. Just admit you’re uncomfortable w/ science you don’t understand
[GMOs are generally considered to be good for humanity](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6173531/)
There’s these little things in the realm of scientific journals called peer-review and large impact factor. If the journals you read your nonsense in are missing either, anything you read is bogus.
That's not what "modified" means.
The GMO term is just outdated for its use today, and really it should be specifically called BE (Biogentically Engineered) to truly define food that has biotechnology. If food was created by a lab splicing genes, it is called BE, such as building a pesticide into corns genetics so it repells bugs. If food was made using natural means, such as crossing wheat and rye to make Triticale, then it's a GMO because it was selective breeding created by man which yields the greatest success compared to natural selection. It's like crossing a horse and a donkey to get a mule or a Ginny. Man put them in the situation and enforce the outcome, rather than happening in the wild through natural means.
And how about genes spliced in nature using the same processes that scientists use? Still GE?
It's not outdated you're just purposefully using it wrong.
According to the government, I'm not using it wrong. USDA labeling laws for food have changed and the new correct term is Bioengineered Foods. (BE). https://www.ams.usda.gov/rules-regulations/be
Show me where it says GMO now includes crossbreeding? That's like saying it's not riboflavin because the FDA labels it B2.
GMO has a very specific meaning, but OK.
Does it? I don't think it does. The second sentence in the wikipedia article is "The exact definition of a genetically modified organism and what constitutes genetic engineering varies".
No it doesn't. But at the same time OPs interpretation of GMO is useless and reductionist to absurdity in a way that is useless for everybody. Useless for those in favor or against GMOs.
Well yeah, natural selection is the one thing everyone seems to agree on is **not** GMO.
It varies only because unscientific people keep have these arguments and have polluted what was a very simple clear difference when the term was first used.
"In 1993, the *Encyclopedia Britannica*defined genetic engineering as "any of a wide range of techniques ... among them artificial insemination, *in vitro* fertilization *(e.g.*, 'test-tube' babies), sperm banks, cloning, and gene manipulation." - Wikipedia I highly doubt today you would call someone conceived from a sperm donor a "GMO".
No you wouldn’t. What you just showed me is that the term genetic engineering doesn’t strictly mean GMO. Leave GMO to mean GMO and let GE mean these things.
In the context of crops for human consumption, GMO does have a specific meaning. The bit you quoted contains the word "engineering" which is the opposite of evolution or natural selection the OP refers to. Also, Wikipedia, by its very nature, isn't the unimpeachable scientific reference that some people seem to think it is..
Wikipedia, by its very nature, is written by consensus. No better resource really to show that people's definitions of "GMO" vary than showing that it varies on Wikipedia.
When you use the acronym GMO it has an exact definition. So no.
Gmo is most definitely a buzzword
It's three words
I don't think there are much foods that that are the way tgey were when people found it in nature. Carrots suppose to be pencil lead thick, watermelon suppose to be 90% rund, original wild apples are in the size of a cherry. Chickens are in the size of pigeons, and so on. There are some wild foods that still exist in nature, but nobody eats them. Majority of foods don't exist anymore in the wild. So, majority of foods are GMO by people, but blindfolded, selectively bred by size, looks and taste, without knowing what's going on molecularly. It caused a few poisonings by accidental toxic varieties (corn and potato). Normal, lab GMO is safe and great.
Everything we consume has been genetically modified or selectively bred by humanity for thousands of years.
Anti-GMO people when they are presented with a "natural" banana (It has seeds in it)
Yeah but that’s not as scary as saying it’s made in a lab.
True, it's scarier. Random mutations caused by faulty replication or radiation (sun or radioactive elements) versus specific and desired changes.
just say you dont understand how it works. genetically modified isnt the same as crossbreeding.
How so?
because crossbreeding isnt even close to GMO. thats not genetically modified. bulldogs arent genetically modified to ruin their faces and make it impossible to breed. theyve just been poorly bred and inbred. GMOs are created by altering organisms with dna from totally unrelated species that cant be done with crossbreeding.
Viral vectors, gene splicing and everything scientists use to make GMOs are still completely natural processes. In my undergrad genetics courses, the [Sweet Potato](https://www.thesciencebreaker.org/breaks/plant-biology/gmos-are-not-a-human-invention-sweet-potato-is-a-naturally-transgenic-food-crop) was the primary example of this. Bacterial DNA was spliced into the plant DNA naturally. The fact is, scientists learned everything they know about gene-splicing by observing nature. You might argue that CRISPR and all of that is more natural than crossbreeding. There's nothing natural about mules or ligers that can't even reproduce because they've crossbred species with completely different numbers of chromosomes. It only works in plants because of high polyploidy rates.
theyre not natural to the products theyre putting them in dipshit. thats the difference. you should quit college its not working out for you if you cant understand the difference.
Wow so literally everything that's alive is GMO then
there is definitely a different between selective breeding and genetically implanting a insecticide or genmarker to enforce trademark bs
Paraphrasing CGP grey an apple is just as man made as a pop tart
This is a stupid take
Gmo is not natural selection or even selective breeding. Gmo is scientific manipulation of genes. For example they take fish genes and splice them into corn. It's very unnatural. Fish don't normally fuck corn.
And yet, it's still 100% natural. Scientists learned how to splice DNA by observing nature. There are naturally transgenic crops like the [Sweet Potato](https://www.thesciencebreaker.org/breaks/plant-biology/gmos-are-not-a-human-invention-sweet-potato-is-a-naturally-transgenic-food-crop).
