that would ordinarily kill a plant. Instead, these plants absorb it, the pesticide can't be all washed off, and people consume it.

And the long term consequences of this exposure are unknown, in part because the consumption of GMO's in the population can't be tracked.

If there is an outbreak, for example, of salmonella, epidemiologists can study the victims and see what foods they have recently consumed. The same thing couldn't happen if, in the general population, there were allergic reactions to GMO's that hadn't been detected before the GMO was put on the market.

Doctors wouldn't know if a GMO were responsible because people don't know what GMO's they're consuming.

Not pesticides, thank you.

However, there are a lot of GMOs in addition to those. Many the developers aren't taking to market until they take the time to redevelop them by traditional means because of the fear factor associated with GMOs. (In some cases the GMOs would probably save 10s or 100s of thousands of lives or serious ailments, but hey, it's just another decade of these problems.)

Note that many of these herbicides are very commonly used prior to planting and around houses. 2,4-D is probably the most widely used herbicide in the US. You spray for weeds, whether the sidewalk or a field or the side of the road or your lawn and it's probably 2,4-D. The dose you'd get from that is far larger than the dose you'd get from eating the food.

The researchers are being a bit disingenuous, as well. 2,4-D is a possible carcinogen. Which is to say, it hasn't been shown to not be a carcinogen. That goes for most things, but if you're into the precautionary principle come hell or high water, then that's your description. And that's what an international organization with members that into the PP are stuck with. In the case of glyphosate, the government organization the international organization cited (this was news perhaps 4-6 months back) had no purely "possible" category. There were carcinogens, probable or possible carcinogens, and non-carcinogens. While glyphosate, the governmental organization said, wasn't shown to be a carcinogen, neither was it shown to be completely risk free.

are specifically GMO'd to be grown using those herbicides. Nobody's having fainting spells over golden rice with extra vitamin A.

especially grapes, apples, strawberries, pears, and celery.

?1429744087

....so we just let the bugs have hem.

We may try a pure Mineral OIl Spray Treatment next Spring.

I also found out that there are varieties of Peaches that fruit very early. (July 4th)
Gonna give those a try too.

After July 4th, it is usually too hot to work the garden.

The Rocky Mountain locust was taken to extinction through interrupting its life cycle.
http://www.hcn.org/issues/243/13695

We have bird houses surrounding and in the middle of our 2 acre plot. Would love to use chickens and ducks on them too.

The successful Peach growers here use poison in the Spring, and have planted early fruiting species
that avoid the heat and blight of prolonged, high humidity Falls.
My 2 Peach trees are now 7 years old, mature, healthy, and beautiful....just can't make any Peaches
that last through the last few droughts & heat waves.

We've going to plant two more Early Fruiting trees in the Fall.

Two years ago, we had a weird Summer with early Fall cooling, and we got some amazingly good peaches,
so I know the trees are OK.

We have free range chickens, and they do a great job
on ticks, fleas, chiggers and other pests as long as we keep our grass short.

That is what I've been saying all along. Without labeling, there is no such thing as long term safety research.

Journal of Medicine article are saying is that they need to track the use of GMO's in the foods that have them.

Organic foods have nothing to do with this.

and it makes sense.

If people are having allergic reactions, but they don't know what was in the food they consumed, then the epidemiologists won't be able to track the GMO's and make the connection.

of said item at the office as long as the person still has their store receipt they can backtrack to the store and go from there back to who provided it to the store.
That way its easier down the road to get consumer labeling requirements passed down the road because then there would be evidence to support there need.

a detailed inventory on their computers thats updated with every purchase of produce that is made and it goes back for atleast a year or two and they use it to estimate what they need order and their suppliers also keep records so if anything I would say just mandate that all grocery stores as well as fruit companies that can their fruit and veggies for consumers track "all" their produce in that manner both GMO and organic.
The side bonus is it could help reduce the numbers of deaths that happen every year due to salmonella poisoning from produce.

scientist says scientist are wrong - and it is true

but if scientist are right - then they are wrong - then they are right

omg

Only corporate PR departments are qualified to tell us what "science" actually is!

