It's A Man's Cern

[Jason]

rEv managed to use a search engine and then touts himself as a font of knowledge. Nothing new under the sun...

[Cunt]

pErvinalia is likely eating soy products, vegan only, non-gmo, organic, gluten free and ethically sourced and whatever else can make the food more expensive so as to keep distinct from poor people.

All those fancy words make him sound like he boasts of his knowledge of science.

Anyone who would rank Suzuki over Borlaug can't count either. Suzuki wants to reserve BC as a park for the wealthy. Borlaug wanted to address hunger in strangers. He recognized the human misery of starvation, and busted his ass to improve crops. Total fucking badass, and the whole Suzuki fan club would revile his name just in case he was associated with GMO foods.

[pErvinalia]

So he did some good fruit fly science...but is also a science denier.

How to square that circle...oh yeah, he makes a huge living claiming GMO's are harmful. Fossil fuel is bad, and immigrants are bad for the environment.

Suzuki said slavery and climate change are not economic issues, but moral issues. “I’m with the Pope, and as you know, I’m an atheist, but I’m willing to kiss the Pope on his feet, on his hands or anywhere else he wants me to kiss him,” Suzuki told Solomon about the Pope’s position on climate change.

So the oilsand workers are slavers...I wonder how much oil Suzuki uses in a year, producing his indoctritation crap for Pravda (CBC)...

Another place is the GMO thing. It's like buzzword bingo to find nutrition idiots. They will use words like 'gluten-free', or 'non-gmo', or 'organic' or any of a dozen other words to make their food more 'elite' and pretend they are making important choices.

Suzuki is a hack. Want a hero? Look up Norman Borlaug (the man who saved more lives than anyone who ever lived) and tell me if you would rather science-denier Suzuki or Borlaug on your side.

I'll take Borlaug, and the advancements he made to reduce suffering over Suzuki and his anti-science stance any day.

So yeah, he's published, and a scientist. He's still spreading bullshit though. Still pumping a biased message. You can tell it is biased, because it never changes.

That was incoherent even by your standards.

[pErvinalia]

rEv managed to use a search engine and then touts himself as a font of knowledge. Nothing new under the sun...

Well Cunt was wrong. How else would you like me to so simply prove him wrong?

[Cunt]

He published in fruit fly science.

He speaks publicly as if he has some more qualifications.

So look at his claims. GMO's, pipelines and energy industry improvements are WRONGTHINK.

[pErvinalia]

He was the head of Canada's biggest genetics lab, you dumb twit.

[Jason]

He's a nut.

[pErvinalia]

He might be, but it doesn't make Cunt's dumb statements right all of a sudden.

[JimC]

The whole anti-GMO thing can become a bit cult-like for some environmentalists. It is reasonable to be cautious and do some careful testing, but regarding it as automatically evil is not very rational...

[pErvinalia]

I've only ever seen/read him discuss the subject once, and that was on Q&A on ABC Australia a few years back. My understanding from that is not that he regards it as "automatically evil". What he said was pretty reasonable. One, that general caution should be applied, given it's a very young industry and we won't see any unintended consequences for a while yet. And two, that extra caution and concern should be shown for inter-species gene transfers. That particularly seems reasonable, as we aren't talking about mixing the natural genome at different proportions. We are talking about introducing 'alien' genes to an organism.

[JimC]

Actually, one thing that modern genetics has shown is that genes do jump around, certainly between bacteria, but even between multi-cellular organisms. Also, many quite different lineages share ancestral genes that do precisely the same biochemical job in each. So, gene additions from different species are not automatically dangerous.

Having said that, there certainly needs to be caution and testing, but once that is done, at least some GMO crops for example may be very, very useful, if they can grow with less fertiliser or water, or in warmer conditions. I think that at least some of the objection is over-emotional.

[Jason]

OK... so assuming that a modified plant, say some strain of wheat, was engineered to resist a particular pest, what do they say would be the damage to the environment if that modification where to somehow spread to another species?

[pErvinalia]

It's obviously hard to say, as it would be organism dependent (and unknown without testing). Of the top of my head I could think of one possible negative consequence, and that could be transferral of the resistance to the normal food of the pest. Whether that would be a big problem or not is impossible to say with hypotheticals.

[JimC]

Often the real issues with genetic modification are secondary effects. For example, consider a crop where a relatively simple genetic change leads to resistance to a particular herbicide. The companies selling the seed (and probably the herbicide itself) would tell farmers to sow it, then spray the shit out of their fields with herbicide, leaving the crop more productive...

Not a good outcome, but the actual modification itself is not toxic, just the consequences of the spraying...

[JimC]

OK... so assuming that a modified plant, say some strain of wheat, was engineered to resist a particular pest, what do they say would be the damage to the environment if that modification where to somehow spread to another species?

That is a real issue, in that it does introduce the possibility of unintended consequences...