Posted on 03/10/2002 12:38:04 PM PST by Phaedrus
The above shows what happens when we fool with genes. In nature, a plant would not have the toxin in every cell, it would have it just in certain cells, just as we have skin in certain parts of our bodies, bone in others and muscles in others. In nature, each cell only activates (although it has the entire genome of the individual) only the parts of the genome needed for that particular cell. However, because this plant has been genetically engineered, there is no control over what this new gene will do and therefore it is active in every cell.
You are correct, the highest count cited and detailed in sunshine;s post#110 of some 70,000 by Yuan's team :
Yuan avoids calling the index entries genes, preferring to call them transcript clusters, .
The "classical" definition of a gene is a series of DNA ending at a stop codon. Even though both Celera and the Human Genome Project used this "classical" definition, they still were unable to count the same number of genes and what is much worse - only 1/5 of the genes identified by them were the same in both lists! (again see sunshine's post#110).
Clearly genes are very complicated. Clearly it is not so easy to define what a gene is. What is pretty obvious though from all these articles - even those who try to debunk Commoner's - is that there are interrelations within the genome which we do not have the vaguest idea about.
Well, I am not much of a soybean eater, I go for nice red meat. I leave soybeans to the vegetarians who to seem to have lots of medical problems, but that is just MHO. Your argument that "It works" would be a good response, except for the problem of unintended consequences. You may get soybeans, they may be tasty, but you do not know what side effects there may be to them. This is BTW the reason why medical drugs take so long to be approved - thorough testing is needed to be sure that the side effects are found. To see the side effect of your wonderful plants see Andrew's post#78.
This suggests to me that perhaps the plant knows far better what it's doing than we do. For what it's worth, of course . . .
A strange reaction, p, seeing I wasn't trying to 'intimidate' you. Sorta weird, -- in fact.
However, attacks on betty boop, or anyone else for that matter, will not be tolerated on this thread.
I attacked the phony philosophy of Voegelin, and how BB uses his gibbersh words to advance her own anti-secular agenda. - By an invitation, a 'flag', to comment.
Now, -- I suppose that if you find that intolerable, you could complain to the mods of being abused and perhaps get my comments pulled. -- Or, -- you could mind your manners and play nice.
Suit yourself.
Since he was writing for the layman, if he intended to present the subject honestly, Commoner should have included in his article much of what Bailey presented. But then, I knew when I first started reading Commoner's article that the famous leftwinger was not to be completely trusted.
Commoner or no Commoner, my concerns are not allayed. These processes are very dicey. While transgenic plants appear safe, no one can credibly say the same for the work being done on higher life forms.
BARRY COMMONER: 1969Many people don't realize where the roots of folks like Commoner and others pushing the apocalyptic vision are buried and how the entire idea of ecological disaster that would bring an end to civilization as we know it unless we act RIGHT NOW because to wait to see if there really is a crisis will cause us to be too late, now an accepted image, was manufactured by a small set of largely socialist activists back in the 1960s. Even in the 1960s and shortly thereafter people were unaware of this. Here's an interesting description of this from pages 56-57 of The Apocalyptics:
By 1969, the ecological "crisis" was part of the repertoire of many of those who were considered enlightened. Indeed, Senator Edmund [crybaby] Muskie, a major Democratic Party contender for the next presidential nomination, had made the apocalypse his own. He launched a series of Senate hearings to investigate the charge that American industrial technology was destroying life on earth; and one of his most startling witnesses was biologist Barry Commoner of Washington University in St. Louis. Commoner had been predicting environmental disaster ever since the early 1060s, and because he was a scientist he had aroused widespread interest. But this was his first appearance in America's most prestigious political forum. He testified before Muskie, accompanied by W. H. Ferry, Vice-President of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institution, who was also an apocalyptic.(60) Their testimony was reported in the New York Times of April 28, 1969, under the headline "Technology and Environment: Senators Hear Gloomy Appraisals." The word "gloomy" did not quite capture the revolutionary nature of their testimony, in either its scientific or its political dimension. Here is how the reporter, Robert H. Phelps, presented the story quite accurately:Is the United States set on an irreversible course that will destroy the natural base on which it has built the highest standard of living in the world?It was not until 1976, in a book entitled The Poverty of Power, that commoner explicitly identified the political solution he envisioned. To survive, he said, our society would have to repudiate its present productive system and substitute a system organized in harmony with the global ecosystem using the second law of thermodynamics as its guiding standard: "...it may be time to view the faults of the U.S. capitalist economic system," he wrote, "from the vantage point of a socialist alternative." (62)
This is one of the questions that the Senate Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Affairs, headed by Senator Edmund S. [crybaby] Muskie, has been looking into for months. While at least another round of hearings is scheduled, the answers so far are pessimistic.
