> > Furthermore - we have already changed our food chain
> > through the process of selective breeding
>
> The difference between relatively harmless selective breeding

Selective bredding reduces diversity, as Jim noted. Not too much hard done
in many cases as long as you retain the base stock for when things go wrong.
NZ radiata pines are bred from Monterey pines. KiwiFruit / Zespri bred from
inedible chinese plant. Most all dogs bred from wolves or similar (most in
quite recent times).

> and genetic modification is enormous. Some people seem
> not to have grasped the significance of moving genetic code
> between species, something that could never happen in nature.

What you say is in large part true but you have to be wary of blanket
generalisations as the apologists for whatever you are railing against at
the time will use them as amunition when they can show they are wrong (even
if what you are saying more or less nakes sense). In fact gene transfer can
and does take place to some extent in nature. The important point is, if it
does then it is because "nature" "allows" it to. Regardless of whether the
"allowing" is due to specific design by persons/beings lnown or unknown or
by zillions of years of evolutionary
try-it-and-see-and-throw-away-the-disasters the end result is that nature
largely allows what will not cause major disasters. In the latter case
(evolution and natural selection) the "reason" is that paths that lead to
vast disaster are evolved out by the disasters deselecting the "successful"
candidates.

With GM the gene insertion occurs in manners which are generally not known
in nature. The pre-eminent genetic transfer "inserter" is in fact a natural
sequence which has been isolated and fine tuned due to its efficiacy. This
is the Monsanto patented (what a surprise) S-35 promoter sequence which is
derived from thr Cauliflower Mosaic Virus. THE standard GM test is to look
for S35 sequences using PCR. CMV is most at home in the Brassica family but
S35 is rather good at a range of cross species transfers.

> One of the claims I
> find totally unpalatable (as unpalatable as supermarket tomatoes)
> is that "we can feed the world with better crops".

I am sure that GE CAN do great good. I am equally sure that we are way way
out of our depths and that, driven by all the standard forms of self
interest, we are playing with miraculous machinery with very sharp blades
that we have far too little knowledge of. The programming language has been
decoded but there are feedback paths that we have no idea about the
finctions and connection points of. The machinery driven by the program
drives machinery which interacts with the program. The machines make end
products which interact with the machinery and the program. Which pieces of
code live nearby in the program affect how a given piece of code works. The
program error corrects itself except when it decides not to. When it decides
not to it goes out of its way to destroy itself. There is lots of program
material that appears to mumble to itself but it has information content
characteristics that indicate that it does things but we don't know what
they are. We can find pieces of code that produce machines that produce end
products that we want and when we add them to other programs they often more
or less do what we expect them to. Quite often we can insert the new code in
the location in the new program that we want it to be in but when we do it
sometimes interacts in ways we don't expect. It can also interact at some
unknown future time when triggered by some factor we are not aware of - this
can be stress or temperature or too much or too litle water or some
machinery or products arriving that we were not expecting. Sometimes (often
in fact) things don't get put where we expected them to get put, or they
move all by themse;ves or there are multiple copies put in interesting
places. Whe this happens anything may happen in the program and sometimes
almost anything does. If the program ever happens to say "destroy the world"
or just "wipe out all of this given species" nobody should be very
surprised.

> This ignores the
> fact that there is enough food to go around but tinpot regimes and
> civil wars put a stop to the even distribution of it.

Fat cat westerners (like me) are a bigger hurdle.
GE could still help. but that's unlikely to be the major driver behind it.

> Bottom line is what
> it's always been - money.

Standard list: Money, sex, power, fame.
Sex seems to be missing out on this occasion.

> Even at the amateur gardener level there
> are already suspicions that seed is modified so that (a) the plants
> grown from it are sterile, so you have buy a whole new lot next season
> and (b) that the seeds and "recommended" fertiliser (made of course
> by the same company) must be used together, as there's something
> in the fertiliser that is missing from the seed

Nah - its just dud seeds - so far anyway :-)


        Russell McMahon

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