Giant Gobs of Crazy and the EFCA

[Jcelios]

There isn't as much "playing god" far-right type religious objection to GMO as you might think. I'm not sure why, it's just something I haven't observed very often.

What there is however is a massive far-left environmentalist type anti-GMO sentiment.
It's particularly strong and even very influential in mainstream politics in europe.
The three main reasons being:
Appeal to Nature
Fear of Corporations/Big Business (Monsanto etc.)
Chemophobia (which to be fair is I guess a sub set of the first one)

[Jcelios]

Did you know that Charles Darwin invented atheism and caused the holocaust?

did you know that Darwinism has nothing to do with darwin at all?

Depends what you mean by Darwinism.

Biologists use Darwinism to refer to biological evolution and it's influence upon the natural world.
Philosophers use Darwinism to refer to a scientific/materialistic world view in which evolution is a central component.
Creationists use Darwinism as an out-group jargon term for what they perceive to be an ideology masquerading as objective science. Richard Dawkins is trumpeting the "darwinist" agenda. If you accept evolution your a "darwinist". etc.
Some people use Darwinism as a short hand for Social Darwinism which is a whole other thing all together.
So just what are you talking about?

[Jaedar]

Biologists use Darwinism to refer to biological evolution and it's influence upon the natural world.

noo, they just say evolution.
As for the other things, My previous statement stands on its own.

And really GMO is just a faster, more efficient means of breeding and humanity has been doing that literally since we first started taking care of animals.

[chris the cynic]

Well damn this thread has moved along. This is in response to Jcelios's list of lunitics on the left.

Some of the areas listed (entire anti-corporate movements ... not to mention a general shrill paranoia about "big business" and "the man") can't really be classified as right or left. The bit about disguising the first example as environmentalism probably can be, but when you are anti corporate, anti-government, anti-"the man", anti "big business" or something like that then if you go far enough to the left and you'll meet up with people who got to the same place by going to the right.

I would hesitate to call any of the people who prove the political spectrum loops back on itself as being on the left or the right, they defy the ordinary one dimensional classifications.

There is certainly a lot of room on the left for crazy, and a lot of room for dangerous crazy.

That said, I think DDL is right that some positions can prove to be more fertile ground for lunatics than others. Though some of this is within the same part of the spectrum. There are distinctions that need to be made. For example Anti-war groups are not necessarily pacifist groups, the latter will have a much harder time justifying resorting to violence than the former (though human beings are great at rationalization.)

[Jcelios]

And just because I love triple posting:
I think I found a good classification of the effect that was possibly observed this thread regarding the amount of crazy people on each side of the political spectrum.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outgroup_homogeneity_bias

[Moonbo]

Or this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingroup_bias

And now I have to run off, work is calling .

[chris the cynic]

And really GMO is just a faster, more efficient means of breeding and humanity has been doing that literally since we first started taking care of animals.

I think one of the principle arguments against it (other than the catastrophic effects to ordinary farmers when GM crops pollinate their non-GM crops) is that it is faster. Non genetically modified corn is one of the greatest biological engineering feats in all of history, but it took a damned long time. That damned long time is, in the eyes of many, a feature because it meant that at every step along the way farmers could check to make sure they were going in the right direction, they could look at the outcomes of individual mutations and decide which one, if any, was best.

The process was slow enough that there wasn't much room for surprises, that individual changes to the corns phenotype could be observed and evaluated over generations, and if something ever went wrong it there was no way it could go all that wrong.

So people (people like my mother if you want to be specific) think that if you go faster that isn't good because the slowness or progress at this moment is a very powerful safety feature.

[Jaedar]

Or this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingroup_bias

can't say I'm surprised, Humans are flock(herd?) animals by nature, it is natural to be biased towards ones fellow flock members.

As for the safety of GMO.... yes I suppose it is better to let thousands of africans starve every (insert time period lesser than year here) than to trust some people whose jobs it is to make sure there are no risks to GMO... And really there are easy solutions to the risk of spreading, including but not limited to; infertility, dependence on chemical not found in nature or using you know, greenhouses.

[Jcelios]

Biologists use Darwinism to refer to biological evolution and it's influence upon the natural world.

noo, they just say evolution.

Albeit it may not necessarily be common I do occasionally hear it used in this context by biologists. Both in lectures and informal conversation. This is probably an issue with the "plasticity" of language rather then some official designation though.

As for the other things, My previous statement stands on its own.

But as I was trying to explain... the term Darwinism means many different things to many different people. You've yet to clarify what exactly you meant by it. Good day sir!

And really GMO is just a faster, more efficient means of breeding and humanity has been doing that literally since we first started taking care of animals.

And crops even. It's amazing how different our domesticated crops, fruits and vegetables are from their wild counter parts just through eons of artificial selection.

[Xesum]

Darwinism is fun to bring up in the company of Christians.

[Jaedar]

As for the other things, My previous statement stands on its own.