If your concern is herbicides, label the herbicides that were used. While you're at it, label the pesticides too. Because more risky pesticides are used in far greater quantities in industrial organic farming, yet somehow people think they're safer for humans and healthier (when there is no evidence for either).

And anticipating someone claiming that organic farming can't be industrial: You're wrong.

There is an intersection between organic and agroecological approaches to farming (they're not the same, some ideas employed in organic farming are wooly-headed), so we'd expect organic farming to have less environmental negatives. But it's frankly silly to imagine something is safer and better for human health because it's organic.

So if you want to label things relevant to human health, label the thing itself and do so consistently, not some associated thing because you're caught up in the wooly-headed cult of nature of the middle-classes.

Considering that every herbicide that becomes popular causes resistance to that herbicide to emerge, the constant deployment of this argument as if it was a damning point against GMOs is specious. The popularity of glysophate is contingent on its replacement of prior, more harmful herbicides.


All of which said, I support labeling of GMOs if a majority wants it. Because even though I think it's informed by scientific illiteracy and naturalistic fallacies, I support the right of people to make their own stupid consumer choices.

"some ideas employed in organic farming are "wooly-headed"

I've never seen that expression used on DU.
What exactly do you mean by "wooly-headed"?


Can you point to some peer reviewed, long term studies published in legitimate Scientific Journals
that detail long term effects of GMOs on Human Beings?
.
.
NO?
You can't?
.
.
.
because there aren't ANY.


....because GMOs were approved by POLITICIANS who were told by Monsanto that GMOs were practically the same thing as natural food....
So without long term (or short term) studies, our "politicians" "approved" GMOs, and
because, after listening to Monsanto, they agree that GMOs were "close enough"...and APPROVED them.


BTW: I believe the use of GMOs along with the increase of herbicides in our food supply to be INSANE.

Last edited Sun Aug 23, 2015, 07:46 AM - Edit history (12)

that detail long term effects of the Hayward cultivar of kiwifruit, a natural mutant that arose in the 20th century and is now the most popular kiwifruit cultivar in the world? Long term studies that detail long term health effects of the countless lineages of food plant derived by mutation breeding (bathing plants in radiation and mutagens to produce mutations) that are widely sold as "organic" produce?

...
No?
...
You can't?
.
.
.
because there aren't ANY

Ironically, there are in fact some for most GMOs.

The rank foolishness of this demand and the thinking behind it is the failure to realise that the criteria used for risk evaluation here is applicable to everything else you eat, and everything else fails to meet the same goddamn demand. There is nothing peculiar in a categorical sense about lineages developed using precise gene engineering techniques. They're indistinguishable from natural organisms at a molecular level.

ALL DNA in all living things is just various arrangements of the same 4 amino acids. All arrangements that produce a viable organism (one that can reproduce) can arise out of natural evolutionary processes. This means that all putative "GMOs" represent lineages that could come about by the same natural processes that produced every species on earth. Our intervention only ensures that they arise now, rather than at some random time in a random walk through the phenotypic phase space.

They're almost indistinguishable from their parent lineages apart from a few genes and hence traits being different from prior generations. Just like mutation bred lineages, just like hybrids, which is, like, ALL of our food supply. Because that's how natural evolution, a process we've harnessed for the entire 10,000 year history of agriculture works. Random mutations in the genes arise and are distributed through the population of food plants by hybridization or cloning.

We don't put new, "unnatural" things in GMOs, we just change the sequence of some amino acids on the genome, just like nature does, naturally. This applies to so-called "transgenics" too. Any mutation brought around by inserting a short sequence of DNA from another species somewhere on an enormous DNA molecule CAN ARISE THROUGH NATURAL SELECTION. There is nothing materially or fundamentally unnatural about it and no reason whatsoever to imagine it represents heightened risk, outside of the allele-coded traits it intentionally changes. The amino acids in bacterial DNA and the amino acids in Elephant DNA are exactly the same molecules. All life uses the same alphabet.

