Of course they did. Anyone on the internet about a year - 2 years ago remembers every time you mentioned monsanto they would send shills in to defend them and call you a tin-foil hat conspiracy theorist.
A lot of the pro-GMO people seem to argue in really bad faith if they're not paid shills.
Unfortunately nuance and middle ground are hard to come by online. And it doesn't help when you dismiss all GMO proponents as paid shills.
And I've never bought the characterization of breeding/selection as a form of GM. Breeding is selection of a pathetically tiny set of modifications, but GM is on a whole other level. With GM we can write arbitrary binary strings of code into any organism. That's simply not comparable with breeding -- the space of realizable phenotypes is orders of magnitude larger with GM.
>Breeding is selection of a pathetically tiny set of modifications, but GM is on a whole other level.
The truth is probably closer to the opposite of this: most GM species in the pipeline are rather unimaginative ones improving one phenotype at a time, and the vast majority of them focus on pest or herbicide resistance. There is a couple of near commercial crops aimed at improving nutritional content such as golden rice and high-lysine corn, but they are more exceptions than the rule.
The kind of totally disruptive GM e.g. introduce C3 photosynthesis in C4 plants, has not left the drawing board yet for a good reason.
OK if you wanted to create, say, a fluorescent horse, which technique would you use:
* GM
* breeding with radiation and chemical mutagens
You have one month.
On the other hand, one can slowly breed for desirable traits such as speed, endurance or disease resistance in horses, good luck doing that with GM.
We can do that precisely for fluorescence and many other traits with GM today, but good luck trying to breed a fluorescent horse, it could take millions of years if at all.
Besides, GFP fluoresence is the proverbial low hanging fruit as it is robustly expressed in many cell types but has very little practical value. Inserting useful traits via GM is often no short cut because they are rarely determined by a single gene.
Your point about multiple genes is a very good one but we have a good understanding of how some gene networks work already and the rest will follow.
I'd say that our ability to interact with the genome is still rather crude, else we'd have already cured cancer by now - we already have a pretty good understanding of the cellular biology of cancer but it only helps us so much.
Also I understand that this is a computer centered site but thinking of DNA as binary is a often used but terrible analogy. Living organisms were designed through complete randomness, try refactoring that. If you wanted to turn teosinte into corn without any random mutations and selection I think that would be far beyond our abilities for 100 years at least.
Even CRISPR-CAS9 is not perfect and introduces a lot of unwanted genetic changes when used. Further the big advantage of GM compared with selective breeding is that you can inject Transgenes. This makes them totally incomparable.
In evolution there's no design, which implies prediction and a model of function. But evolution is far from "completely random". In fact evolution goes to great lengths to correct mutations and only allows mutation in certain carefully controlled sequences of the genome where variation is potentially useful. There are sequences in our genomes that are identical to those of yeast, having been faithfully copied, and error-corrected, for billions of years.
>modifying a crop to be resistant to a carcinogenic poison farmers are going to dump all over it
This is purely speculation at this point. I recognise the ecological harms of massive monoculture enabled by GM but again, opponents seems fixated on unproven health effects and miss the bigger picture.
What is "monoculture" and why is it GM that enabled it? Didn't monoculture exist before GM? Could you describe to me a field where non-monoculture is used.
Isn't your comment self-defeating? You have legitimate concerns about corporate abuse of IP law and a specific crop product- not with the scientific field of genetic modification. So why do you insist on villifying the term GMO instead of using accurate language to describe what you're talking about? From the other perspective, I cannot begin to understand how you are the one not acting in bad faith.
A lot of the anti-GMO people seem to argue in really bad faith if they're not paid shills.
See, I can create straw man arguments too.
It's worth noting that having such groups is a commonly used counter intelligence tactic: create a loud and incoherent pseudo-strawman opposition to distract from those who are actually asking legitimate questions.
An effective astroturf campaign calls for both pro-x and anti-x shills.
See flat earth as an obvious example of this.
Do you know of any well documented cases of this (though by its nature, any case of this is probably not well documented)?