By way of wetwareontologies:

There is a great deal to admire about Richard Pelling’s Centre for PostNatural History. Its central objective is exhibiting genetically modified organisms. It’s the framing that I admire most. Pellin posits a post-natural organisms cultural history as a parallel branch of evolution. The CPNH explores artificial selection as a cultural object, and that’s good news IMHO.

On the website 5 PNOs (PostNatural Organisms) are catalogued in curiosity cabinet style: E. coli x1776, Transgenic American Chestnut Tree, BioSteel™ Goat, Triploidy Atlantic Salmon and Sterile Male Screwworm. That curating format carries over to the Transgenic Organisms of New York State exhibition and Strategies in Genetic Copy Prevention exhibition.

Note: I have points of disagreement but nonetheless a good talk and Q&A session.

From feuilletoniste:

We well-fed consumers are blinded by romantic nostalgia for the traditional farming of the past. Because we have enough to eat, we can afford to indulge our aesthetic illusions.

—Mark Lynas at the Oxford Farming Conference, Jan. 3, 2013.

Following up on my Bittman rant (I’m trying to be less rant-y; I don’t want this to be a space primarily for whining), I’m posting this lecture by Mark Lynas, recovering GMO conspiracy theorist. Lynas is a much-needed reasoned voice on the topics of GMOs, organic agriculture, and agra conspiracy theories of all stripes. He’s done thorough research and isn’t hostile toward organic—his own parents are organic farmers and “approved” this lecture—but acknowledges that while a privileged few may enjoy it, organic farming is not suitable for meeting the world’s food needs. The video is worth watching in full, and the full transcript is here.

Distrust of science doesn’t only exist on the right (climate change denial, rejection of evolution). The left rejects science as well (baseless phobias of sugar, gluten, dairy; GMO hysteria) when it doesn’t conform to its own ideology. Overcoming ideology and being open to changing perspective when presented with contrary scientific evidence (not “proof”) is a universal challenge, and something that I’m going to try to work on personally.

A list of his reversals on GMOs:

My second climate book, Six Degrees, was so sciency that it even won the Royal Society science books prize, and climate scientists I had become friendly with would joke that I knew more about the subject than them. And yet, incredibly, at this time in 2008 I was still penning screeds in the Guardian attacking the science of GM – even though I had done no academic research on the topic, and had a pretty limited personal understanding. I don’t think I’d ever read a peer-reviewed paper on biotechnology or plant science even at this late stage.

Obviously this contradiction was untenable. What really threw me were some of the comments underneath my final anti-GM Guardian article. In particular one critic said to me: so you’re opposed to GM on the basis that it is marketed by big corporations. Are you also opposed to the wheel because because it is marketed by the big auto companies?

So I did some reading. And I discovered that one by one my cherished beliefs about GM turned out to be little more than green urban myths.

I’d assumed that it would increase the use of chemicals. It turned out that pest-resistant cotton and maize needed less insecticide.

I’d assumed that GM benefited only the big companies. It turned out that billions of dollars of benefits were accruing to farmers needing fewer inputs.

I’d assumed that Terminator Technology was robbing farmers of the right to save seed. It turned out that hybrids did that long ago, and that Terminator never happened.

I’d assumed that no-one wanted GM. Actually what happened was that Bt cotton was pirated into India and roundup ready soya into Brazil because farmers were so eager to use them.

I’d assumed that GM was dangerous. It turned out that it was safer and more precise than conventional breeding using mutagenesis for example; GM just moves a couple of genes, whereas conventional breeding mucks about with the entire genome in a trial and error way.

But what about mixing genes between unrelated species? The fish and the tomato? Turns out viruses do that all the time, as do plants and insects and even us – it’s called gene flow.

But this was still only the beginning. So in my third book The God Species I junked all the environmentalist orthodoxy at the outset and tried to look at the bigger picture on a planetary scale.

And this is the challenge that faces us today: we are going to have to feed 9.5 billion hopefully much less poor people by 2050 on about the same land area as we use today, using limited fertiliser, water and pesticides and in the context of a rapidly-changing climate.