Dude, remember creationists? I bet they get surprised by nature all the time. "I wonder why it's doing that!"

Sure.  I'd like to have choices, too, but you're the economist.  I'll let you deal with all that.

As I sit here, I'm watching three local women tilling the ground on a local organic farm.  Really.  They're about forty feet from me.  I also like supporting my local economy, and (let me reiterate... I am in the food industry) there is an undeniable drop in the palatability of many mass-farmed products.  Growers are more interested in getting an extra day or two to ship their product before it spoils than making the tastiest product possible.

There are lots of good reasons for supporting local farmers who use non-industrial farming techniques for small scale agriculture.  I don't count the danger of growing a third head from eating GE corn to be one of them.

Monsanto is a bunch of sociopathic bastards.  I couldn't agree more.  

S'long as you're underminding them.

In the vein of the whole mad scientist thing, I'd rather take you on as an Igor; you already have kinda bad posture.

Oh, hell... Here we go again...

Gauche, look, you're blowing shit out of proportion and being emotional.  The thing is, you've already admitted you don't know enough about the food industry to be an authority.  I do.  I'm in the food industry, and I'm quite the science nerd, too.  Just listen to yourself.  Are we talking about herbicides or pesticides or irradiated food?  (Not that there's anything wrong with irradiated food...)  Who in the hell mentioned artificial sweeteners?  I, for one, don't use artificial sweeteners -- especially the ones that cause anal seepage. 

What does any of that have to do with the price of genetically engineered rice in China?  Not a damn thing.  I have no idea if you're an alarmist or not.  I just happen to have seen from your own statements that you don't know jack shit about engineered food, and I'm trying to tell you that.  Five hundred million average Europeans also don't know jack shit about engineered food.

I do, and Damn Dirty Ape does, and we're telling you it's alarmist to dismiss GE food based on the data available right now.  Believe us or not, but please cut out the shit where you pull in every subject under the sun and paint an agenda on my statements.  I get it.  You disagree.  Fine.  Now, either demonstrate some knowledge on the subject or admit that you don't have it and move on.

Didn't I say that?  So, you just enjoy getting on the internet and chiming in on topics you know nothing about for the hell of it?  What are you trying to prove?

No, I said based on the short term testing, there's no particular reason to suspect that genes will express differently from the predictions of evolutionary theory.  I do have reason to believe it's probably essentially healthy.

That's different from not having a clue.

Go to a damn organic cafe.  All food labeled "organic" is good for you after all.  Sheesh.

13 years people have been eating the stuff. Duno when they first started playing around with it though.

 Depending on the definition of organic, you're right.  We have more people than we can feed using small-scale farming methods.

And yeah, if we suddenly cut out the use of all pesticides, herbicides, and "artificial" fertilizers, feed, and so forth, we'd fix the overpopulation problem in one generation.

 So while we're cutting through pseudo-science, here's another news flash.  "Organic" is bullshit.  In most parts of the world, the word isn't required to mean jack shit.  In a lot of cases, it's just a pseudonym for "more expensive."

Furthermore, everything is "natural."  There's no such thing as an "unnatural fertilizer."  Nature contains the ingredients for every chemical in existence on earth.  Some require more steps by man than others, but unless you're shoveling cow shit directly from the ground onto the plants, man is intervening and processing fertilizer.

Perhaps "synthetic" is a better word than unnatural, implying that man must actively alter the chemical makeup of a substance by various processes of molecular manipulation, as opposed to just packaging what occurs without man's help in nature.  Even so, there's no clear dividing line between organic and synthetic.  Chemicals are a lot like DNA.  Whether a certain nitrate occurs in the environment without being synthesize, or it was manufactured from scratch in a laboratory, if the chemical formula is the same, it's the same stuff.  Some "chemical" addatives to food production are the same things that can be done "naturally," except that they're made in a lab for ease of production, cost efficiency, etc.

