I agree with Neil deGrasse Tyson

He’s been catching some flak for his comments on GMO foods, but I agree whole-heartedly with what he says here (except I don’t think “non-perennial” means what he seems to think it means…astronomers, geez).

Ten days ago, this brief clip of me was posted by somebody.

It contains my brief [2min 20sec] response to a question posed by a French journalist, after a talk I gave on the Universe. He found me at the post-talk book signing table. (Notice the half-dozen ready & willing pens.) The clip went mildly viral (rising through a half million right now) with people weighing in on whether they agree with me or not.

Some comments…

1) The journalist posted the question in French. I don’t speak French, so I have no memory of how I figured out that was asking me about GMOs. Actually I do know some French words like Bordeaux, and Bourgogne, and Champagne, etc.

2) Everything I said is factual. So there’s nothing to disagree with other than whether you should actually “chill out” as I requested of the viewer in my last two words of the clip.

3) Had I given a full talk on this subject, or if GMOs were the subject of a sit-down interview, then I would have raised many nuanced points, regarding labeling, patenting, agribusiness, monopolies, etc. I’ve noticed that almost all objections to my comments center on these other issues.

4) I offer my views on these nuanced issues here, if anybody is interested:

a- Patented Food Strains: In a free market capitalist society, which we have all “bought” into here in America, if somebody invents something that has market value, they ought to be able to make as much money as they can selling it, provided they do not infringe the rights of others. I see no reason why food should not be included in this concept.

b- Labeling: Since practically all food has been genetically altered from nature, if you wanted labeling I suppose you could demand it, but then it should be for all such foods. Perhaps there could be two different designations: GMO-Agriculture GMO-Laboratory.

c- Non-perennial Seed Strains: It’s surely legal to sell someone seeds that cannot reproduce themselves, requiring that the farmer buy seed stocks every year from the supplier. But when sold to developing country — one struggling to become self-sufficient — the practice is surely immoral. Corporations, even when they work within the law, should not be held immune from moral judgement on these matters.

d- Monopolies are generally bad things in a free market. To the extent that the production of GMOs are a monopoly, the government should do all it can to spread the baseline of this industry. (My favorite monopoly joke ever, told by Stephen Wright: “I think it’s wrong that the game Monopoly is sold by only one company”)

e- Safety: Of course new foods should be tested for health risks, regardless of their origin. That’s the job of the Food and Drug Administration (in the USA). Actually, humans have been testing food, even without the FDA ,since the dawn of agriculture. Whenever a berry or other ingested plant killed you, you knew not to serve it to you family.

f- Silk Worms: I partly mangled my comments on this. Put simply, commercial Silk Worms have been genetically modified by centuries of silk trade, such that they cannot survive in the wild. Silk Worms currently exist only to serve the textile industry. Just as Milk Cows are bred with the sole purpose of providing milk to humans. There are no herds of wild Milk Cows terrorizing the countryside.

5) If your objection to GMOs is the morality of selling non-perennial seed stocks, then focus on that. If your objection to GMOs is the monopolistic conduct of agribusiness, then focus on that. But to paint the entire concept of GMO with these particular issues is to blind yourself to the underlying truth of what humans have been doing — and will continue to do — to nature so that it best serves our survival. That’s what all organisms do when they can, or would do, if they could. Those that didn’t, have gone extinct extinct.

In life, be cautious of how broad is the brush with which you paint the views of those you don’t agree with.

Respectfully Submitted

-NDTyson

London suggestions

I’m landing at Heathrow at the appropriately ungodly hour of 6am on Thursday, 7 August. I need to check in to the WHC in Oxford sometime that evening. That means that there is that whole day stretching in front of me. So a few questions:

  • I’ve been to that part of the world a few times, and I know the trains make it dead easy to get anywhere…but if anyone familiar with the lines can spell out for me ahead of time what I have to do to get from Heathrow to Oxford, it would be appreciated. (I know, just go to transportation, find an information desk.)

  • What is there to do in that neighborhood, anyway? If anyone wants to meet up for lunch or something, I’d be happy to…but I know it’s a weekday workday, so I expect nothing.

I am looking forward to 9 days in the UK!

When will we wake up?

We had organic solvents dumped into West Virginia rivers thanks to lack of regulatory concern. We’ve got Republicans rah-rah-rahing for fracking, which risks our aquifers…and of course, they want to run the leaky ol’ XL pipeline across our midwestern farmland. And now 400,000 people in Ohio are without drinking water, and are draining the markets in Michigan of bottled water. What’s causing this problem?

The annual algae blooms have been concentrated around the western end of Lake Erie. The algae growth is fed by phosphorous mainly from farm fertilizer runoff and sewage treatment plants, leaving behind toxins that can kill animals and sicken humans.

Somehow, we seem oblivious to the fact that we can’t poison our environment and also have a good quality of life. You can’t just say, “I’ve got good water now,” and then neglect the infrastructure that maintains that water, or worse yet, charge off and let people profit by wrecking it.

