You know what made me laugh?

[holly_evolving]

I was in the hippie organic store the other day (because I like it and their chicken tastes better) and I saw, in the produce section, some peppermint. The sign on the bin said it was Non-Genetically Modified Peppermint. Now, a kinder spirit than mine would probably take that to mean that this peppermint didn't have hormones added to it to make it grow bigger, or have it's DNA recoded to make it greener, or some other way in which people messed with it. But me? I just laughed. Because peppermint is a naturally occurring hybrid species. I suppose it's inaccurate for me to giggle about that, since it's not like people hybridized it. Still, just because people didn't modify it, doesn't mean it didn't happen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppermint

I'm splitting a very fine hair, I know. It would have been better if it was a bin of loganberries.

Comments

[wolf-nd-shadows.livejournal.com]

technically, genetic modification refers only to direct manipulation of genes, not the indirect manipulation through selective breeding. because honestly, unless you are a hard core survivalist that only eats what you personally hunt and gather, every thing we eat has been selectively bred.

[holly-evolving.livejournal.com]

Oh, I know. I just think that, at a very basic level, selective breeding IS genetic modification. You're choosing to only allow those animals/plants with the traits you choose to pass on their genes. That's why loganberries would have worked better; they're an intentional hybrid of blackberry and raspberry. But yeah, you can't find non-genetically modified domestic turkeys. Their genes were modified through selective breeding instead of fiddling with things under microscopes, but the end result is the same. They can't fly--hell, they can't even mate. And yet, they are technically the same species as wild turkeys.

It was just an odd moment in my hippie store. Like the vegan-friendly gelatin they carried for like, a week. What was IN that stuff?

[wolf-nd-shadows.livejournal.com]

vegan geletin is made from tofurkey bones.

this discussion reminded me of one of my garden center stories. News of gene jumping killing off monarchs, non-approved BT corn entering the food supplies, the threat of the terminator gene, etc, had just but the GMO debate back into the public spotlight. I had a customer who asked my why the tomatoes had different names on them, and then got scared when she thought they were all GMO. In any scientific discourse, genetic modification is specific to when genes are directly manipulated, because doing so creates an organism that is environmentally unstable and could not exist without human manipulation. Even though selectively bred animals sometimes do develop characteristics which do seem counter productive, or absurd, these genes are not being introduced into the species, as is specifically done in gentic modification, and it is possible that the characteristics could still evolve on their own. Afterall, it isn't unheard of for a species naturally over select the characteristic that drives them to extinction such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_elk or just overselect to absurdity, such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jersey_Shore_%28TV_series%29

[holly-evolving.livejournal.com]

Ah, but depending on the context in which the discussion is taking place, I can be a semantics-oriented jerk who likes to mess with self-riteous people.

I wish http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/ updated more often.