The gloomiest appraisals of all came last week from Barry Commoner, director of the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems, at Washington University in St. Louis, and W. H. Ferry, vice-president of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, Santa Barbara, Calif..
Both witness said that nothing less than a change in the political and social system, including revision of the Constitution, was necessary to save the country from destroying its natural environment.
Both agreed, too, that the peril came from uncontrolled technology.; In the process of creating new goods and services, they said, technology is destroying the country's "capital" of land, water and other resources as well as injuring people.
Dr. Commoner said, "Our present system of technology is not merely consuming this capital, but threatening--probably within the next 50 years--to destroy it irreparably."
Mr. Ferry...said, "We may have passed the point of no return in some areas."
Dr. Commoner cited the success of inorganic fertilizers, high-compression automobile engines and insecticides as examples of "progress" that damages the environment....
Referring to Dr. Commoner's testimony, Mr. Ferry asked: "What good will color television in every room and outposts on the moon be to the grandchildren, if their air is unbreathable, their water undrinkable and their dwellings half buried in their own debris?...."
Mr. Ferry offered what he called a "wildly absurd" proposal for a two-year moratorium [remember those?] on most technological research and innovation. He suggested creation of an international body to halt pollution of the oceans [they've finally achieved this with the equally spurious but equally suitable for hysterical exploitation "threat" of global warming] and a national ecological authority with wide powers over all major construction and technological projects [OSHA (1970) and many other regulatory agencies soon followed].
Noting that such proposals might be unconstitutional, Mr. Ferry suggested that the Constitution be completely revised....
Agreeing with Mr. Ferry, Dr. Commoner said...the problems are so profound that they call for "not a new legislative base, but a new constitutional one."
In response, Senator [crybaby] Muskie, referring to technology as "the modern Trojan Horse," told Dr. Commoner and Mr. Ferry that their proposals, even if they served no other purpose, would "open a lot of eyes that are still closed to the problem." This news story reveals the degree to which apocalyptic thought had penetrated the highest levels of the political culture of 1969. While Senator [crybaby] Muskie was careful to disassociate himself form proposals for "revising" the Constitution, he nonetheless had given Commoner and Ferry one of the most important political platforms in the land and praised their testimony as enlightening.
Commoner's conviction that the Constitution stood in the way of solutions to ecological problems was paralleled by his conviction that "our system of production" stood in the way of such solutions. That same year, he was invited to contribute a paper for the 13th National Conference of the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO. The conclusion of a lengthy analysis of the same general problems he was discussing above can be cited here:Our technology is enormously successful in producing material goods, but too often is disastrously incompatible with the natural environmental systems that support not only human life, but technology itself. Moreover, these technologies [remember, genetic engineering didn't exist then but as a gleam in someone's eye--Commoner is just trying to cram this into his bag of portending disaster and get control of it] are now so massively embedded in our system of industrial and agricultural production that any effort to make them conform to the demands of the environment [as given voice by Commoner, Ehrlich, et al] will involve serious economic dislocations. If, as I believe, environmental pollution is a sign of major incompatibilities between our system of production and the environmental system that supports it [see the Soviet Union for incompatibility between government system and the environment], then, if we are to survive, we must successfully confront these economic obligations, however sever and challenging to our social concepts they bay be. (61)
In 1978, Commoner was identified by Rae Goodell in an MIT study of scientists who dominated the media as a "guerrilla" and one of the most "visible scientists" in the country.(63) And in 1979, he abandoned his primary identity as a scientist and founded a new leftist party in the United States, called the Citizens Party, which would direct its efforts to achieving grater government control of industry in the name of the environment. In 1980, he ran for President, as the candidate of that party.