A typical natural mutation goes to market with no such safety testing, whereas it takes up to 10 years for a typical food GMO to reach market because of precautionary safety testing regulation that already applies an higher standard to precisely engineered plants for no good reason.

And when 20 billion people have routinely eaten a GMO over 2 decades without any clear long-term negatives arising, that's a pretty huge gorram sample of test subjects telling you it's safe. Inventing new safety protocols for foods that are not categorically different from past foods because you don't understand that genetically engineering changes are no different from natural mutations that happen all the time and have been exploited by humans throughout our history without safety testing, is the result of scientific illiteracy, woolly-headed thinking and naturalistic fallacies. One of the most basic requirements of scientific and more broadly analytic thinking is the requirement to apply the same logical tests consistently to everything with the same features, where in this case the features in question are putative potential risks.

Its almost like if we created synthetic water and a bunch of scientific illiterates started fretting about the health effects even though it doesn't make a damn difference whether we assemble the two hydrogen and one oxygen molecule ourselves or they randomly combine. It's still exactly the same thing at a molecular level.

Your stated "belief" and scientific, analytic reasoning are directly at odds. So that belief in the "insanity" of GMOs is akin to the religious convictions of someone who thinks the earth is flat. Its an article of faith, founded on an ignorance of science, an unwillingness to learn the science and a fear of what you don't understand.

Last edited Sun Aug 23, 2015, 07:40 PM - Edit history (1)

started fretting about the health effects even though it doesn't make a damn difference whether we assemble the two hydrogen and one oxygen molecule ourselves or they randomly combine. It's still exactly the same thing at a molecular level."

The same thing is happening now with sugar produced from GMO sugar beets. The sugar is exactly the same as that produced by non GMO sugar beets or cane, but some want it labeled. It's exactly the same molecule.

why would you 'fight' against a Label on food??

"All of which said, I support labeling of GMOs if a majority wants it. Because even though I think it's informed by scientific illiteracy and naturalistic fallacies, I support the right of people to make their own stupid consumer choices. "

What I object to is the misinformed and illogical thinking behind that demand and its more serious consequences like crop bans in Europe and the attacks on Golden Rice in South East Asia. People are willing to jeopardize food security and allow people to go blind by blocking the nutritional supplement that would stop it because of the same specious arguments against GMOs qua GMOs and the panic-mongering of wooly-thinking nature-worshiping suburbanites in developed countries. So I make an effort to get people to educate themselves when the topic comes up.

...sold it to the USA for BILLIONS, and told the GIs that it was "safe".
Excuse me if I don't trust this one.

BTW: Do you know how long it was between exposure to Agent Orange, and the cancers started to appear?

I also noticed you FAILED to profuse your long term, per reviewed, Scientific REsearch published in a legitimate journal showing that GM products and natural produce are the same,
or that GM produce is safe to eat.

I can produce about a Million Year long test of Kiwi Fruit that says it is safe to eat.

You also FAILED to explain what you mean by "Wooley-Headed Thinking".
Please Proceed.

Last edited Mon Aug 24, 2015, 09:10 AM - Edit history (4)

"I also noticed you FAILED to profuse your long term, per reviewed, Scientific REsearch published in a legitimate journal showing that GM products and natural produce are the same,
or that GM produce is safe to eat. "

is the fruit of basic scientific illiteracy. Holding that they are categorically the same doesn't require long term studies. It is already proven by a century of biology. They are categorically the same because genetic and evolutionary theory, the entire basis of modern biology, says that there are no common material properties of all GMOs that are different from some common property of all non-GMOs. The only things all GMOs have in common with each other are the things that all living things have in common with each other. There is no distinct property of "GMOness" that GMO's have. A molecular biologist, presented with the genomes of an unknown "GMO" and an unknown "natural" organism could not establish which is putatively natural and which is artificial because there is no material property of the actual organism which indicates that and because genomes produced by engineering have exactly the same characteristics as genomes produced by nature.

