zoologicallyobsessed:

thatfloatingcat:

demonessdollie:

*whispers menacingly*

Your dog is a fucking GMO because of selective breeding. Quit using fear mongering conspriacy theories to fuel your rage against “big scary science”

Selective breeding is not the same as GMO tech? GMOs are often organisms that could not occur from normal crossbreeding?

Like look I don’t think GMOs are dangerous to human health or killing us all or whatever, but can we not use inaccurate comparisons please? Yes, humans have been altering the genes of things since we started agriculture. No, selective breeding is not the same as lab-created GMOs which often contain genes from different species that couldn’t be crossbred without human-initiated specific gene splicing in a lab. No, this doesn’t make GMOs intrinsically bad or dangerous, but yes, there are very good reasons to be concerned about GMOs from a standpoint of preserving genetic diversity in agriculture, preventing corporate monopolies of the food supply, and preventing us from digging ourselves deeper into problems like pesticide and herbicide dependence that stem from the kind of homogenous monocrop system practiced in much of the developed world.

By all means, fight the conspiracy-theory type stuff about GMOs. Some of it is really wacky and harmful. But at least use an apt analogy, and recognize that there are plenty of reasons to oppose GMOs that have nothing to do with their safety for human consumption, many of which are perfectly valid.

Selective breeding is literally a type of GMO. The thing you’re whinging about is just genetic modification which is one way in which GMO’s are created. 

Seems like you’re confused as to what GMO entitles and means based on your hyper focus on what part of GMO’s and GMO tech. 

So you really shouldn’t be saying what is or isn’t considered GMO when you yourself are still confused.

A good example is a type of rice that was recently genetically modified to help it survive flooding. Instead of selectively breeding it to survive flooding, which is entirely possible but would take many generations and was far too slow to solve the immediate problem of people starving after floods, the rice was spliced with a gene from a grass that can survive flooding. This produces the same result as selectively breeding the rice for that trait, but much, much faster, in time to save lives. 

Corporate monopolies, lack of genetic diversity in agriculture, and pesticide/herbicide dependencies do not come from GMOs. The same thing can come from corporations selectively breeding plants for certain traits. Corporations and current agriculture methods are the issue there, not GMOs. Don’t forget that whole “the pollen from my patented corn blew into your corn, so now I own your corn seeds” business- again, people causing that, not GMOs. 

GMOs are the future of agriculture. Plants can be modified to do better in all sorts of artificial farming situations that take far fewer resources than traditional farming, like aquaponics. If we’re going to terraform other planets and live on them, we are going to do it by developing GMOs to help us. 

Some people use the Internet to communicate and arrange criminal acts. That doesn’t make the Internet bad, that makes the Internet a thing that people can use for unpleasant purposes.