GM food

When it comes to evolution, no reputable scientific organisation supported the ploy by creationists some years back to put “intelligent design” on an equal scientific footing with evolutionary biology, however, many in the GMO debate deny and muddy established, consensus science in a similar way as those religious fundamentalists and also climate change skeptics have done by claiming equal access time and for the "right for people to know".

A longtime opponent changed his former position and endorsed the use of genetically modified crops. Mark Lynas is a British environmentalist who helped start the anti-biotechnology movement in the 1990s and who took part in destroying test plantings of GE crops. Lynas realized that he had never done any academic research on biotechnology, despite his strongly held opposition to it. "So I did some reading," he said, "and I discovered that one by one my cherished beliefs about GM turned out to be little more than green urban myths." Lynas said there is "rock-solid scientific consensus" on the safety of biotech food. "We no longer need to discuss whether or not it is safe—over a decade and a half with 3 trillion GM meals eaten there has never been a single substantiated case of harm," he said. "You are more likely to get hit by an asteroid than to get hurt by GM food."

The issue of herbicide resistance is not unique to GMO crops. Whenever a pesticide is used year after year in the same place on the same target populations, resistance to that pesticide will develop. With any pesticide, and with any genetically engineered crop that involves pests, the pesticides must be rotated to prevent any resistance genes that develop from spreading throughout the population. While crops resistant to glyphosate have resulted in a switch away from other herbicides to glyphosate which has resulted in an increase in glyphosate resistant weeds, this is not due to genetic engineering. The problem is a lack of integrated pest management strategies that incorporate a variety of solutions.

The real issue isn't GM technology itself or its safety, but what it's being used to do. Biotech is often used, not to feed people, but to line the pockets of Big Ag Corporations with many companies trying to patent pieces of genome, like Mosanto that copyright seeds, then prohibit the cleaning and re-using of seeds in order to make more money off them. What bio-tech is being used FOR is the much bigger issue than the technology itself.

Myths about GM

Good to see a counter case being presented against those Greens who oppose Genetic Modification.

Myth one: GM is just haphazard, imprecise cross-breeding

In genetic engineering, scientists can very precisely select genes and introduce them into their target species. The wheat we consume today, for example, is a natural hybrid of three different wild species. This has resulted in bringing tens of thousands of genes together in several independent events. It is responsible for wheat being such an important crop. Modern wheat breeders release new varieties after introducing thousands of unknown genes from wild grasses without any regulatory requirements or special testing and with no genetic engineering involved. This is very haphazard and we do not know what genes are being introduced, apart from the target gene we know is present. The irony is that the precise introduction of a single gene is heavily regulated yet the introduction of thousands of unknown genes from wild grasses into a new wheat variety via traditional breeding methods is regarded as being completely acceptable.

Myth two: GM is a cure-all for more efficient land use and food security

GM technologies are just one of the tools that may be useful. Other important contributions to land use and food security come from traditional breeding, agronomy, land management and sustainability research. Breeding new varieties of any species requires multiple selection and evaluation methodologies, and there are a lot of conditions at play when developing better wheat.A new variety has to offer an advantage to the grower, it must have good yields and be adapted to the region where it is grown. It must also have good resistance or tolerance to diseases.GM technologies are generally only suitable for the single gene traits, not complex multigenic ones. Over time, GM may contribute to factors such as grain yield and drought resistance as we learn more about the basic biology underpinning these traits and identify the key genes to optimise. More importantly, it must be beneficial for end users and consumers.

Myth three: GM is harmful to the environment

In fact, there have been many environmental benefits from GM.GM technologies have massively reduced pesticide use in all circumstances where pests have been targeted. For example, the GM cotton varieties that are insect resistant reduce pesticide use by up to 80%. This reduced use of pesticides has other flow-on effects: less greenhouse gas associated with lower diesel use; less pesticide run-off; less residual pesticides; more biodiversity and improvements in human safety.

Myth four: GM means creating Frankenfoods

Often GM technologies don’t involve the introduction of any new genes from another species. Rather they turn the “volume” up or down of a certain gene already present in our crops (rather than introducing foreign genes). Some of them just silence, or “turn off”, a particular gene. Silencing can be important in modifying grain composition. For example, modifying starches can result in grains that have the potential to reduce the incidence of certain cancers. Turning up the volume is used to over express some genes, such as those that detoxify excess levels of aluminium in the soil or solubilise nutrients in the soil to improve the nutrition of plants.

Taken from Richard Richards here ,

All change for being human

Mailstrom recently wrote on human nature and human behaviour and we now read in the New York Times that for the last 20,000 years or so, people have inadvertently been shaping their own evolution. The force is human culture, broadly defined as any learned behavior, including technology.

Culture itself seems to be a powerful force of natural selection. People adapt genetically to sustained cultural changes, like new diets. And this interaction works more quickly than other selective forces, “leading some practitioners to argue that gene-culture co-evolution could be the dominant mode of human evolution,” Kevin N. Laland and colleagues wrote in the Nature Reviews Genetics. The idea that genes and culture co-evolve has been around for several decades but has started to win converts only recently.

The best evidence for culture being a selective force was the lactose tolerance found in many northern Europeans. Most people switch off the gene that digests the lactose in milk shortly after they are weaned, but in northern Europeans — the descendants of an ancient cattle-rearing culture that emerged in the region some 6,000 years ago — the gene is kept switched on in adulthood. Lactose tolerance is now well recognized as a case in which a cultural practice — drinking raw milk — has caused an evolutionary change in the human genome.Genetic changes that enable lactose tolerance have been detected not just in Europeans but also in three African pastoral societies. In each of the four cases, a different mutation is involved, but all have the same result — that of preventing the lactose-digesting gene from being switched off after weaning. Presumably the extra nutrition was of such great advantage that adults able to digest milk left more surviving offspring, and the genetic change swept through the population. This instance of gene-culture interaction turns out to be far from unique. In the last few years, biologists have been able to scan the whole human genome for the signatures of genes undergoing selection. Such a signature is formed when one version of a gene becomes more common than other versions because its owners are leaving more surviving offspring. From the evidence of the scans, up to 10 percent of the genome — some 2,000 genes — shows signs of being under selective pressure.

Many of the genes under selection seem to be responding to conventional pressures. Some are involved in the immune system, and presumably became more common because of the protection they provided against disease. Genes that cause paler skin in Europeans or Asians are probably a response to geography and climate.But other genes seem to have been favored because of cultural changes. These include many genes involved in diet and metabolism and presumably reflect the major shift in diet that occurred in the transition from foraging to agriculture that started about 10,000 years ago. Amylase is an enzyme in the saliva that breaks down starch. People who live in agrarian societies eat more starch and have extra copies of the amylase gene compared with people who live in societies that depend on hunting or fishing.

With archaic humans, culture changed very slowly. The style of stone tools called the Oldowan appeared 2.5 million years ago and stayed unchanged for more than a million years. The Acheulean stone tool kit that succeeded it lasted for 1.5 million years. But among behaviorally modern humans, those of the last 50,000 years, the tempo of cultural change has been far brisker. This raises the possibility that human evolution has been accelerating in the recent past under the impact of rapid shifts in culture.

A tgroup of selected genes affects brain function. The role of these genes is unknown, but they could have changed in response to the social transition as people moved from small hunter-gatherer groups a hundred strong to villages and towns inhabited by several thousand, Dr. Laland said. “It’s highly plausible that some of these changes are a response to aggregation, to living in larger communities,” he said.