In scientific terms, demanding proof that GMOs are indistinguishable from natural organisms is as rational as demanding proof that both water and steel are made of matter. It is either the fruit of idiocy - if you know the science of living things - or gross ignorance if you don't (in which case you should get informed rather than argue from a position of ignorance)

Explicit and very detailed knowledge of genetics and developmental biology (the same level of knowledge that proves its validity by allowing us to genetically engineer things in the first place) tell us not merely that there isn't, but that there cannot be a categorical material distinction that distinguishes putatively "genetically engineered" from natural organisms. This is because we are simply altering the genome, which is already constantly being altered by nature generation to generation (otherwise evolution wouldn't have happened) using the same genomic letters nature uses. And even the rewrites we do on the genome are rewrites that nature itself would arrive at given enough time and resource space.

The distinction does not exist in the material manifestation, only in the means of creation. It's like two kinds of hot water, one boiled over an electric plate and one boiled over a flame. We can name a category "boiled over a flame water" and another "boiled over an electric plate water", but materially there is no difference between the two. They're identical at a molecular level. They're identical at an atomic level. The categories describe their history, not their material properties. The category "genetically engineered" is similar.

Assuming there is a difference apropos of no evidence and in contradiction to the logical implications of what we know about how DNA-based-life works, not the opposite, indicates irrationality or ignorance of science.

I'mma repeat this to make it absolutely clear: Any genome arrived at by genetic engineering that produces a viable organism can be arrived at by natural selection. In other words, natural selection, which has created all the species on earth, will over some arbitrary period of time produce Bt Corn without human intervention. With genetic engineering, we just make that particular genome come into existence now, instead of some random time determined by natural selection's semi-random walk through the space of all possible phenotypes. When you understand this, you'll understand why thinking there is a material difference between genetically engineered and natural plants is faulty reasoning.

You said:
"demanding proof that GMOs are indistinguishable from natural organisms is as rational as demanding proof that both water and steel are made of matter.

You are familiar with the Logical Fallacy called the "Strawman"?
Yes?
Can you see yours?
.
.
.
No Charge.

your observation wasn't an implicit demand? If not, what was it?

Because if it was just an observation, it's a meaningless one. The failure to produce unnecessary research to prove something we know from basic biology and logic is not notable or relevant to anything being discussed here. So what was the purpose of that observation if it was not a pointed one?

You said:

"I also noticed you FAILED to profuse your long term, per reviewed, Scientific REsearch published in a legitimate journal showing that GM products and natural produce are the same,
or that GM produce is safe to eat. "

Which I took as an argument that we cannot assume GMOs and natural lineages carry the same risks without what you pointedly said was not supplied - as any reasonable reader would take it. I then wrote a post back addressing this. To wit there is absolutely no necessity to produce peer reviewed studies showing that GMOs and natural lineages are indistinguishable because that lack of distinction is a logical consequence of uncontested biology. In other words, the absence of the kind of study you pointed said was not presented to you means nothing. No such study is required to establish the veracity of the statement you appeared to be challenging, just a little scientific literacy.

In other words, I did not straw man anything. I directly addressed something that you posted.

Are you reading your own posts? Are you aware of what you wrote previously? Do you even understand what a straw man is?

and you still haven't produced a explanation that floats.

Why NOT label the foods?

I think you have reading comprehension problems. I have said no less than twice on this thread "By all means if a majority want it, label them." and that consumers have the right to demand meaningless labels for stupid reasons.

I also said that the concerns that drive such demands are ignorant, stupid and do harm to people in developing nations - which is the entire reason for my participation on this thread. It's written above.

You said:""By all means if a majority want it, label them."


Poll: Skepticism of Genetically Modified Foods

in 2006 my wife & I moved to The Woods and started growing our own Non-GMO food.
OF crourse,everything manufactured by Monsanto is forerver banned from our little hilltop,
along with non-naturally occurring occurring pesticides and herbicides.

We HAVE purchased GMO tomatoes at the Market for a taste-test, and guess what?
The Natural ones we grew actually taste like a tomatos!!!!.

and certainly not arguing against your observation that genetic engineering is intrinsically indistinguishable from “natural” processes altering nucleic acid sequences, but isn’t the probability of a spontaneous multiple insertion mutation which codes for the equivalent of a “foreign” protein fairly low?

