Re: [DIYbio] free food

Well, the results suggest the crops are generally a boon, particularly
to economically marginalised farmers (plenty of data on India for eg),
but I'll grant you that the marketers aren't exactly poster-children and
I'm certainly not a fan of theirs.

As far as Hybrids, it doesn't suit my aesthetics either to have a
variety that doesn't breed true, but aesthetics be damned: it's a
rule-of-thumb in genetics that where variation exists in a meaningful
way, bad things are *usually* recessive, beneficial traits are
*sometimes* dominant.

That's simple Darwinism|Mendelianism; if bad things are dominant, there
is more opportunity for the environment to act selectively on them, so
they are weeded out faster and leave a pool of less damaging alleles,
whereas if they are recessive, they can hide from selection for a
generation or two and may contribute benefit in terms of unexpected
side-effects, etcetera. So, bad traits that are dominant usually work on
an organism after it has had a chance to breed successfully, which is OK
in most agricultural contexts.

Meanwhile, if things are beneficial, they tend to drift towards fixing
in the population absent other pressures, until they hit equilibrium. If
they are recessive, they'll reach some equilibrium with other alleles,
if they are dominant they are more likely to simply become the norm,
which means "variation doesn't exist in a meaningful way" and the
rule-of-thumb ceases to apply. However, if only marginally beneficial on
their own, beneficial dominant traits can take a long time getting to
this point.

Given that bad things are usually recessive and beneficial things are
not always recessive, and given that breeding creates an artificial
circumstance of near-total allelic fixation (for a defined subset of
genes), it stands to reason why Hybrids are so popular: when you cross
two pure-bred lines, the bad traits that limit those lines are usually
recessive, and many of the good traits are either co-dominant or fully
dominant.

In other words, the F1 generation is often awesome. It's not called
"carefully selected parental lineages vigour", it's called "hybrid
vigour". The act of hybridising purebreds *often* or even *usually*
results in very successful offspring.

Now, there are two ways to look at this. One is to accept that hybrids
are awesome and live with the fact that you can then only use them for
one generation, because they're heterozygotes at most relevant loci. The
other way is to look at this as inspiration: if it is clear which genes
are valuable, then engineering a pure-bred line with those advantageous
traits becomes the goal.

Right now, we make one or two genetic changes, but with CRISPR and
next-gen plant engineering, we could hypothetically be making
"true-breeding hybrids". Hybrids aren't popular because manufacturers
like DRM'd plants, they're popular because they're awesome. So, make
them more awesome; make them breed true, and (some) farmers will use them.

On 15/01/15 17:31, leaking pen wrote:
> Terminator is beside the point. Hybrid is the point. even before GMO,
> hybrid plants are good THAT YEAR. many of them naturally are sterile,
> like mules, and many of them reproduce the second time to start
> expressing recessive genes, (remember ye old D and R charts!). So
> lots of hybrid varieties need to be rebought every year for the freshly
> hybrized anyways.
>
> The main fears with a lot of protesting farmers are issues with the
> SALESMEN. A lot of the GMO's that are immune to various parasites or
> molds that plague that particular plant also have changed needs because
> of it. some need more or less light, a lot tend to need a LOT more
> water, and what was traditionally a drought tolerant crop has become one
> that needs more water than the farmer can supply. And the salesmen
> don't TELL the farmers this, that was often an issue, they would sell
> this seed that is immune to x y and z pests, and not tell them, OH! you
> need to give them 5 times the water, or they will all die. Then the
> sprouts wilt and die, and the farmer is out a LOT of money.
>
>
> On Wed, Jan 14, 2015 at 5:19 PM, Nathan McCorkle <nmz787@gmail.com
> <mailto:nmz787@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Jan 14, 2015 at 2:11 PM, Cathal Garvey
> <cathalgarvey@cathalgarvey.me <mailto:cathalgarvey@cathalgarvey.me>>
> wrote:
> > Dude. Do some research. Monsanto never shipped Terminator after the public
> > backlash
>
> Dang, I was swindled by popular media. Actually I assumed the Haitians
> I saw protesting were doing so because of fears terminator genes,
> because they used some slogan about getting caught in a cycle of being
> forced to buy seed each year.
>
> 'Monsanto | Myth: Monsanto Sells Terminator Seeds'
> http://www.monsanto.com/newsviews/pages/terminator-seeds.aspx
>
> I guess I don't understand why more countries aren't pirating, I guess
> I don't know enough about international politics to know why Haiti
> would care to mind American IP. Maybe the protesters didn't really
> even know what they were protesting.
>
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