Talk:Genetically modified food

Percy Schmeiser
I do not find anything wrong with what Percy Schmeiser did; if an useful trait improves some of my plants, I shall select for the improved trait. ¿Why should Percy Schmeiser have to pay? The trait showed up in a small percentage of his crops and he selected it. He signed no contract with Monsanto If Monsanto did not want all rational farmers to select for RoundUp™-resistance, it should have made the crops sterile; by leaving the crops fertile, it guaranteed that all rational farmers would select their crops for RoundUp™-resistance. Those farmers did not steal from Monsanto; Monsanto gave them free pollen and they just selected the best offspring.
 * Reverend Black Percy (talk) 01:33, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

They would've, but terminator seed research was forced to be abandoned because of folks not unlike him. (registered user who forgot pass) 70.45.60.225 (talk) 00:17, 13 August 2018 (UTC)

Better get your propaganda in line
Media Bias/Fact Check lists CounterPunch as a site with high factual accuracy despite its articles detailing pro-GMO propaganda in collusion with the US federal government? What is this crap. Unacceptable

And again, Media Bias/Fact Check rates The Nation as having high factual accuracy even as it states that "The case against GMOs has strengthened steadily over the last few years." I can't believe it. So many holes to poke in your propaganda; it's almost like it's a precarious piecemeal attempt to hide the truth from the American public. 11:49, 14 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Errrr. Sorry?  Your point is just a little difficult to follow.--Bob"Life is short and (insert adjective)" 18:19, 14 January 2018 (UTC)
 * You'll need to look at JustOwnedYouSon's contributions and read their talk page to get some context. In short, JustOwnedYouSon believes RationalWiki is part of a "propaganda network" to defend GMO/vaccine corporations. JustOwnedYouSon has also suggested that Media Bias/Fact Check is a "propaganda front group". CowHouse (talk) 03:31, 15 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Hi and thanks for the suggestion. But quite honestly I'm not really inclined to review a user's wiki contribution history in order to understand a single weird post.  If he writes something it should make sense by itself.  But thank again for trying to get me up to speed.Bob"Life is short and (insert adjective)" 07:33, 15 January 2018 (UTC)
 * I didn't mean to suggest that you should look at their contributions. I only meant that it was necessary in order to understand the comment. I agree that the comment should stand on its own and I don't expect you to look at their contribution history. CowHouse (talk) 11:23, 15 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Yes, I fully understand you were being helpful, and I'm really sorry if I seemed brusque.Bob"Life is short and (insert adjective)" 11:29, 15 January 2018 (UTC)
 * No need to apologise. You said thanks twice so I didn't think you were being brusque. I just wanted to clarify what I meant since it was ambiguous. CowHouse (talk) 11:35, 15 January 2018 (UTC)

Fuck this, let's mongoose!
If you search for "Gef", as in Gef the talking mongoose, you wind up here. Should there be some kind of cross-reference or hatnote at the top for people who actually want a talking mongoose? Or should Gef redirect to the mongoose rather than here? Or should there be a disambiguation page? What do you want when you type "Gef"? --Annanoon (talk) 20:48, 7 January 2019 (UTC)
 * God Enhanced Flavor? 05:03, 8 January 2019 (UTC)

Study on attitudes on GMF
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0520-3

Basically, opponents of GMF greatly over-estimate their knowledge on the field. Really, just Dunning Kruger, but still worth incorporating in this article. 05:46, 15 January 2019 (UTC)

Updates
Are there more recent figures than 'As of 2014...' Anna Livia (talk) 19:21, 6 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Updated, but with heavy reliance on ISAAA data, needs more citations. The Sqrt-1 talk  stalk 05:19, 9 August 2020 (UTC)

§. “Inherently Bad”: Explication
I aim to explicate the text from this quote from the subsection titled “Inherently Bad” : The most prevalent claim is that all GMFs are harmful to health and cause a variety of illnesses and disabilities: cancer, autism, reproductive problems […] Caveats: (1) What will proceed is just a rough draft of some ideas I’ve had, which will, eventually, be edited into a more structured and readable piece. Explication is the most general method of engineering; explication isn’t explanation, description, or analysis. (2) the explication that I will provide is very charitable.

Step 1: Clarification
The principle aim of “clarification” is to provide a suitable explicandum. First, I shall clarify the sentence as best as I can, so that, in principle, some mutual agreement can be reached as to the intended form and meaning of the sentence. Moreover, this “clarification” will enable me to try and provide the best form of the sentence in ordinary language, which shall then serve as the explicandum, and after this, the sentence may be translated into predicate Logic and mathematics (viz. class theory).