And given that such such an event does occur and persist in a population within a time scale of human participation, doesn’t the argument that this is indistinguishable from “natural” processes deny a preference to nutritionally avoid naturally occurring toxins?

Last edited Tue Aug 25, 2015, 05:10 AM - Edit history (3)

specifically this bit

"doesn’t the argument that this is indistinguishable from “natural” processes deny a preference to nutritionally avoid naturally occurring toxins? "

Its true that some deliberate modifications might represent mutations that could be considered low frequency in nature in terms of probability. It's not obvious and doesn't necessarily follow that low frequency mutations carry extra risk because of their statistical frequency. Nor that conventional techniques cause less genomic disruption. Hybridization between food crops and their wild cousins to increase vigor, a common practice historically, produces massively more change in the genome. So the rate of change in a lineage has certainly never been a concern before now. And unless the modification in question is known to cause the expression of toxins, there is no reason to assume an increased risk of toxicity.

I'm going to hazard a guess that you're speaking to the common misconception that prior to precise engineering agriculturalists were in a "slow dance with nature", where crops changed gradually over time so that their human consumers and environments could also gradually adapt to them. But a review of the history of agriculture and in particular the colonial era when native crops were uprooted from their native environments and widely propagated in alien ecosystems, to be consumed by clades of people who had not co-evolved with them, shows this to be false. And conventional agriculture has relied on infrequent and large mutations to produce many staples today. The change from teosinte to modern corn seems to indicate a few major mutations over a relatively brief historical period.

There is a further and curiously contradictory dimension to this, though. When we compare rate of change between precise engineering techniques and conventional techniques we ignore non-agricultural change. And despite the natural changes we exploit and deliberate changes we achieve through propagation of otherwise non-viable natural mutations, hybridization, mutation breeding and modern engineering methods, agricultural civilization tends to diminish the number of species and make the ones employed more uniform genetically than would be the case in the absence of human agriculture. This is why monoculture is a problem for sustainability and biodiversity. And it must be said that at this point genetic engineering represents an invaluable tool in the migration to more agro-ecological and sustainable farming techniques, as recommended by the UN in their recent global food security report.

The key point here is that for most of our time on earth in hominid form, like, for 99% of that time, we were eating whatever the hell the environment threw at us, which anthropologists are learning was a staggering range of diets from local-fruitarian to diets consisting entirely of horse meat. An aside - this is why "paleo" diets, while they make work for some people, have absolutely zero connection with "what our paleolithic ancestors ate". And anthropologists now believe that hunter-gatherers were significantly more healthy than their early, settled, agricultural neighbors and that settled agriculture therefore must have conferred some group-competitive advantage - i.e. it was initially worse for the health of individuals, but conferred competitive advantage to the groups those individuals were in. The bones of early agriculturalists are smaller, more brittle, et al.

So the whole "slow dance with nature" thing makes no sense if you're examining a migratory species pre-agricultural-civilization, which is 99% of our homonid history. And when you go back to the start of agricultural history, you see a major decline in health due to poor nutrition, with agricultural civilization taking a substantial portion of its history just to catch up with hunter-gatherer outcomes. And we often evolved tolerances after centuries of saying f* it lets just eat this and deal with the side effects. A recent study shows that we were probably eating cheese and other dairy based products for up to a thousand years before someone developed lactose tolerance. With that kind of history, fretting over what amount to comparatively tiny changes in food plants today, with highly anticipatable effects, seems quite bizarre for a naturally robust carnivore like homo sapiens. especially when we have vastly more pressing concerns like the input:yield ratios required by 7 billion people for food security and severe deficiencies in the traditional diets of hundreds of millions of people that cause severe illnesses in some regions. This last point is why the vacuous advocacy of comfortable middle-class science illiterates in rich industrialized nations, catching vapors over vague and ill-defined risks, is in my view evil and harms human beings. Because in a global, connected economy, that precious and selfish concern translates into effective activism in far poorer countries with the final effect of denying millions of people access to Golden Rice, which could prevent serious problems like blindness in up to 100 million people.