I'm not suggesting that some farmers' markets or organic cafes aren't selling things that have been grown without "big farm" chemicals.  Many of them are.  I'm saying that just because something is man-made, it's not evil and bad for you, and just because something is NOT man-made, it's not automatically the cure for cancer and the common cold.  There's no magic in a "natural diet."

 Um... are you being sarcastic or serious?  I can't tell.

Remember what I said about DNA not being "flounder DNA" or "insect DNA"?  It's the same thing.  Flounder have a set of genetic code that happens to have the useful effect of increasing cold resistance.  Fine.  It produces chemicals that also happen to have the same effect on tomatoes.  Also fine.  This doesn't mean it's a "flounder-tomato."  It means that all life is related, and many stretches of code do work in different species, and even different kingdoms.

You've got a lot of the same stretches of DNA as an octopus.  Does that mean you're an Octo-Human?  No.  It means life all came from the same place.

The only difference is that these genetic adaptations are being consciously manipulated instead of blindly stumbled upon by chance.

Let's make sure we understand something really important.  Scientists' efforts at genetic manipulation are several orders of magnitude more successful than blind natural selection.  Nature invents thousands more unsuccessful variations than successful ones.  It only appears that nature is the "perfect mother" from the current perspective.  We don't get to see that over the course of a few thousand generations, natural selection will screw up millions of potential species who will die out before they ever get to be recognized -- because they're too unsuccessful to become a species.

The only reason it looks like nature is super awesome at success is that the billions or trillions of failures are all dead.

Scientists, on the other hand, have the benefit of foresight and the scientific method.  The know precisely what they are trying to make, and they systematically search the genetic database for a stretch of code that is predicted by evolutionary theory to have the desired effect.  It's possible that tomatoes would have stumbled randomly onto the same stretch of code that flounder already posess, but do you have any idea how staggeringly improbable that is?

Oh.. and one more thing.  Every offspring of every organism ever in the history of life has been a new life form.

I'm totally serious, and what I'm saying is totally incontrovertible to anyone who knows how this stuff works.

To be precise, I am saying that because scientists use the scientific method, they are orders of magnitude more likely to achieve a particular result than natural selection.

Do you want to talk politics or science?  I'm addressing the science.

"UNnatural" doesn't exist.  I don't doubt that GE plants can have unforseen effects on the environment.  I haven't been addressing that point.  I've been addressing the claim that because something is GE, it is likely to be dangerous to humans to consume.

You seem to think I'm defending the GE crop industry.  I'm not.  I'm explaining the GE process to people who are ignorant of what it is and how it works.

I'm trying to prove that you're proposing to irrevocably change the molecular structure of the world's food supply using un-recallable, self-replicating organisms without the knowledge necessary to predict the results and calling anyone with reservations about it an alarmist while making completely irrelevant points about how everything the government says is true and how anything labeled organic is automatically safe in an attempt to mischaracterize my statements.
 

LMAO, well when you put it that way, of course. But I think most of us will agree that force applied to picked produce to hasten ripening just results in tasteless food with lower nutrient content.

I prefer "organic" for loads of reasons, not least of which that it usually tastes better and is as a general rule w/w more nourishing than mass produce due to the basically better soil it's grown in.  There is reason to believe that the nutrient yeild from organic farming methods is capable of satisfying societies needs, the problem is not that it can't produce enough, really, the larger driving force behind GE crop research is lowering the capital outlay required to meet our (wasteful) demand. Capitalism has a problem with the "expensive" old fashioned science of agriculture and GE is the (long term) money saving solution, just in that it's kinda inherently a corrupt interest, anyway, so I will happily watch it fail.

FWIW, because I'm an Australian soil erosion is a bit of a sore spot for me (we've had some serious problems with it here) and anything that steers us generally away from toying with the plant so we can neglect the plant's environment works in my book, the failure of GE to meet its crop goals is that to me.