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Comment by jbob2000 | Hacker News Reader

jbob2000

The same effect is noticed with GMO foods. They're better in all regards, yet there are people who are afraid of them because "not natural".

I don't think this has to do with the education system. My friend's father has a terminal illness, and in his attempt to understand and rationalize it, he thought that he did it to himself by leading an "unnatural" lifestyle. The man has a masters in mathematics and owned a software company, he's quite intelligent.

I think people just try to rationalize their situation, sometimes they rest on the idea that natural is better.

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"The same effect is noticed with GMO foods. They're better in all regards, yet there are people who are afraid of them because "not natural"."

No. People are afraid about GMO because they expect private companies incentives not being healthy food but economic benefits (for them).

That means for example, that if they could flood our food plants with "Roundup" because the plants are resistant to it, and the pesticide ends in our food, and we start getting cancers 10 years from now they don't care at all if they can profit now from it.

"sometimes they rest on the idea that natural is better."

Well, natural is usually better because nature had millions of years of adaptation to the environment. You can protect yourself against natural sunlight or natural nuclear radiation because nature created mechanisms against their bad effects, but you can't protect against manmade Pultonium or xrays or cosmic radiation not protected by Ozone.

Day after pill for example contaminates water with estrogens that are not easy(cheap) to filter.

Thinking about it, this is probably a side effect of the later, dirtier portions of the industrial revolution (early-1800s-) vs the early conservation movement (mid 1800s+).

I think it's ultimately to the detriment of the environment that the preservationist/Muir/Sierra Club strain of environmentalism won out over the sustainability/Roosevelt/management view in the public consciousness.

Of course, I generally stop listening when an "environmentalist" starts railing against nuclear power without a cogent argument (of which I'll admit there are a few). Love alone doesn't save nature, sadly.

One of the issues with GMO foods is that we don't actually know for a fact exactly how the changes we make in them work, or what effect they may have in the human body over long periods of time. We just don't know.

There are a lot of things we don't know. How do we know that non-GMO foods are good? Just because that's what we've done for thousands of years doesn't mean it's "right". Should we let people starve and die because "we don't know"? It's just intellectually dishonest to not use GMO foods because "we don't know". How will we ever know if we don't try them?

It's just intellectually dishonest to not use GMO foods because "we don't know". How will we ever know if we don't try them?

Is it really intellectually dishonest, or did someone else just come up with a different risk and cost/benefit analysis from yours? I'm not saying they're right, but it's entirely possible they're making an honest mistake. (Also, the ethics of science get tricky when your subjects are human beings.)

We know it is safe to eat because we have tested it for thousands of years. Call me up when we have tested GMOs for that long.

Exceptions can of course be made for places that are experiencing acute malnutrition, but even so it probably makes much more sense using the same money to make sure the African farmers have access to fertilizer so they can get better yields.

As opposed to "naturally" cross-breeding strains and selecting for traits without genetic sequencing?

Changes are changes, whether random or induced mutation. I feel better if there's at least one brain inspecting the changes vs throwing dice.

Cross breeding does not induce mutations. Cross breeding mixes genetic code that already exist on the original plants.

Random or induced mutation like they do in GMO has lots of unintended consequences(for example radiating it). It is like a program that has not been debugged, only that a crash could be people dying or getting ill in the thousands or millions.

Also mixing genes from species that have nothing to do with each other like creatures that live in deep ocean that emit light with those that live on the surface will also have unintended consequences.

Human beings could be cocky and arrogant. I have a river near my house. Someone had the brilliant idea of introducing an alien small fish to help native fish as food. The unintended consequence was that the new small fish ate the eggs of native fish and made them disappear completely from the river.

> Cross breeding does not induce mutations. Cross breeding mixes genetic code that already exist on the original plants.

And why do you think that genetic code within the same species is different in the first place...?

I think it's a bit disingenuous to paint with such a broad brush the level of knowledge there is about the long-term effects of GMO foods. Numerous studies have been released[0] and more published every year seem to lean towards minimal to no perceivable negative effects.

EDIT: I will grant that all of these studies deal with animals rather than directly at effects on humans, but it doesn't seem there is compelling evidence thus far for one to assume there would be a significant difference.

[0] http://www.fass.org/page.asp?pageID=52&autotry=true&ULnotkn=...

Every single new modification is it's own risks independent from all others. So, no set of studies can say that this new GMO product is safe until you test that GMO product.

In 100 years people may reasonably feel that pre 2060's GMO food is fine, but that new stuff is risky. And they would be reasonable to feel that way. After all, we have recalled a lot of great new products from the market due to long term issues.

PS: This might be unreasonable, however the pro GMO argument is lower food costs which is a non issue for many people.

Well, all "unnatural" GMO food DNA are going to be broken to pieces inside my intestine anyway: I think I can trust modern science (and common sense) enough to say a different jumble of nucleic acids in my bowel won't do anything "natural" nucleic acids can't do.

I mean, if you come across a dish of quinoa, macadamia nuts, and beef, would you object to eating it because it contains DNAs that never made contact with each other for a hundred million years, and there's just no guarantee what their combined power could do once ingested?

The only credible potential danger of GMO food is what they might do to the ecosystem while they're still alive (that is, before you eat them), but somehow most GMO opponents just gloss over this important distinction.

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