So the nutritional and ecological desirability of a given genomic change in the context of human interests is independent of the method or rate of that specific change, and is case specific.

Are there "natural" barriers to genomic changes which if overcome by engineering techniques defeat some effect useful to human interests?

Last edited Tue Aug 25, 2015, 05:54 PM - Edit history (3)

That I'm not a scientist. I'm not a biologist, just a software engineer that has had a huge interest in biology for the last few decades and has read a lot of books especially on evolutionary biology. I do know several life scientists though, who I've picked up a lot from. Just so you know you're not speaking to a someone qualified in the field

It's an interesting question. I know most cells have DNA repair mechanisms, but AFAIK they usually fix damaged bases rather than "correcting" sequences of undamaged bases. I vaguely remember something about DNA rewriting itself, but all that comes to mind is methylation, which involves tagging bases to inhibit gene transcription and change genetic expression, especially in neurons. So I can't think of a mechanism that would actively block some types of change after it's happened.

As far as blocking it when it happens, I don't think the cell can consistently block mutagens from effecting any kind of change. Aside from things like radiation and exposure to mutagenic chemicals, around 8% of our genome is endogenous retroviruses thanks to viral infection of germ cells in our ancestry. So viruses have significantly altered our genome and our body has found use for some of those viral genes which have become our own. Viral insertions can confer complex changes to plant or animal genomes.

There is horizontal gene transfer by other means. Several bacteria that are distant cousins share genes between themselves using plasmids, autonomous loops of DNA that are passed between them with by inserting inserting into and extracting from the loop. So a harmless soil bacteria can give a nasty bug in your system antibiotic resistance. We recently observed the first example of similar DNA transfer in animal cells, although that was mitochondrial DNA.

And somehow a species of sea slug, Elysia chlorotica, has learned to harvest chloroplasts from its algal food and hijack enough of the algal DNA to actually maintain them, so that it can photosynthesize. There are other examples of seemingly natural "transgenics" So it looks like there is a fair amount of horizontal gene transfer going on, marshaled by some cellular intelligence we have yet to understand. The genetic landscape is temporally and spatially in flux to a greater degree than most imagine.

I think given all those different vectors of mutation and the ways they have of bypassing a body's and a cell's defenses, there is no change that is out of reach of natural processes. No distinctly "unnatural" mutation, as long as the resulting genome produces a viable organism.

*The same Corporation who swore that "research" has shown that Agent Orange was "perfectly safe"?

OR

*New England Journal of Medicine (that well known magazine of "woo".)

First, it's an op-ed written by two people, not broadly representative of the whole journal.

Second, it's an op-ed written by two people who frequently lie about their credentials and conflicts of interest.

Third, Chuck Benbrook used to be part of the leadership of The Organic Center and has been paid frequently by the organic industry to say how good it is. He's an industry shill.

Haven't allowed round-up in many years, even the stronger stuff on pastures or areas with brush to clear.

I've noticed some livestock 'slip' their fetus early in pastures where these products are routinely used.

All GMOs, non naturally occurring fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides and other toxins have forever been banned from our little hilltop in Arkansas.
My wife is a 2 times cancer survivor who has no history of cancer in her family.
She is certain that her cancers were caused by exposure to carcinogens in the cities for 40 years.

Funny (and anecdotal), but since we moved to our hilltop and started producing our own food, honey, and chickens,
her cancers are in full remission.

Point of data....not proof,
but I'm not going to argue with it.
Thank gawd she is Cancer Free.

When we first moved to The Woods, my motivation was to give her a nice, peaceful place to die,
but she fooled me and stayed alive and vigorous.

...are just a bunch of woo-peddling science-haters.

the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community. Charles Benbrook also works for the organic foods industry. He has also claimed that organic foods are more nutritious, a claim that is also contradicted by most of science.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science:
http://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/AAAS_GM_statement.pdf

...even when humans direct the breeding process.

Biotechnology bypasses those mechanisms and simply places genes into organisms. No mediation at all -- fish genes may be spliced into tomatoes, a process that would not happen in nature except possibly on geologic time scales.

