I guess we are a real company now?
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@groo said in I guess we are a real company now?:
imagine something that developed by changing small bits at random until it works
yeah, I've seen some Discourse code too
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@masonwheeler said in I guess we are a real company now?:
Even if we know what the gene being inserted does, and manage to get it transferred in such a way that it will do what we want, we don't know what else it does, or how it will interact with all the rest of the DNA we inserted it into
The same argument applies to any random mutation or sexual recombination of chromosones, and so far no Godzilla
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@masonwheeler said in I guess we are a real company now?:
Even if we know what the gene being inserted does, and manage to get it transferred in such a way that it will do what we want, we don't know what else it does
Do you think there's any serious likelihood of The Happening happen if you put an antifreeze gene from a fish into a fruit? Or, less melodramatically, some kind of generic poison gas? Or even a toxin or something? The people who freak out about GMO foods seem to think this is not only within the realm of possibility but maybe even likely.
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@FrostCat said in I guess we are a real company now?:
@masonwheeler said in I guess we are a real company now?:
Even if we know what the gene being inserted does, and manage to get it transferred in such a way that it will do what we want, we don't know what else it does
Do you think there's any serious likelihood of The Happening happen if you put an antifreeze gene from a fish into a fruit? Or, less melodramatically, some kind of generic poison gas? Or even a toxin or something? The people who freak out about GMO foods seem to think this is not only within the realm of possibility but maybe even likely.
Well, considering that the intention of many (though not all) GMO agricultural projects is explicitly to create poisons in the form of crops that produce their own pesticides...
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@groo said in I guess we are a real company now?:
imagine something that developed by changing small bits at random until it works
On a more serious note, this tends to be what happens with code generated through evolution like mechanisms.
I remember reading about a process of building circuit boards, selecting and randomly mutating and recombining (i.e. simulating sexual reproduction) the best ones for the given goal from each generation. By the time something satisfactory came out it was crazy. There was a sub circuit that didn't touch the main part of the board, but taking it out stopped it working. Turned out that the EM interference from that part was essential in making the rest work correctly.
Now I'm going to have to search for that study and see how much I misremembered. It was really fascinating
Edit: found it
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@masonwheeler said in I guess we are a real company now?:
until they discovered that there are multiple gene sequences encoded on the same RNA
HIV. HIV and all encapsulated viruses are under extreme selection pressure for genome size. Every base counts, and that's very unusual. All the proteins are run off at once (in one giant "print statement") and then that protein cleaves itself into smaller functional ones, just to avoid having to make spaces between genes. It's fascinating, and a lot of our HIV drugs interfere with
@masonwheeler said in I guess we are a real company now?:
Even if we know what the gene being inserted does, and manage to get it transferred in such a way that it will do what we want, we don't know what else it does, or how it will interact with all the rest of the DNA we inserted it into. Mapping that out will still take decades of research, and until we've done that research, releasing such organisms into the ecosystem--and particularly into the food chain!--is reckless in the extreme.
I mean, this is what's happening all the time all around us. Sure, it's incredibly dangerous. But so is being alive, more or less. The system is up against thermodynamic constraints in every direction, and if any of the simple changes (one gene from a living organism to a different one) could produce species-level extinction events they would have already.
Hell, all spirulina ever produced(it's a health food) contains the several-gene cluster that produces microcystin which is incredibly liver-destroyingly nasty. The algae doesn't produce it when it's grown for human consumption as far as we can tell, but we have to check every couple batches just in case, because we have no idea what conditions prompt microcystin production.
All potatoes are related to the deadly nightshade, and can produce horrible paralytic poisons(still do, in the leaves and green bits of potatoes). Before the FDA got their act together, new potato varieties required no testing before being sold, and people died, more than once. New varieties need to be tested for the toxins we know they can make.
New transgenics are the same, but you also need to screen the new genes for allergenicity, under very strict standards. Wild peanuts wouldn't pass, for instance.
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@Adynathos said in I guess we are a real company now?:
the solution would be to "eat less", because forests are removed to make place for farms.
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@masonwheeler said in I guess we are a real company now?:
explicitly to create poisons in the form of crops that produce their own pesticides...
You're thinking of Bt corn or what have you, I think.
Bt is in the soil all the time, all around you. It's hilariously potent against insects, but you can eat a huge amount of it(grams). It's less poisonous than caffeine, and they were already spraying it on the crops. It's easier to have the crops make it themselves and better for the environment in terms of splashing pesticides around.
It's not a great idea because Bt-resistant pests evolved almost instantly, but it did lower pesticide use for a little while.
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@masonwheeler Are any of those poisons, ones that affect humans by the time they get to your table? My understanding is they're all aimed at, for example, insects.
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@AyGeePlus said in I guess we are a real company now?:
It's not a great idea because Bt-resistant pests evolved almost instantly, but it did lower pesticide use for a little while.
...and then they move on to other, stronger stuff. The arms race continues, and eventually the consumers (in a very literal sense, because this is food we're talking about) end up being the ones who lose.
