I’m At a Loss

I’ve been finding it difficult to come up with ideas for blog posts, which is why this blog hasn’t been very active lately. As such, I’d like to leave it up to the readers: what would you like us to write about? Would you like to know something specific about our atheism? Do you have an argument that you’d like us to address? Would you like us to discuss a particular book? Do you have any questions about Philosophy, Biology, or History? Would you like to know our stance on a particular feminist issue? Is there something else you’d like us to write on? Let us know in the comment section.

Labeling Genetically modified food, why it’s a waste of time and money.

Anyone who has read my posts about GMO’s (Genetically modified organisms) and the anti-GMO movement know I am a proponent of genetic modification.

I suggest those who are not actually sure what genetic modification is go read the post I’ve previously written explaining the types of genetic modification in broad terms. Link below.

https://hessianwithteeth.wordpress.com/2014/09/27/tackling-the-gmo-problem-part-5-what-the-heck-is-a-genetic-modification-anyway-2/

Now this demand for GMO labeling, from my understanding, is largely a byproduct of the anti-GMO movement and the massive ignorance surrounding the fields of biology related to genetic modification. People really just don’t understand what is going on in the production and modification of food crops. Even Bill Nye The Science Guy is a proponent of these labels, but this is only further proof that people don’t understand the biology. Allow me to defend these statements, and explain why the labels will not help consumers.

Genetic modification, and what kinds of genetic modification are considered “problematic,” is poorly defined, and even more poorly understood by the general public and most policy makers. Much like how people think Organic food means no pesticides, herbicides, chemical fertilizer (this is actually true in some areas, but not all), and healthier (which it isn’t). People think GMO means “bad” and unhealthy, but this is childish and flatly wrong. Why? because genetic modification refers to a wide array of methods, some of which have been used for hundreds or thousands of years. That, and genetic change occurs all the time. When advantageous mutation spring up, farmers and horticulturists have jumped to capitalize on these mutations. The only difference now is some times we are able to take a well understood (if it isn’t well understood then you simply don’t have the necessary information to transfer the genes) advantageous trait from one crop and put it into the other without mucking about with hybridization or artificial mutation.

But this is the biggest problem: genetic modification is massively complex. I’m 5 years into my degree and I have only in the last year and a half become competent in speaking about this topic. So to expect the lay person to understand is unreasonable without first devoting some serious resources to publicly educating the population. But moving along, why are the labels likely to be ineffective at communicating anything useful?

Because almost everything is genetically modified. If you read my other blog post about about the kinds of genetic modification here, you will quickly come to realize there is a lot going on with everything on the shelves, and I think it very probable that labeling will result in either a whole lot of things been labeled or very few, and the problem is that all that will accomplish is a reduction in sales of those things labeled, since there is a strong anti-GMO bias in much of the population. But that bias is not based in the science, so we will not see a direct health benefit, nor will we see a better informed populous.

Why won’t we see a more informed population? Because the number of potential combinations are unfathomable. Just sticking a label on a fruit isn’t going to tell you anything, and even if you do add a much more substantial label to the fruit telling you what genes and methods were used and how to get more information, people in general don’t have the biology, or specifically genetics knowledge to make effective use of that knowledge.

This, as far as I’m concerned, is the realm of government regulation and independent researchers to test the safely of these foods and products. And you know what? It’s already happening. There are many thousands of research papers published and many more each year that indicated the safely of, as far as I’m aware, all genetically modified food organisms currently sold in the west.

As for those papers, here are a selection of over 600: http://gmopundit.blogspot.ca/p/450-published-safety-assessments.html

So why would we spend money (any expenses will ultimately come out of us consumers) on labels that won’t help a damn thing?

Withteeth

Tackling GMO’s Part 4. G.E. Séralini case. Why it is both pivotal and pointless.

It’s about time I got back into this, here we go!

If you’re digging through the facts about GMO food, especially if you’re going from the popular media, eventually you’ll be brought back to one report. This report, headed by one Gilles-Eric Séralini, can be found here. Now, this report has since be redacted, and, if you look below the main article, you will see that the article itself has been heavily criticized within the journal itself.

I’ve already stated before that I am pro GMO (over all, it isn’t perfect, but those problems almost exclusively fall into farming practices, not the GMO’s themselves). The data that exists overwhelmingly shows that as far as food crops go there is no significant harm to humans or even the environment in making or using GMO’s. However, the above paper, redacted or not, is still being used as a source to “prove” that GMO’s are toxic. There is numerous reasons why that is not the case and I’ll be going through some of those reasons.