Satire done right

Mark Steel praises our new-found tolerance for child murderers.

In recent years most of humanity has become proudly more tolerant of groups who once seemed to be on the margins of society. But until now it’s still been seen as acceptable to be offensive about one minority, which is the child murdering community.

At last it seems the mood is changing, and finally we’re beginning to hear the child murderers’ point of view.

For example one brave soul, prepared to speak out, is spokesman Uri Drome, who explained on Radio 4 yesterday that although the Israeli government bombed a school that several children died in, the deaths are clearly the fault of the people who live in the areas being bombed.

What a refreshing change from that tired old thinking that always blames murder on the murderer.

Oh, so that’s what ethicists do

So OKCupid has been doing psychological experiments on its users. Big deal! Here’s what they think of that.

Alex Goldman: Have you thought about bringing in, say, like an ethicist to, to vet your experiments?

 

Christian Rudder, founder of OkCupid: To wring his hands all day for a hundred thousand dollars a year?

Sweet gig. Could they do occasional thumb-twiddling to change it up a bit? Or play Angry Birds on their cell phone?

2 + 2 = 17, for certain values of 2

A while back, I responded to Behe/Luskin’s claim that his model proving the impossibility of evolution of chloroquinone resistance was vindicated. I pointed out (as did Ken Miller) that showing that a particular trait required multiple point mutations did not affect the probability in the naive way that Behe and Luskin calculated — in particular, it did not require that the mutations be simultaneous. We’re familiar with a great many known mutations that involve multiple sequential hits to have their effect. I mentioned the work on steroid receptor evolution, and how cancer is an amazing example of the power of the accumulation of sequential variants.

Behe fired back, issuing a challenge to ‘show my numbers’. If he could have said anything to confirm that he was obliviously ignoring my point, that was it, and so I blew him a raspberry and ignored his challenge. I wasn’t arguing with his numbers, and we could even use his very own set of numbers — my point was in the operation he was doing with those numbers. His assumption is that you must have two mutations occur simultaneously, in the same individual, so that you simplistically multiply the probabilities together to get an improbably low frequency. I’m saying that’s invalid: these mutations can happen independently, they can accumulate to some frequency in the population, and then a second mutation can occur.

Now Larry Moran has carried through on the calculations. Using the known data on mutation rates, and throwing away Behe’s bogus demand that everything occur in the very same instant, he shows that the evolution of chloroquinone resistance ought to be rare, but not at all impossible, and with frequencies that are in the ballpark of what is observed.

Furthermore, Moran describes a paper that quantifies the presence of malaria strains in the population that contain pieces of the resistant combinations and that further describe the sequential series of mutational events that led to the most resistant strains.

All of the strains (except D17) are found in naturally occurring Plasmodium populations and the probable pathways to each of the major chloroquine resistant strains are shown. It takes at least four sequential steps with one mutation becoming established in the population before another one occurs.

None of the mutations occurred simultaneously as Behe claimed in his book.

The intelligent design creationists are somehow still crowing victory. I don’t quite understand how — their premises have been demolished, they’ve been cut off at the knees, but I guess their followers are easily bamboozled if they shout “math!” loud enough. Even if the math is wrong.

It’s a fair fight, but it’s hard fought

Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar seems to be doing all the right things in congress — I’ll definitely be voting for her again, and also for Al Franken. All of you from states with less progressive representation can’t imagine how good it feels to actually have politicians in office who do good, rather than providing embarrassing soundbites. One of her latest efforts is a bill to close loopholes in background checks for gun sales.

For women, domestic violence is the greatest risk factor associated with guns. According to Everytown, “The presence of a gun in a domestic violence situation makes it five times more likely that a woman will be murdered,” and some Center for Disease Control statistics suggest more than 50 percent of female homicides are attributable to intimate partner violence.

Klobuchar’s bill, the Protecting Domestic Violence and Stalking Victims Act, would close gaping holes in background check laws that don’t bar gun ownership by abusive dating partners rather than spouses, and don’t incorporate many stalking crimes.

This is a popular bill — polls show that the electorate, even the responsible gun owning electorate, thinks it’s a good idea to keep guns out of the hands of your local angry bully. But as you might guess, the NRA opposes it, and they’ve got a few politicians in their pocket who’ve also been told to kill the bill, or similar bills in their home states.

And that’s where it gets interesting and uncomfortable. Democrats are fighting back. Not Klobuchar directly, but three states are running an ad right now to highlight the use of guns in domestic abuse — three states with three states with Republican shills for the NRA.

The thing is that the ad they’re running portrays a fairly common domestic abuse scenario, and it is terrifying. It was a punch in the gut for me, and I’m a guy who’s never been in this kind of situation, ever, so I’m warning you: if you’ve ever had a stalker or abuser, this is an extremely potent video.

Maybe this is what we need to do more of — slap people in the face with the horror of what our irresponsible gun policies do to people. My one concern is that there may actually be people who sympathize with the man in this ad, rather than the woman.