I love Tyson. But totally disagree with him on this...
Yes farm animals are 'engineered' but they are engineered via NATURE and NATURAL SELECTION over THOUSANDS OF YEARS.

Putting Jellyfish glow dna into mice is fucked up and would NEVER happen in NATURE.
INSERTING PESTICIDE PRODUCING GENES INTO FOOD IS SOO FUCKED UP FOR ALL OF NATURE.

Bee's anyone ?

Human's, Animals, Plants, we all share essentially the same cells.
So something that is designed to kill insects, if ingested by us, may fuck us up.

Also, WHY DO IT ? GM yields are not that astronomic.

Most of the food we grown is WASTED. Let's fix that first.

I know, why not give moderating powers wholly to the sifters who swing the lowest-hanging sack of hollow, worm-ravaged nuts inhabiting the most struggling of fruit-bearing trees in the orchard at any-given-time as an homage to all insect species of the entire planet? That's an easy-out and it saves on the effort and drain of pesticide costs, yeah??

This said in the spirit of tongue-in-cheek, powers to play here commensurate with efforts to enhance and expand the video content rather than involvement lopsidedly focused upon popping-spit and clicking up or down (as always, more down please) would be best bestowed quickly to keep the rabble form thinking too fondly of themselves..The preceding message is to most of you "P's" who chime-in incessantly, frequent the place, but contribute very little eye-soul-essence candy.

We love you anyhow, go find some cool shit for us to watch why dontchas??

The fact that it is molten metal is pretty irrelevant, since I would argue that this is less painful than pesticides and most other ways to kill ants. Whether the ants should be killed at all is a whole other argument.

*related=http://videosift.com/video/Largest-Mass-Bumblebee-Die-Off-Ever-Recorded-in-Oregon

pesticides one, bees zero

" this ever-more frequent and distressing phenomena"

As I found above, this isn't a poorly understood 'phenomena'. Somebody sprayed the tree with a pesticide known to kill bees while it was in bloom and loaded with bees. No surprise or mystery with the outcome of thousands of dead bees. It's distressing when someone fouls up like this, but nothing about this is "ever more frequent". This is an isolated incident. Its likely that this human screw up will be repeated somewhere else, but the cause and the prevention are 100% understood and we know exactly how to stop it. Don't deliberately and intentionally use chemicals designed to kill bees on trees loaded with bees and they won't die this way again.

I've heard all manner of people talking about the mysterious mass die off of bees that's happening around the world. This incident is absolutely 100% unrelated to that in every imaginable way.

Ah, but there was followup to the story and it looks like the trees were innocent:

But a local conservation society concluded that the tree was inadvertently sprayed with a pesticide that killed the bees.

Scott Hoffman Black, executive director of the Xerces Society, said he has confirmed the thousands of dead bees found Monday in a Wilsonville parking lot died from pesticide poisoning.

Black said the Oregon Department of Agriculture talked with a landscaping company that recently sprayed an insecticide called Safari on the European linden trees in the parking lot.

“They made a huge mistake, but unfortunately this is not that uncommon,” said Black. “Evidently they didn’t follow the label instructions. This should not have been applied to the trees while they’re in bloom.”

@Buck said: "We should close factory farms and teach people how to hunt again."

Hunting can't scale to support a larger population than a hunter-gatherer tribe. So the cost of meat would skyrocket because demand stays high, and supply can't increase.

Meat costing $75 per pound instead of $5 per pound would be a huge reduction in quality of life for everybody.

That's why humans left hunter-gatherer lifestyles in the first place.


The answer will probably end up being the vat-grown meat Silicon Valley is working on now. It will be the health equivalent of organic and free range meat, since it's not fed pesticide food, antibiotics, etc.

You're right. I stand corrected. At first I thought this might be an example of an improper usage that is so common it becomes accepted but according to the EPA at

http://www.epa.gov/opp00001/about/

"Though often misunderstood to refer only to insecticides, the term pesticide also applies to herbicides, fungicides, and various other substances used to control pests."