I’d like to redirect to my previous post about statistical significance here before we go further for a refresher on what that means for those readers unfamiliar with the concept.

The first thing I will point out is the redaction of the paper. Redactions are rare in science. Generally they only occur when there is some form of scientific misconduct. From what I’ve gathered from the back and forth posts, Séralini has not been accused of any misconduct, however, the Journal’s representative indicated that the redaction is due to pushing from the scientific community, and because the article itself was inconclusive and couldn’t accurately draw the conclusions made by the research team.

This is my major complaint with the paper, and the most telling, although it isn’t the sort of stratifying headline that gets people’s attention. “Anti-GMO paper found statistically irrelevant, says Journal representative.” Just doesn’t have a nice ring to it. This lack of statistical significance is why I call it a pointless paper because it really doesn’t say anything, but allow me explain why.

Generally the upper cut off in the biological sciences for a result to be statistically significance is 5% (though it is often only consider accurate when that percentage is much lower). What that means is that there is only a 5% chance that the results are just a fluke that can be explained by random chance. The primary ways of lowering the risk of statistical insignificance are to increase the population or sample size you’re researching and reduce the number of thing you’re studying and testing for (to better make use of your limited sampling population).

So this bring us to back to the Séralini paper. In the post analyst of the paper by researchers who also use rats for toxicity testing (a very routine bit of science) that suggested that the paper would have done much better to have at least over 200 rats, and Séralini and his team only used 100 each of males and females. Why so many rats? Well Séralini wasn’t just testing one factor he was testing the effects of Roundup and a Monsanto corn feed, splitting up by sex. So You have the rats split into 10 equivalent groups a control group and 9 treatment groups for both male rats and female rats. 6 of the control groups contained GM corn feed and the feed was either treated with roundup or not with each group given different level of roundup in their corn feed. the final three treatment groups were fed control (a similar non-gm corn) feed and tap water contaminated with some level of round up. Again all the group had different levels of round-up treatment.

If you’ve done the math that means each group only has 10 individuals in it. That’s a tiny sample size, and while there is some overlap, it’s like the team was trying to do three or four experiment in one, and they definitely did not use the resources they need to pull that off.

Why? Because 10 individual is almost never enough to draw any sort of accurate conclusions. There is simply to much room for mistakes or randomness to dictate the results. And even though there is some overlap in the treatment groups, this can’t help since the control group, which forms the basis of comparison of every other group, still only contains 10 individuals, so any of the inconstancies could easy wind up there. Regardless, you can’t pull off accuracy with such small sample sizes and without a group (the control group) to compare to you can’t actually say anything about it one way or another, since the statistics could be normal, but you can’t be sure since you lack a population to compare too.

Though this isn’t the only issue I have with the paper, besides being a pointless and useless waste of time and resources, because it could never be statistically significant, the treatment of the animals was unethical. If you look at the paper (I won’t share them here as they are pretty gruesome) you’ll see some pictures of 3 rats with massive tumors, though problematically only three of the rats. If you where being unbiased, you’d include the pictures of all rats, though, since the pictures had nothing to do with the results, I suspect they where added only for shock value. And they are shocking. You have three rats who by mass are over 25% tumor. Swollen to the point they problem would have great difficulty moving and be in great pain.

Before you panic, cancer in rats is abnormally common compared to other mammals, and the line of rat used in the paper have the terrible tendency to form these sorts of tumors spontaneously 30-50% of the time no matter what else you might do to them. So it might be the case that the research team picked this group of rats specially because they would form these “showy” tumors spontaneously.  But, more over, they allowed some of the rats to live longer than the average life span of these sort of rats, and probably simply to take those shocking pictures. Though we won’t actually know that for sure as the original data from the experiment was never released, so we don’t know which rats were which or what the original data collected was. This little fact is also damning since it make replication and comparison much more difficult, since you don’t know what all the outcomes actually are.

There is plenty else wrong with the paper: it’s hard to read for a scientific paper, the figures are unclear and overcrowded, and certain other results where ignored in the conclusion (like that one group of male rats which drank round up contaminated water actually had a longer life span then the control group). Though, again, all of these data points are statically irrelevant, so ultimately all of the result are meaningless.

Another damning fact surrounding the paper is that Séralini, while creating a lot of hype before the paper was published (which itself was odd given how poor it is overall), would not allow reporters to read the paper until they sign a legal document to promise that they would not share the document with other people (including trained scientists in the field) until after the paper was finished, so reporters had no means of fact-checking the legitimacy of the paper. And no other scientists were allowed to read the paper prior to publishing. A very odd thing to do unless you know your result are suspect.