In 1977, two legal historians got a serious shock. They were James E. Krier of UCLA and Edmund Ursin of the University of San Diego, authors of a scholarly book called Pollution and Policy. Both were themselves strong supporters of the "environmental" movement, their work had been generously funded by the Environmental Protection Agency, and they were analyzing the development of public policy in the realm of air pollution. When they sought to identify the origins of the "great environmental crisis" that had suddenly swept the U.S. with force during the years of 1969-1970, they found they were unable to do so. The reason, they said with some bewilderment, was that there had never been a "great environmental crisis."And then there was the great environmental crisis; it most of all is a mystery. That, like crises in the past, this one contributed to further intervention seems unquestionable, but there similarity ends. Crises in the past concerned particular pollution episodes and generated, if anything, rather focused response. But that was not the case with the great environmental crisis of 1969-1970. Its roots were not in any specific cause, and it spawned not a narrow response but an entire movement (or the movement spawned it; the connection is hardly clear)--a general "environmental consciousness." Some observers appear to attribute the new crisis to the same forces largely behind the old; growth in population, production, consumption, affluence, and pollution. Surely these factors played a part, but more must also have been at work. For this crisis had no episode to trigger it (unless one lays it all on a few oil spills) and, in any event, if growth factors were the cause, why did not the crisis, and the movement, occur sooner--or later? We cannot answer that question ; we do not know what "more" was at work. We only know that this new crisis was different. Those of the past were crises in action; they merely signified that government should do more of the same, take that next small step in policy. The great environmental crisis was rather a crisis in thought....In this sense, the environmental crisis may simply have been part of a larger whole, a general "loss of citizen confidence in governmental institution...generating a crisis of its own." Whether the environmental crisis arose from this larger sense of unrest, or from efforts of crusaders finally bearing fruit, or from growth, or the need for anew issue now that the "urban crisis" had quietly died [remember that one?', or from all or none of these is an open question.(133) [Emphasis added by E.E.]
Efron's book goes on to thoroughly document the factors behind what the authors above called a "mystery". It's one of the best I've seen at laying bare the origins of the "environmental movement".
I heard an interesting, related fact the other day. in a similar way, "organic" vegetables can be more toxic than vegetables treated with chemical insecticides. Chemical insecticides can be washed off of vegetables. But plants selected by organic farmers are plants that are high in naturally occurring insecticides. These naturally occurring insecticides can't be washed off; they permeate the plant.
Commoner is an evil left-winger. So is Louis Lapham the editor of Harpers.
1. There are scientists in existence today who are deeply distrustful of, or even hostile to, science as well as technology. They are guided by the belief that Western industrial civilization [or Western science/technology/medicine] will, if not arrested and reversed, destroy life on earth.People who close their eyes to demonstrations of someone's M.O. spanning decades are people who will be suckered yet again.
2. The idea of the apocalypse has greater power over such scientists than any attachment to the disciplines of science, and in the name of that idea they are entirely willing to reject those disciplines. Even when they are fully aware that the known data do not support that idea, they do not tolerate rational limits on their knowledge. They aggressively convert not-knowing into a kind of knowing, a pseudo-knowing that Myrdal in one instance called "quasi-learnedness" and Nagel in another describes as an "unenlightening" substitute for "genuine knowledge." The spurious knowledge is always used to rationalize their expectation of catastrophe. The characteristics of the spurious knowledge--vacant abstractions, arbitrary extrapolations, conclusions based on inadequate or nonexistent data; the rejection of logic; and the incorporation of moral attitudes into the very core of their "scientific" thought--are so standardized that they constitute a pseudo-scientific paradign. It will be called, henceforth, the "apocalyptic paradigm".
3. From the moment that this "apocalyptic paradigm" appeared, "traditional" scientists ahve been clashing with the apocalyptic scientists--actually clashing over the "apocalyptic paradigm" itself [the response of the apocalyptics is usually something along the line of "attack the messenger when you cannot refute the message"].
--p. 57, The Apocalyptics, Edith Efron.
Whoever it was above that commented to the effect that a clock is right twice a day may be right with regard to Commoner in this instance. I am aware that Commoner and his pet environmentalism are left-wing and that I am not. But, again, he has raised concerns that I share for reasons above-noted. But effective rebuttal, to me, means countering what he has written and not the man himself.
I should not be doing this early in the morning.
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