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@masonwheeler said in I guess we are a real company now?:
and then they move on to other, stronger stuff.
I mean, they were going to do that anyway. It's only a matter of time. And 'strong' isn't a scalar here, you can switch to a different bacterial toxin with a different mode of action and undo all the Bt-resistant evolution without upping the human toxicity.
The real poster child for genetic engineering of crops is stuff like papaya ringspot virus. The engineered papaya can't be infected with the virus, so the virus went extinct in quite a few places. It's a solution that'll always work, and yields of non-transgenic papayas even go up because of herd immunity.
Producing the pesticides exactly where they're needed is always going to be a better solution than spraying the whole field, but it's no silver bullet. Easier on the butterflies, harder on the corn rootworm.
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@masonwheeler said in I guess we are a real company now?:
@FrostCat said in I guess we are a real company now?:
@masonwheeler said in I guess we are a real company now?:
No matter how much selective breeding you do, you can't accomplish that.
Bacterial plasmids do something vaguely like that all the time.
Very vaguely. It happens entirely at random, and there's no natural mechanism to do so deliberately.
Given bacteria tend not to have thinky-parts, it rather depends on what you mean by deliberately. I'm pretty sure you mean it in the "with conscious thought" way, but I'm gonna reply as if you didn't:
There are several mechanisms for horizontal gene transfer among bacteria, at least one of which can be considered "deliberate": conjugation, which is rather like the bacterial version of sex, except without needing to involve kids.
@masonwheeler said in I guess we are a real company now?:
@FrostCat said in I guess we are a real company now?:
So what? I mean, that's true, but it doesn't change what I said.
@masonwheeler said in I guess we are a real company now?:
It's different by "we're doing things that are literally impossible the way we (and nature) have been doing it since the beginning of time." Like taking genes from one species and deliberately grafting them into specific points on another species' genome. No matter how much selective breeding you do, you can't accomplish that.
That's what.
If you consider viruses to have species, then quite a number of them do that. That's why adenoviruses are popular in gene therapy research, for example.
@AyGeePlus said in I guess we are a real company now?:
Have you heard of the gene gun? You put DNA on tiny tungsten spheres and shoot them into plant tissues then grow them on media. If you're very lucky you get integration into the chromosome.
A lab I was (unfortunately only briefly) in at college did that, very neat. They were targeting mtDNA, IIRC.
@AyGeePlus said in I guess we are a real company now?:
@masonwheeler said in I guess we are a real company now?:
explicitly to create poisons in the form of crops that produce their own pesticides...
You're thinking of Bt corn or what have you, I think.
Bt is in the soil all the time, all around you. It's hilariously potent against insects, but you can eat a huge amount of it(grams). It's less poisonous than caffeine, and they were already spraying it on the crops. It's easier to have the crops make it themselves and better for the environment in terms of splashing pesticides around.
It's not a great idea because Bt-resistant pests evolved almost instantly, but it did lower pesticide use for a little while.
Now that's a troublesome acronym. There's more than one BT, and this one's really dangerous.
@masonwheeler said in I guess we are a real company now?:
@AyGeePlus said in I guess we are a real company now?:
It's not a great idea because Bt-resistant pests evolved almost instantly, but it did lower pesticide use for a little while.
...and then they move on to other, stronger stuff. The arms race continues, and eventually the consumers (in a very literal sense, because this is food we're talking about) end up being the ones who lose.
There are other means to manage resistance, such as cycling the pesticide used and creating havens for the susceptible population (to prevent the resistance genes becoming the only versions around).
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@Dreikin said in I guess we are a real company now?:
There's more than one BT, and this one's really dangerous.
Indeed. Users risk being pitymocked by the Daily Fail.
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@masonwheeler said in I guess we are a real company now?:
Mapping that out will still take decades of research
Yes and no. We can fairly easily map out what genes are present in a genome; it's just a computational problem now, and can be handled by running the right software on a suitably large cluster. We can also relatively easily look for places where there's interactions between the DNA and the RNA it produces. The real complications come when dealing with expression levels and gene networks. (Also, detailed 3D structures remain complicated, but most of the time people don't care very much.) Gene networks are incredibly complicated to deal with; I've seen the network map for metabolism in e coli and it has a crazy number of enzymes involved, some of which occur in multiple places (because they roll that way), and that's much simpler than for a complex organism like a yeast or amoeba. We can't solve the reaction equations on that sort of scale other than in the very vaguest terms, even when we have the correct rate parameters (which we mostly don't), so we end up using very coarse approximations in our simulations and reality ends up surprising us a lot…
Genetic engineering is hard. It's not hard because making a change is difficult (though that's not exactly easy). It's hard because there's a very large number of embuggerance factors.
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@dkf said in I guess we are a real company now?:
Genetic engineering is hard. It's not hard because making a change is difficult (though that's not exactly easy). It's hard because there's a very large number of embuggerance factors.
Exactly
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Congratulations on your assimilation to...The Microsoft Way™®©.
