Comment by srisa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by srisa | Hacker News Reader

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I have no clue how granting patents on plants and animals is supposed to diminish biodiversity. Won't new plants and animals increase biodiversity? I mean yes, without the patents you could crossbreed and remix GM and other plants more freely which would boost the increase even further, but even a small increase is still pretty much the opposite of a decrease and dismantles the argument.

With the proliferation of patents and the marketing blitz by these companies, we'll have only a handful of varieties that are sterile. There will be no new varieties coming out of natural cross pollination because we are left with sterile patented varieties.

Ecosystems are not static, they are extremely dynamic and never balanced.

Exactly. The viruses, bacteria and pests are evolving naturally; they are increasing their resistance to the existing pesticides. With the sterile varieties, there is no evolution, no adaptation to the changing environmental conditions and the changing pests.

There are some short stories by Paolo Bacigalupi[1] set in a dystopian post-oil future where the only fuel is grown from sterile GM crops, any non-GM varieties are killed by various GM pests (introduced by the patent owning companies). Obviously such a world works very differently to our own, with no global movement or trade; everything is hyperlocal, including information flow, and energy storage is done with mechanical springs, not electricity or chemical potential.

At least one story is about someone who reverse engineered the GM/pest resistant crops to be non-sterile again.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paolo_Bacigalupi - at least two of them are in the "pump six and other stories" compilation - I can't remember which are which though.

I found his full-length novel on the same topic, "The Windup Girl"[1], to be particularly insightful and disturbing.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Windup_Girl

With the proliferation of patents and the marketing blitz by these companies, we'll have only a handful of varieties that are sterile. There will be no new varieties coming out of natural cross pollination because we are left with sterile patented varieties.

That makes sense. But it only seems to apply to species that have already been thoroughly reshaped by humanity (pets, food and similar). Not what you normally think of when someone goes crying about biodiversity. To me it just seems like a more efficient/adapted successor generation to our current designed species.

Exactly. The viruses, bacteria and pests are evolving naturally; they are increasing their resistance to the existing pesticides. With the sterile varieties, there is no evolution, no adaptation to the changing environmental conditions and the changing pests.

Yes, and with biotech we're able to adapt these design-species much faster than 'natural' evolution ever could.

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