So this paper, pivotal to so many anti-GMO arguments, is in fact a pointless bit of research that says nothing about the Monsanto products it was studying, but does speak poorly of those researcher who worked on it. I suggest if you see the name Gilles-Eric Séralini you’d be best to proceed with a healthy dose of skepticism.

There has been no shortage of criticism of this paper, and here is a very thorough tear-down of the paper. It does a better job than I do. Though, after searching through Youtube, this is the only video that accurately address the paper. That is, actually talks about the paper itself rather than working around it or just addressing the criticism. However, after carefully looking around, this is the most thoughtful and, most importantly, thorough I could find. So thanks to Myles Power for being awesome and stuff. I’ll definitely be linking to him more in the future:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWQON4FzQo4

Oh and why it the study pivotal? That because it’s the crux of some many GMO arguments, understanding that the science doesn’t support the vast majority of anti-gmo claims particularly this “paper” it key to getting a problem understanding of the issue and tackling this problem people have with GMO’s

Tackling the GMO Problem: Part 1, GMO hysteria and your role.

I tried a couple of times before to tackle this issue and have failed to post, since I couldn’t deal with the breadth of this issue to a level I felt was worthy, so this time I will split it up as a series of posts, each time tackling a major issue around GMO’s. I will be linking to videos and the most informative articles that the average person can read, sadly mostly these are Wikipedia articles, but I have gone through them and the ones I post are accurate to my understanding as an undergraduate who has been studying GMO’s and biology in general for about 3 years. Though my focus has been genetics, plants, and genetic engineering techniques and methods.

First before I go about digging into the science I need to validate fears. There is a ton of fear mongering out on the internet and in the general media. It is not the general populations job to understand the nitty gritty of the science, nor does the general public have the education to understand the raw studies which do not come to clean and easy conclusions, if they come to a conclusion at all!

If you are not a scientist, don’t feel bad. It’s okay to be unsure and have conflicting feelings, in fact, if you’re a scientist you should have conflicting feelings on complex and poorly researched issues. Sadly for the non-scientist, science communication is poor and misinformation is more prevalent then good solid information because good science rarely makes for sensational news. These day science reports tends to sound like this: ‘New research shows a possible cure for liver cancer in the form of a new cancer killing drug!’ When an accurate title would be: ‘Researchers have see some success in killing cancer cells in vitro (in Petri dishes) with a new chemical compound.” See the difference? And this happens all the time. Science reporting almost everywhere, except in well reputed science magazines and news providers, over personalizes new research to the point where they are misleading their readers. This is a strong claim, but the fact is, if a news provider is saying that title one is the same thing as title two, then they clearly don’t understand the very real difference between killing cancer in a Petri dish and killing it in a human body. Worse, articles are often just as bad as their titles: drawing conclusions from the research, which have no basis other then the fancy of the journalist, or they don’t actually say anything about the real research paper so you can’t even fact find if you wanted too.

Though journalism isn’t the only problem: the scientific journals charge an outrageous amount of money for access to scientific papers at the tune of $20-$30 per 10-20 page paper, even though the journals do not do the research themselves. So it’s actually pretty damn hard to get a hold of a research paper unless you work at or go to a university, since they tend to have bulk subscriptions to most academic journals. I’m sure if Journals offered research to be purchased for a less outlandish price, the science communication problem wouldn’t be so grievous.

So I get it, unless you have a science or research background, getting information is hard. And most of what we hear in the media is, to be perfectly honest, some level of misinformation. So someone being scared of GMOs in this light makes sense, since the loudest voices are saying “GMO’s are bad! Bad! Bad!”

So here is the first link to a Healthcare Triage video and I will be re-linking to this again, I’m sure, as it’s an amazingly thorough video for being a measly 12 minutes long. Please watch it no matter what stance you have as they handle the facts very effectively, and very thoroughly. He does not say that GMO’s are bad or good, he just tells you the facts, which is admirable, and it’s good science (and in this case healthcare) journalism. I readily recommended any and all Healthcare Triage video’s for their unbiased approach. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKO9s0zLthU

Let it be clear, I am a proponent for GMOs, not because I want them to be safe, but because I understand how they’re created and have studied this in University. However, I hope it is also clear that, for the layperson, it’s very easy to be drawn into the fear mongering surrounding GMOs, because there lacks good sources of information on them. Really and truly finding them is very difficult, and many are geared towards scientists in the fields of Genetic Engineering, which does not make it any easier for the average person.

In the next post I’ll be looking at what Organic food really is and the fear surrounding the word chemicals.