[quote]Da Man reloaded wrote:
I deal with data driven decisions every single day.[/quote]
This is an oxymoron or a false dichotomy. Once the data is conclusively collected, there is no decision to be made and only completely irrational people (like, jumping off an 18-story building naked, completely irrational) make decisions based on zero data. Everybody else, from the age of about 6 mo. onward, collects some amount of data from somewhere and uses that to make a decision.
I’ve got news for you. Data is going to deviate from the norm whether you want it to or not. What you’re talking about is the Precautionary Principle and it, while used in scientific endeavors, has very little to do with science. Particularly because it is often invoked simply to prevent progress rather than to actually enhance understanding. If you think the engineers at Monsanto didn’t, metaphorically, bathe themselves, their fellow employees, test animals, their kids, and test humans in GMO grains before releasing them to market, you’re nuts.
Decent idea to be skeptical and demand proof, but hard to cling to the precautionary principle and demand things like ‘real proof’ when you can, quite literally, be buried in anecdotal data. There’s one thing good statisticians always comment upon or redirect themselves and their cohorts back to, and that’s empirical evidence.
It’s quite easy to create elaborate statistical schemes that produces accurate predictions with reliably true results, but if it doesn’t jive with anecdote, it’s too slow and costly, or plain ‘no one cares’ then the science isn’t worth the electrons it is recorded with. It seems no amount of data would make Flavr Savr tomatoes successful, regardless of safety.
Know how Barry Marshall won his Nobel Prize for work on H. pylori? How’s this for an experiment to generate some safety data; I’ll eat a bowl of GMO soybeans and wash it down with three fingers of Round Up and you can choose the conventional crop of your choice, prepared in the method of your choosing, but you have to wash yours down with three fingers of the more conventional herbicide of my choosing; Paraquat/gramoxone.
Seriously, wait until the 2,4-D resistant crops roll out, then the challenge I proposed here doesn’t hold near as much water.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that cross-polination was the only method of gene tinkering we’ve done.
Plants often reproduce by asexual means and, for several species (notably coffee and bananas), we’ve overwhelmed natural variety with ‘genetic purity’ with little understanding or concern of “the consequences”. Plant ‘cloning’, ‘splicing’, or ‘grafting’ is far older and successfully practiced modern cloning and has developed to the point where, now, some crops can’t be grown successfully without it. Through the fog of history, it isn’t clear that some crops, possibly, didn’t even originate (as crops) without it.
Most notably tulips, but daylilies, and even apples are n-polyploidy within species. That is an apple can be diploid, triploid, or tetraploid. Cross-polination in these cases, doesn’t just introduce new genes, but whole new chromosomes and functional metabolic pathways. The results are often sterility (whatever that means), but that’s not always the case. Further, tulips (I’m not aware of this having been done largely with other species) exist in a wide array of colors that aren’t or weren’t naturally occurring.
It was found that you could cross plants with higher chromosome numbers with their n-1 chromosomal partners and then knock out genes “selectively” using X-rays to achieve colors that didn’t exist in either lineage.
Judging what can be done to weaponize H1N1 by simply breeding ferrets, I’d say we’ve been doing relatively state-of-the-art genetic manipulations in plant species for quite a while.