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@masonwheeler said in I guess we are a real company now?:
pesticides
Objection, you're being misleading. The pesticides in question are harmless to humans.
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@Jaloopa This is effective organization structure (assuming this is software house).
Basically each Project Managers can look after 6-10 projects, and they all reports to the C-level Officers.
And we all know that SA/AP/P all do the same things regardless of the job title...
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@Fox said in I guess we are a real company now?:
Objection, you're being misleading. The pesticides in question are harmless to humans.
Counter-objection, speculation, and biased speculation at that. Independent testing (ie. paid for by someone other than agribusiness interests) has a distinct tendency to arrive at different conclusions.
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@masonwheeler source?
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@groo said in I guess we are a real company now?:
@masonwheeler If we think our WTF code is hard to read, imagine something that developed by changing small bits at random until it works.
I can tell that you have never worked with me...
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@masonwheeler said in I guess we are a real company now?:
Exactly
Science is hard, let's go shopping!
Seriously though. If it can grow, that rules out a huge number of potential problems. It's weird that "does this organism produce a poison" is an easy question to answer, but "what does this organism eat?" is a hard question. Were not even sure how to feed most bacteria.
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@Fox said in I guess we are a real company now?:
The pesticides in question are harmless to humans.
Dose matters, as does method of exposure. OTOH, it's entirely possible that the BT toxin is effectively harmless to humans at doses seen in practice. Our biochemistry is quite a bit different to that of insects after all…
Also, I'm certain that it's safer than the organophosphates that it replaces. Those are nasty!
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@dkf said in I guess we are a real company now?:
I'm certain that it's safer than the organophosphates that it replaces. Those are nasty!
My eyeballs initially interpreted that last word as "tasty!"
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@flabdablet said in I guess we are a real company now?:
My eyeballs initially interpreted that last word as "tasty!"
Nerve poison? Yummy!
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@dkf said in I guess we are a real company now?:
Nerve poison? Yummy!
It might be ... nobody ever claimed the opposite ...
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@dkf said in I guess we are a real company now?:
@flabdablet said in I guess we are a real company now?:
My eyeballs initially interpreted that last word as "tasty!"
Nerve poison? Yummy!
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@cartman82 said in I guess we are a real company now?:
You have one guess at who is at the top.
Your Dom. Kneel.
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@lucas1 said in I guess we are a real company now?:
@NedFodder The best one is the "please don't print save the environment" which takes up more room and thus more paper if you need to print them out.
Now it uses more bytes, which uses more bandwidth, which uses more electricity. Not only does it use more electricity at your mail server, but at every switch, router and server between you and your destination. So that means literally more coal on the fire (since is still backwards like that and Nuc Laar is scary). So there's MORE pollution being dumped into the environment.
Not to mention that those extra bytes need to be stored, which compounds into needing bigger hard drives, which adds to you pollution footprint now (manufacturing) and later (e-waste disposal, which is actually just sending it to a third world country to be burned in a campfire).
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I wonder what other jokes I can make in this thread.
OMG GMO
Fuck it. I'm out.
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@flabdablet said in I guess we are a real company now?:
What would be even more amusing, is if he tried to have the bowel movement that produced in a library restroom.
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@Lorne-Kates just when I was hoping to get some insight on wether burning GMO whore corpses produces more pollution than organic whores...
Now I'll never know.
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@Lorne-Kates said in I guess we are a real company now?:
. So that means literally more coal on the fire (since is still backwards like that and Nuc Laar is scary).
Except how we have more nucular power than anyone else? Plus, natural gas is fracking friendly.
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@boomzilla said in I guess we are a real company now?:
we have more nucular power than anyone else
Those things really do pack an astonishing amount of pork into one barrel.
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@flabdablet I think that Iowa has more pigs than people. Mmmmmmmmmm...
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@masonwheeler said in I guess we are a real company now?:
Counter-objection, speculation, and biased speculation at that.
No, it isn't. Cry toxins have been proven to be safe for human consumption, as they, like most other proteins, are digested - broken down into harmless components - before they could pose any threat to the few types of human cells they're even effective at killing.
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@dkf said in I guess we are a real company now?:
Dose matters, as does method of exposure.
Well, yes, but the dose required to pose a threat is more than any sane human would be willing and able to eat, and the only way Cry toxins have been proven harmful to humans at all, in the blood stream, is completely inaccessible to the toxins unless you inject them directly or have a serious GI bleed, at which point you have more serious problems than some tiny crystals making you sick.
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@boomzilla said in I guess we are a real company now?:
I think that Iowa has more pigs than people.
It's hard to tell for sure, since both look so alike.
#IowaTrolling
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The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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@boomzilla said in I guess we are a real company now?:
Except how we have more nucular power than anyone else?
Not in proportion to your overall power production, you don't. I think the French are top of that particular pile.
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@dkf said in I guess we are a real company now?:
Not in proportion to your overall power production, you don't.
I'll bet that's why I said what I said.