In one case, the gene placed into corn produces a pesticide, Bt. Since the plant produces the pesticide in every cell, it is not possible to wash the pesticide off the plant before eating it. It seems quite possible that consuming a food that contains its own pesticide in every cell might have effects on the human organism.

There are other considerations as well, such as the increased use of Roundup on "Roundup-ready" GMO crops, as laid out in the article in question.

If GMO foods are so safe, if they are in fact superior as is often claimed, then the companies that use them should be thrilled to label them. Those of us who want to know should be allowed to know.

Not all of us who are wary of GMO foods are anti-science or anti-genetic engineering. I for one think the research is valuable and has many useful applications. But putting GMO foods widely into our food supply before we were even aware of it, which is what happened with corn and soybeans, is reprehensible. Basically the entire US population was treated as guinea pigs for years without our knowledge, and now that we know it is still hard to know which foods do and do not contain GMOs. For that reason alone, these foods should now be labelled. Any trust we might have had has been broken by these actions IMNSHO.

then the companies that use them should be thrilled to label them. Those of us who want to know should be allowed to know".

And then when they are labeled, the same people will question why they need to be labeled if they are safe.

Nature changes genes all of the time, including exchanging genes from unrelated species. Nature doesn't care. After the fact, if the genetic change causes harm to the organism, nature tends to eliminate that organism.

Since the dawn of agriculture man has replaced nature in determining what genes are passed on. This has been going on for thousands of years. Most of the foods we eat couldn't survive in nature. They are now drastically different than the original plants. The relatively minor changes in GMO foods are fundamentally no different than each of the minor changes that have occurred in the age of agriculture. A major difference is that the changes made in GMO foods are far more studied than the random changes that breeders have selected for.

People eat a lot of crap. That is why so many Americans are so unhealthy. GMO's have nothing to do with our health problems. GMO's do help farmers feed more people using less land at a lower cost, and going hungry is very unhealthy.

...two of my major points: (1) the presence of a pesticide, Bt, in GMO corn; and (2) the introduction of GMO corn and soybeans into the U.S. widely, without notification, such that the population was in essence treated as guinea pigs.

Horizontal gene transfer, or crossing genes between species, occurs commonly in nature, that is true: however, it occurs in single-celled organisms, not in complex organisms such as we are, or such as grains, vegetables and fruits are. Higher, more complex organisms breed using sexual reproduction. Bypassing the mediation of sexual reproduction may have consequences that we have not yet considered. Life is a complex system, and the layers that have been placed on life forms through evolution should be respected. IOW, when doing research that bypasses those layers, we should not just assume they have no significance. When we breed for desired characteristics, we are still operating within those constraints.

Again: I am not against doing the research. I am against introducing this stuff into our food supply without informing us so that we can make our own choices. I for one do not believe we know enough about the biological systems in question, to just inject a random gene into a plant, have it expressed, and then assume it must be okay and won't have any systemic long term effects. Also, since we already know that some corn has the Bt pesticide in each cell, it seems reasonable to me to avoid that food.

Your statement that "People eat a lot of crap. That is why so many Americans are so unhealthy." shows a very elitist attitude: it seems to say, since most Americans don't eat right, then why complain when Big Ag introduces something else into the food supply that may or may not be healthy -- Americans don't care about their own health anyway. Yet, Americans' unhealthy diet is in many ways a direct effect of corporations shoving things into the food supply that are the most profitable to said corporations (HFCS, anyone?), and to hell with overall health.

There is no evidence that GMO's are unhealthy - none. They have been well studied already. There is overwhelming consensus among scientists that they are safe and no adverse health effects have been documented.

Unlike most other genetic changes in other foods, GMO's are studied before they come to the market.

What is harder to believe is that on any thread about GMOs, I see the same names.
They are absolutely frantic to keep GMOs from being labeled in the marketplace,
and are more than willing to call anyone who DOES want the labels an idiot.

I don't like those people. They remind me of Carnies,
and I don't like that GMOs are NOT labeled in the marketplace.
There is no reason WHY Americans are kept in the dark about their food sources.