But as I was trying to explain... the term Darwinism means many different things to many different people. You've yet to clarify what exactly you meant by it. Good day sir!

I mean that they don't really have anything to do with darwin... Do I really need to clarify this further?(for the record, when I think darwinism I think of the philosophical one)

And crops even. It's amazing how different our domesticated crops, fruits and vegetables are from their wild counter parts just through eons of artificial selection.

Yeah, did you know that all bananas on the globe are identical in terms of DNA? the banana plant lost its ability to reproduce because it wasn't necessary for the humans that bred it.

[DDL]

The trick with 'safe GMO' is in making sure the traits conferring non-standard chemical dependency REMAIN LINKED to all the other traits you're worried about infusing the non-GMO genepool with, which given they're separate genes, and that plants are notoriously promiscuous, what with all their crazy viruses and bacteria and such swapping DNA out and putting new stuff back in, is quite hard to guarantee.

[Jcelios]

Well damn this thread has moved along. This is in response to Jcelios's list of lunitics on the left.

Some of the areas listed (entire anti-corporate movements ... not to mention a general shrill paranoia about "big business" and "the man") can't really be classified as right or left. The bit about disguising the first example as environmentalism probably can be, but when you are anti corporate, anti-government, anti-"the man", anti "big business" or something like that then if you go far enough to the left and you'll meet up with people who got to the same place by going to the right.

I would hesitate to call any of the people who prove the political spectrum loops back on itself as being on the left or the right, they defy the ordinary one dimensional classifications.

There is certainly a lot of room on the left for crazy, and a lot of room for dangerous crazy.

That said, I think DDL is right that some positions can prove to be more fertile ground for lunatics than others. Though some of this is within the same part of the spectrum. There are distinctions that need to be made. For example Anti-war groups are not necessarily pacifist groups, the latter will have a much harder time justifying resorting to violence than the former (though human beings are great at rationalization.)

Fair enough. I didn't really mean to suggest that to be anti-corporate for example you have to be far-left or a lunatic. Just that a significant portion of that group is far-left, extreme in their views and probably viewed as lunatic lefties by a lot of people on the right. It's kind of impossible to not over generalize when comparing stereotypes of different groups.
But I pretty much agree with everything you said. There is a certain "fallacy of middle ground" in assuming that each side must have equal crazy.

[chris the cynic]

And just because I love triple posting:
I think I found a good classification of the effect that was possibly observed this thread regarding the amount of crazy people on each side of the political spectrum.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outgroup_homogeneity_bias

I doubt it. The recognition that there are crazy people and non-crazy people on the opposite end of the political spectrum is a recognition that, far from being a monolith of homogeneity, the other side is in fact a heterogeneous group populated by people with various divergent beliefs and motivations.

Or this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingroup_bias

And now I have to run off, work is calling .

That, on the other hand, could be it. If we assume that calling someone an idiot rather than a lunatic is a show of preferential treatment then we could use that to explain DDL's belief that there are more lunatics on one side.

That said, I think that in-group homogeneity is a factor that really should be looked at if we want to determine whether or not crazy really is spread universally. (Do we want to determine that?)

As an example of why that might have an effect, consider multiculturalism. There are a lot of conspiracy theories about how multiculturalism is a tool to destroy us all, the proponents of such theories naturally try not to partake in the evil they believe they see. Instead they try to make sure they are as far from it as possible by interacting only with those with whom they strongly agree. In effect they create a homogeneous in-group. Since such a group would never give its members reason to question the beliefs they all hold I would guess that they have a much easier time maintaining their beliefs than they would in a heterogeneous group where their beliefs were not universally agreed with.

Now consider the reverse, someone who believes that those against multiculturalism are at the heart of a conspiracy meant to destroy us all (I don't actually know if such a conspiracy theory exists, but it wouldn't surprise me if it did.) To oppose the evil that they think they see such people would want to immerse themselves in multiculturalism, which would mean they'd often be around people whose beliefs are not like their own. Wouldn't that constant interaction with different beliefs challenge the conspiracy theorists beliefs and make it harder to continue to be a conspiracy theorist?

If it would, then that means that in-group heterogeneity discourages conspiracy theory, and in-group homogeneity encourages it. In that case there would be more crazies in parts of the political spectrum that encouraged in-group homogeneity.

I have no idea if that is accurate, it just seems to make sense to me, or how you would test it.

[Added:] God this thread is moving fast.

[Jaedar]

Which is why we need to start researching for real now in controlled environments before starvation becomes an even more serious problem. and really what you say DDL, is just as applicable to current plants as it is right now . I mean it is about as likely that a regular plant will go haywire as it is a GMO one, in fact the GMO one may be less likely since you would probably infuse it with antibacterial things and such.
I'm obviously not an expert on GMO, but I would say that it is our most viable option to support human(and animal) populations, because when food gets scarce, people start wars.
Edit: this thread is now approaching warp 10