 * 1) The word ‘all’ (in “All GMFs”) is a quantifier, which indicates quantification over a domain of objects.
 * 2) The conjunction of “Harmful to health” with “cause a variety of illnesses and disabilities” is a redundancy, since it seems that GMFs are being claimed to be “harmful to health” precisely because they “cause a variety of illnesses and disabilities.” Thus “harmful to health” is superfluous and can be dispensed with in favour of “…GMFs cause a variety of illnesses and disabilities”.
 * 3) “… cause a variety of illnesses and disabilities”. Unless the claimants are aware of the complexity of causal mechanisms, then it seems to be largely incoherent as to what they are claiming (hence my ongoing explication). Moreover whilst certain diseases such as cancer or reproductive problems (to name some of those quoted) can, at times, be readily identified, other conditions such as Autism are more complex phenomena, involving behavioural, psychological, as well as neurological and cognitive phenomena, and as a consequence it seems difficult to picture just what “causation” of autism would look like (if this is even the correct terminology).
 * 4) “[GMFs] cause a variety illnesses” presupposes that GMFs are capable of causing illnesses and disabilities; granted, this isn’t a problem as far as validity is concerned, but it doesn’t seem cogent …..
 * 5) “All GMFs are harmful” —this requires interpretation: do they mean all GMFs up to this point in time are harmful—surely they wouldn’t claim clairvoyance and say “all future GMFs are also harmful”—or, perhaps they are against them in principle. Suffice to say, a lot of this ambiguity can be removed, in the next stage, when the clarified sentence is translated into predicate Logic and class theory (more on this later).
 * 6) Based on these concerns a better construal might replace “All” with ‘some’ or ‘at least one’, thus:  “Some\at least one\ GMF causes a variety of illnesses and disabilities”.
 * 7) In ordinary language, as a façon de parler, I would agree that “Some GMFs” is intelligible, but “some GMFs” is not to be confused with a thing for which the predicate ‘cause illness and disabilities’ is true of, for this would commit a category error.  What is (or ought) to be claimed, rather, is that the predicate holds true for  a particular subclass of the category of GMFs.
 * 8) Ultimately, ‘GMF’ denotes physical entities occupying slices of space-time (a quadruple of real numbers).
 * 9) Now the end-product of “Clarification” (n.b. This is the most general clarification):
 * (9i)‘All GMFs cause illness or disability’ is true—if and only if—the class of future GMF light-cones ‘â’, includes a subclass ‘ŷ’ whose members are illnesses or disabilities. In addition, one may add a well-ordering relation on both the classes such that ‘â’ is interpreted as ‘first’ and ‘ŷ’ as second; this in-turn could be explicated by way of equivalence classes such that ‘â’ is equivalent to the ordinal ‘1st’ and ‘ŷ’ to the ordinal ‘2nd’.
 * (9ii) Moreover, (9i) can be substituted into a conditional schema as a complex antecedent, which has as its consequent the statement “GMFs are inherently bad”. This is due to the use of “because” in the claim—“GMFs are inherently bad because they cause illnesses or disabilities”—, ‘because’ functions here as providing causes or reasons for the consequent, and thus ‘inherently bad’ shall be the consequent, and ‘cause illnesses or disabilities’ shall be the antecedent.


 * 1) Both 9(i) and 9(ii) need to be further modified if they are to serve as an explicandum. Since, a referential claim is being made about certain objects in the domain we need to modify (9i) and 9(ii) so as to produce a referential sentence (viz. a sentence that makes an existential claim); and since the locus of reference, in ordinary language, is found in the relative pronoun construction, 9(i) and 9(ii) shall be modified as follows:


 * 1) (9i’) There is an it such that it is the class of GMF light-cones, and it includes a subclass whose members are illnesses or disabilities.
 * 2) (9ii’) If (There is an it such that it is the class of GMF light-cones, and it includes a subclass whose members are illnesses or disabilities), then (all GMFs are inherently bad).
 * The consequent of (9ii) is a prescriptive claim, which means that it isn’t truth-functional (at least in the classical sense). However, I’ll bypass this issue by assuming that all humans hold the ultimate end (whether consciously or not) to survive, and to increase their welfare—I’ll include this assumption as part of the class of premises. Now, it follows that if a particular entity φ causes illnesses or disabilities, then this is in direct contradiction with human ends (as I’ve specified them), and as a consequence, we ought to avoid φ, and one may even say that ‘φ is bad for survival/for welfare/for me’ is true, and thus I shall proceed to treat a forteriori the consequent as truth-evaluable; this may be explicated further by taking this prescriptive claim to be about certain patterns of behaviour that have been influenced by the usual selection pressures and conscious decisions by rational agents.

Translation into FOL and Class theory

 * 1) First the use of the neuter-pronoun ‘it’ in (9i’) shall be translated as a class variable, which is signified by the symbol ‘x’, (where ‘x’, when bound, may take classes as its values).
 * 2) ‘There is’ shall be translated as the existential quantifier ‘&#8707;’
 * 3) ‘is the class of GMF light cones’ is a predicate and shall be translated, since this is class theory, according to the abstraction schema viz. entities that satisfy this predicate-abstract have two things in common: (1) a property/attribute is intended to them e.g. ‘being a GMF’, and (2) they form a class of which they are members. The same holds for the other predicates in the explicandum viz. ‘includes a subclass whose members are illnesses or disabilities’, and ‘are inherently bad’.
 * 4) For purposes of individuation, identity criteria are needed (i.e. so we can identify GMFs, diseases, and disabilities): the axiom of extensionality, the indiscernibility of identicals, and the law of the substitutivity of identicals, shall be used for this purpose.


 * Leucippus Sapere aude 00:45, 19 October 2021 (UTC)