Are you getting at the distinction between herbicide and pesticide? I was going to agree but apparently herbicide is considered a specific type of pesticide, and weeds are a specific type of pest. You learn a lot through nitpicking.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pest_%28organism%29

Err, because modern pesticides kill weeds. They are used because if you don't use them, a lot of the resources in the soil are used by, well, weeds. Because that's what grows when you don't use pesticides.

However, if you did want to nit-pick his nit-picking you could point our that the very tall wheat of ancient times wouldn't have allowed many weeds to grow as they would drown out the light for competing plants. So the weeds he's talking about are a product of the shorter wheat he's saying would be inappropriate. He can't have it both ways...

Not that I'm nitpicking his nitpicking, but I fail to see how a lack of modern pesticides should result in a field full of weeds.

I guess it's time we stop using those incredibly stupid things called antibiotics because we're breeding resistant organisms for those as well. The facts make it damned clear that the only winner in this race are pharmaceutical companies. Patients pay more for the medicine as germs become more resistant. In another 20 years our antibiotics will be useless, but pharmaceutical companies will happily move on to the next longterm fuckup that is profitable in the short run.

While we're at it we should stop using idiotic chemotherapy and radiation for cancer because we only end up with resistant cells.

Do you really see no benefit to pesticides? Not a single upside? That's strange because they keep selling them. Someone's buying.

I'm not a politician or lawyer. The patent infringement stuff you mentioned sounds bad, but I don't know enough to make an educated comment.

As far as RoundUp Ready soybeans, what I know about it is that it inhibits an enzyme required for RoundUp (the sprayed pesticide) to work, thus rendering certain crops "immune" to the spray. From a bioengineering perspective it is ingenious and allows developed nations to have plentiful and cheap crops year round. GMO is a product of our (humanity's) need for cheap, plentiful and calorie-dense foods. Sure, we can complain about the fact that we don't want to eat pesticides/insecticides/whatever, but we complain far more when the food we eat is expensive, scarce and calorie-sparse. Before GM (I'll include selective breeding in this category), our food supply was predicated on the vagaries of the weather, insects, viruses, fungi and bacteria. We now enjoy a plentiful bounty year round and still we complain. We cannot have it both ways.

I realize that there is a gut reaction to GM (and irradiated) foods, but people need to educate themselves and ask if they would rather have massive price swings for staple foods or (relatively) cheap food year round that is inherently not the product of evolutionary changes.

The issue is GMO crops designed to secrete their own pesticides (toxins).
Which is a large part of what plant GM has been about.
In animal tests, there are major health problems - but since you can't PROVE that people will react the same, sale is not prohibited.
In Europe there is more scrutiny to this, and some things actually are banned that are still permitted in the U.S.A..

-scheherazade

I think as a former Creationist (old earth creationist, the idiocy of young earth creationist stunned me, for the Earth to be 6,000-10,000 years old would require God purposely setup evidence to prove it wasn't that old, which some dismiss as "God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise") I can speak to the problem here is that Christian and right wing media reinforce certain key thoughts that keep a Christian from understanding or accepting even the basics of the theory. You can get them to understand evolution is why you need a new flu shot each year, or why pesticides stop working after a time, but they think that is a different type of evolution. The image painted in the mind of a creationist is that one day in the African plains an ape or monkey was having a baby, and rather than be an ape or monkey it was a human... and that somewhere nearby another ape/monkey had to have another human for them to mate and continue offspring... there is no understanding of the scale and time involved to get from A to Z... they think that the A to Z is the same as A to B and ignore B to Y in the evolutionary timeline. They also misuse the word evolution to apply to the big bang and abiogenesis ("see they use the biblical word Genesis too") as that is what is reinforced again and again. They are reinforced to misunderstand the word "theory" to think it is just a random guess... and make no mistake, the fact that the word theory doesn't mean a guess/idea and that evolution doesn't go from A to Z without going through B-Y first has been made clear to those who teach creationism, but they don't care, there is money to be made in deluding the church goers into holding onto the old ignorance, rather than embrace the truth... of course then you run the risk of some of them learning the truth and then going "I wonder what the hell else they lied to me about..." but most never will open their minds to the concept that even if God is real, perhaps the creation account and great flood are not literal events, but parables intended to teach a lesson...