Today's SGU addresses some of the business side of Monsanto.
Last week's episode of SGU discussed the health and safety of GMOs. In response to listener feedback, today they talked about the business practices. Specifically things like suing farmers and what not.
The TLDR version is that most of the complaints about them as a company are pretty much anti-biotech propaganda. Which I already knew. But Novella does a good job of summing it up neatly.
I'd be interested to hear rebuttals, additional cases not mentioned, or anything else people feel is relevant.
Posted Oct 5, 2013, 9:40 PM UTC
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There is a big overlap between anti-GMO, leftist politics and the skeptic movement which is getting in the way of the skeptic movement being able to really dig into these conspiracy theories.
One issue they got sort of wrong. While many seed companies require licensing and require that the seeds cannot be replanted, this is hardly an imposition. Farmers have been doing this since hybrids have were introduced in the 1930s, this is because the second generation tends to not have the same consistent traits as the first generation.
They didn't even hit the most insane conspiracy theories.
I was thinking the seed thing relates more to apples or dogs in a way, here me out. Let's say you move into a house and it has a honey crisp apple tree in the back yard. You spend several years getting sweet apples you love, and enjoying this nice tree. After a coupe of years you have a kids or your family grows, and you realize you what more so your plant a seed from one of your oh so delicious apples and after several years (apple trees take forever to grow) you get a crabapple. The reason, much like the reason farmers keep buying seeds is that that tree or plant was either bereft or engineered for a specific set of genetic traits, and wild polination doesn't select for specific breeds. It's like trying to breed a Great Dane and a chihuahua an expecting a Great Dane to appear. It's like a creationists idea of what genetics is.
Edit: messed a word in the last sentence
So it sounds like you took 500 words to agree with me.
Exactly. Your comment gave me a moment of clarity.
TL:DR Monsanto is God
Your apple example isn't quite on the mark. First, most fruit trees sold today are grafts of a popular variety on a hardy rootstock. So is is possible to get specialty trees which produce more than apple from a single trunk. The crabapple example isn't there either. There isn't a "regression to the gene" where one variety just becomes another. Instead, they hybridize with the surrounding trees so, while you're correct in saying that one of seeds can grow into a non original form, it wouldn't be nearly as dramatic as you state. A better example would be certain varieties of squash (like acorn, gourds, pumpkins) they rapidly hybridize and it is possible to get something vastly different from a seed.
I meant it more as an extreme example. In part because apple trees hybridized very easy, and crabapples (a very general term) are the only native apple variety in the Americas. Also many of your modern apple varieties are developed through extensive genetic selection, making it near impossible wild breeding will produce an apple tree we would consider anything other than a crabapple.
They are confusing anti-establishment with skepticism. David vs. Goliath arguments provide people with a feeling of worth. Science however will favor Goliath to kick David's ass.
I felt like they were giving the opposition side the benefit of the doubt and sticking with arguments that could be reasonable.
The thing is, if you follow the anti-GMO people, they deserve no such benefit.
They are far worse than almost any other conspiracy theory (except those were people die like anti-vax and child chiropracty) in both the inanity of their arguments and the hostility they show towards people promoting facts.
The people people who promote the anti-GMO conspiracy theories are knowing LIARS for their cause and dupe countless other well-intentioned people into believing them. They way they spam reddit with (sometimes 100+ copies of) articles suggests this is their job.
This is a dangerous attitude to take. I fully agree with mocking insane conspiracy theories, but there are also normal people who think they are being "moderate" by buying into the more garden variety misinformation. It's important to debunk this misinformation too so that people see that they can't achieve the truth simply by trying to find a middle ground. Reality is complex and the kernel of truth in a conspiracy theory is almost always smaller than people want to believe.
I have been following the anti-GMO people (not the garden variety misinformed) for about 6 months and they are the worse group of conspiracy theorists and pseudoscience people I have ever seen in my decades of debunking.