Jun 22, 2023 03:07 PM
Thirty years on, there is even more evidence that GMO food are safe.
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/update-...nd-health/
EXCERPTS: The first GMO food was approved in 1994 (a GMO tomato that is no longer on the market), so we are getting close to 30 years of GMOs. Opponents of GMOs falsely claim that they have not been studied enough (there is more evidence for their safety than other food products) and that there may be long term unknown risks. They were wrong 30 years ago, but it was at least true that GMO introduction into the food market and animal feed was new. But the “new” argument, by necessity, doesn’t age well. By now, if there were any actual risk to GMO foods, we would likely be seeing the result – and we are not.
[...] As an aside, I find it ironic that a large number of available crops were produced over the last century through mutation breeding. This technique uses chemical or radiation to dramatically increase the rate of mutation (a thousand to a million fold) to increase the number of varieties to select from. But mutation breeding is not considered GMO or bioengineered. Many other crops are hybrids, even forced hybrids that would not occur in nature. But labeling such crops would be pointless, and banning them impossible, and they constitute virtually our entire agricultural industry... (MORE - missing details)
The Evolution of Anti-Evolutionism
https://skepticalinquirer.org/2023/06/th...lutionism/
INTRO: Anti-evolutionism is a quintessential and particularly pernicious type of pseudoscience. Quintessential because it is both common and characterized by many of the classic hallmarks of pseudoscience. Pernicious because it directly aims at undermining both science, and education more broadly, in accordance with its religious ideological roots.
Yet, rather ironically, even anti-evolutionist tactics evolve. And even more ironically, such evolution can be documented and quantified by using the very same phylogenetic reconstruction techniques that evolutionary biologists normally employ to understand the historical relationships among biological species. A paper published a few years ago by Nicholas Matzke in Science is a splendid example of this approach... (MORE - details)
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/update-...nd-health/
EXCERPTS: The first GMO food was approved in 1994 (a GMO tomato that is no longer on the market), so we are getting close to 30 years of GMOs. Opponents of GMOs falsely claim that they have not been studied enough (there is more evidence for their safety than other food products) and that there may be long term unknown risks. They were wrong 30 years ago, but it was at least true that GMO introduction into the food market and animal feed was new. But the “new” argument, by necessity, doesn’t age well. By now, if there were any actual risk to GMO foods, we would likely be seeing the result – and we are not.
[...] As an aside, I find it ironic that a large number of available crops were produced over the last century through mutation breeding. This technique uses chemical or radiation to dramatically increase the rate of mutation (a thousand to a million fold) to increase the number of varieties to select from. But mutation breeding is not considered GMO or bioengineered. Many other crops are hybrids, even forced hybrids that would not occur in nature. But labeling such crops would be pointless, and banning them impossible, and they constitute virtually our entire agricultural industry... (MORE - missing details)
The Evolution of Anti-Evolutionism
https://skepticalinquirer.org/2023/06/th...lutionism/
INTRO: Anti-evolutionism is a quintessential and particularly pernicious type of pseudoscience. Quintessential because it is both common and characterized by many of the classic hallmarks of pseudoscience. Pernicious because it directly aims at undermining both science, and education more broadly, in accordance with its religious ideological roots.
Yet, rather ironically, even anti-evolutionist tactics evolve. And even more ironically, such evolution can be documented and quantified by using the very same phylogenetic reconstruction techniques that evolutionary biologists normally employ to understand the historical relationships among biological species. A paper published a few years ago by Nicholas Matzke in Science is a splendid example of this approach... (MORE - details)
