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But I thought bananas were eggs :( (thelemmy.club)
submitted 9 months ago by [M] to c/ididnthaveeggs@sh.itjust.works
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[–] 19 points 9 months ago (23 children)

Almost all food crops are GMO through the practice of selective breeding. Bananas have been altered to be sterile, seedless, and have larger edible fruit.

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  • [–] -1 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    It sounds like you have absolutely no idea what genetic engineering means.

    Selective breeding is selecting two banana plants that have characteristics you want, moving pollen (or however it is that bananas reproduce) from one plant to another, and growing, and selecting the "best" plants from the offspring, to get the banana plants with the characteristics that you want.

    Genetic modification is snipping part of the genetic material from an eggplant and inserting them into a banana seed(?)'s genes.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    Yes?

    Selective breeding to get plants with different characteristics inherently involves modifying the genes of the plant. Genes that lead to unwanted traits are bred out, and genes that lead to desirable traits are promoted.

    A plant that undergoes this process has been genetically modified from its wild, undomesticated counterpart. It is a GMO (in its broadest definition).

    Bananas are actually a really interesting plant and I recommend reading about the work being done even today to breed new disease resistant varieties, mostly involving mutation breeding (selective breeding with radiation to speed things along).

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  • [–] -4 points 9 months ago* (19 children)

    Selective breeding isnt GMO tho. Gmo is modifying genetics directly. Selective breeding is manipulativing the natural processes and hoping the offspring carried the desired genes. Its like saying placing bets on a roulette table is investing.

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  • [–] 8 points 9 months ago (15 children)

    Actually I'd say that investing is gambling, and selective breeding is a form of genetic engineering.

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  • [–] 0 points 9 months ago (14 children)

    Investing isnt gambling because if you had all the knowledge of the world, you could guarantee to "win" every single time. Its practically just predicting the future. While gambling, is pretty much a random event, some games may allow for some prediction (such as card counting), but casinos ussually thwart that by constantly introducing more randomness.

    Thats the same analogous for selective breeding. You have some idea what could happen, because at the very least you know the offspring will a random selection of genes from their parents, but you can never predict which genes. But in genetic engineering, you know exactly what genes you're targeting, and how and where those genes will be expressed.

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  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago (10 children)

    Except perfect knowledge of the world isn't possible and there is sufficient complexity in the systems that lead to stock value changing to make it effectively random luck whether any particular investment will pay off (you've invested heavily into office real estate; welcome to the global pandemic and the rise of remote work).

    Selective breeding doesn't care which genes are in play, it is outcome orientated. The result is the same, genes that don't give the desired result are filtered out, genes leading to the desired result are promoted. The fact that you aren't targeting specific genes doesn't matter.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (9 children)

    you've invested heavily into office real estate; welcome to the global pandemic and the rise of remote work).

    Except youre also a big executive at your company and you tell all your peasants workers to go back to the office. And you collaborate with your rich friends to do the same and rake in all the cash.

    But that doesnt change anything. Any amount of knowledge gives your a advantage because it reduces risk. A roulette table has the same amount of risk everytime because the previous spins has zero effect of the future.

    Selective breeding doesn't care which genes are in play, it is outcome orientated. The result is the same, genes that don't give the desired result are filtered out, genes leading to the desired result are promoted.

    Right... but it took humans ~5000 years to breed corn. Perhaps millions if not billions of iterations. And it was all random chance that the offsprings resulted with desirablity traits. There is a reason farmers dont grow apple trees by seed anymore. Noone can guarantee the offspring will produce quality apples, and it takes a decade to produce apples.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (8 children)

    Now we're quibbling over details, I never said it was a fast method of genetic engineering. It's also not so much a matter of chance that the offspring has the desired traits, all that matters is that on average each generation is slightly better than the one before. That's why it takes so long.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago* (7 children)

    Ok... think it about this way. Selective breeding is completely possible under natural circumstances, because we are purely manipulating natural evolutionary processes. The only reason domestication dont naturally occur is becuase generally the desirable traits are often lethal to wild organisms. We are the evolutionary pressure. If we die, so would the majority of our crops and livestock.

    Genetic engineering completely bypasses that process, and can even introduce genes from other species that would be so improable to breed, you might as say its impossible. You'll never be able to breed glow in the dark corn because no parent you can breed with will have the genes, so you would be left with two natural choices... a random mutation, or a random horizontal gene transfer.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (6 children)

    Yes, selective breeding is basically humans inducing evolutionary pressure by allowing or disallowing certain individuals to breed.

    Domestication can occur naturally (as we believe happened with cats), and more generally there's no reason organisms can't develop traits that humans like except that there would need to be an existing evolutionary pressure to promote it. It's not so much that the traits are harmful as there's just no need for them (apart from everything we've bred to be sterile or completely dependant on humans)

    Given enough time evolution turned water-breathing fish into giraffes; there's no reason bioluminescence would be impossible to select for, it would just take an incredibly long time.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago* (5 children)

    there's no reason bioluminescence would be impossible to select for, it would just take an incredibly long time.

    We can speed up the process. But giving a shotgun to a monkey doesnt make the monkey a engineer, now does it?

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (4 children)

    Who's giving shotguns to monkeys? The Ancient Romans didn't have CAD programs, they were still engineers. It took longer to build things, and some of them fell down, but just because their techniques were more primative doesn't stop them being engineers.

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  • [–] 0 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    Well, when you find evidence of the the romans building aquaducts by throwing mud randomly. You let me know.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Piling rocks in the shape of bridges, then copying the designs of the bridges that survived the best with minor iterations. Some iterations made worse bridges; these weren't copied, but the rest survived and led to better bridges.

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  • [–] 0 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    The romans didnt randomly piled rocks and built bridges. They put in a lot of engineer forthought before even beginning construction. Certainly some were primed to fail because of miscalculations and misunderstandings (something that plagues even modern engineering).

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago

    I think we're getting carried away with analogies, the point is: any technique that deliberately modifies the genome of an organism to achieve a desired result is genetic engineering, and such an organism is a GMO

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  • [–] 0 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Perfect knowledge still doesn't fix insolvency, fraud, or outright irrational actors. Tell me you haven't ever touched the stock market without telling me you have never touched the stock market.

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  • [–] 0 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    I mean it would... but good job at missing the point

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  • [–] 0 points 9 months ago

    Then your "perfect" information is a paradox. I will always act in the disinterest of you, regardless of logical or financial sense, what can you do if the capital I have outweighs yours?

    Again, perfect information is either a fallacy, or basically a state machine because you can only have one unchanging frame of information without a paradox. Markets are not state machines, they are also not synchronous. They also have unfaithful actors acting irrationally.

    I don't think you are getting your own point, or my response to it.

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  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Selective breeding isnt GMO tho

    It absolutely is.

    The definition of a genetically modified organism (GMO) is not clear and varies widely between countries, international bodies, and other communities. At its broadest, the definition of a GMO can include anything that has had its genes altered, including by nature. Taking a less broad view, it can encompass every organism that has had its genes altered by humans, which would include all crops and livestock

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago

    Going by the second sense of the definition in the excerpt you shared, every human-domesticated plant or animal is GMO. And that is not exclusive to bananas.

    Which again begs the question why the Original Commenter (OC) would make this distinction in the first place.

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