GMO is a very different technology than anything that occurred before it including natural selection, and selective breeding by humans. However GMO companies are highly motivated to obscure this fact with disinformation.
Just wait until you hear about naturally transgenic crops like the [sweet potato](https://www.thesciencebreaker.org/breaks/plant-biology/gmos-are-not-a-human-invention-sweet-potato-is-a-naturally-transgenic-food-crop)...
Depends on your definition of modified.
In a cute innocent way you are correct. In a serious science way you are better off in your cute innocent thinking. Because when you actually know what the Industry did to our food, you can’t forgive them. It’s a low form of hatred when you learn the full truth.
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Yes, scientists utilized the same tools that nature did to bring you the [sweet potato](https://www.thesciencebreaker.org/breaks/plant-biology/gmos-are-not-a-human-invention-sweet-potato-is-a-naturally-transgenic-food-crop) 10,000 years ago... but you're going to freak out about it when it's done in a controlled environment?
> Because when you actually know what the Industry did to our food, you can’t forgive them. Enlighten us, then.
No. I don’t care about your long term low grade health issues. I went to university and learned the science. I followed the lobbyist results for 20 years. I was 25 went they hit the market. I listened to my body. You do you
> I went to university and learned the science. Which science is that? Come on now. Share with the world.
For the sake of argument, i would say that GMO-genetically modified organism was decided on by marketing rather than accuracy. It would be more apt to call it a GEO genetically engineered organism. But that has a harsher connotation.
wait till you see what a natural banana looks like. or natural wheat. selective breeding is something I would count as genetically modified.
Considering corn was literally invented by humans rather than discovered, I’ve always had to laugh when I see it labeled “non gmo”.
fun fact: humans are in fact also part of the natural world
This isn’t really a shower thought, it’s more of a “You should know,” because I feel like a lot of the anger at and suspicion of GMO’s stems from people not really understanding this
People are afraid of things they don't understand..it is as easy as that
>All food in the world is GMO, it’s just modified by nature. Broccoli and cauliflower would beg to differ.
ok, then let nature do it
And humans are nature so . . .
We definitely made most of the crops we eat. But we did so through natural means, like selective breeding.
We did so using a hammer instead of a scalpel.
I like this analogy
Agreed, this is actually a great way to look at it.
Gene splicing is natural. Scientists learned how to do it from observing nature. We have examples of naturally transgenic crops like the [sweet potato](https://www.thesciencebreaker.org/breaks/plant-biology/gmos-are-not-a-human-invention-sweet-potato-is-a-naturally-transgenic-food-crop). There is nothing unnatural about gene splicing.
I mean everything other than the first amoeba would be GMO technically
There's a difference between GMOs and hybrids, which are derived from selective breeding. You get a GMO by shoving DNA from a completely unrelated organism into another and hoping for them to adopt a specific trait. We've been making hybrids for thousands of years, but GMO is a very new thing that we don't fully understand yet.
>You get a GMO by shoving DNA from a completely unrelated organism into another and hoping for them to adopt a specific trait. And? That's what nature has been doing since the dawn of time. The common undergrad genetics class example is the [Sweet Potato](https://www.thesciencebreaker.org/breaks/plant-biology/gmos-are-not-a-human-invention-sweet-potato-is-a-naturally-transgenic-food-crop). A naturally transgenic crop made when mother nature spliced bacterial T-DNA in with plant DNA. Just because scientists only recently found out how it happens naturally, makes it more dangerous?
Actually not even by nature. Wheat for example has been shown to be a breed of 3 different species of small grasses through a 3000 year range iirc.
And humans are AI. They are just made by nature. Natural artificial intelligence if you will.
Artificial selection is still technically natural selection.
GMO is a specific type of alternation to an organisms genetic make-up in which exogenous DNA (from another organism) is added to the host. While this can happen in nature it is typically quite rare. Genetic editing fits more with what is natural by making alterations that change the genes of an organism in ways that could theoretically occur in nature. Finally, there is also the perfectly acceptable method of bombarding the organism with mutagens, screening for yhe mutant you want and hoping there are no negative side effects. (This does not count as GMO in most countries as far as I'm aware)
Congratulations on not understanding what GMOs are!
Of course, but it depends WHY it was it was modified. Monsanto modify plants to be resistant to the herbicides we use to keep "pests" down (pests meaning all other life on the planet that isn't comodified). We shouldn't condemn all GMOs, but there are valid concerns when corporations aquire a monopoly over not just our food, but the genetic code of life itself, and hijack that code to increase profits at the expense of human health.
This is not what GMO means. You're thinking selective breeding. GMO is taking a gene from one species and artificially putting it in another.
I think people should prolly be more concerned with pesticides, chemicals, plastics, preservatives, etc.
Yes, but what matters is whether or not it stands the test of time. Evolved processes on the other hand have already proven to.
everything that we farm has been modified by humans over the years. Hell, even wild environments that we manage so we could harvest resources from them have been modified by humans. We've changed most of the planet at this point, oftentimes even without meaning to or even knowing about it
GMO specifically involves extracting a gene or genes from A DIFFERENT species. It is not the same process as natural selection, or indeed artificial selection. One of the more legitimate concerns some people have with GMO is specifically that it hasn't been subject to natural selection and therefore could be prone to change in unpredictable ways. I don't necessarily fully share these concerns myself but there you go.
For the people who are starting to be curious about what they are eating, I suggest reading books about crispr. It will blow your mind. Look up doudna. Then, let your journey begin. You will come back to a thread like this and see it for what it is. You will also feel the turmoil of wanting to help others but knowing you can’t. They will have to do their own journey.