Friday, October 7, 2016

A rebuttal for the "We are all GMOs" statement

[For a particular whatsapp conv] First, please stop posting more arguments after you have said "i rest my case". If you have truly rested your case, then accept whatever disproving of your statements happens next and don't try covering it up with additional arguments. If you want to put in something more, then first apologize and explicitly take back the "rest my case" statement which is nowadays thrown about for emotional effect.

Now, kindly notice that even what all I'm saying here is only an offering, coming from where I'm standing, and nothing is fixed in stone. It's simply put forward for your kind consideration.

The statement "you and I are all GMOs" is equivalent to saying "Pepsi and Coke are all natural fruit juices". It's the same technical folly. They are not; and we are not GMOs. We are naturally reproduced beings with NATURALLY derived genetic variations, structured through bio-physical limitations within the same species family, not ARTIFICIALLY done through bombarding embryos with foreign DNA coming from completely different species trees like fish & bacteria. All breeding of plants, dogs, etc done in the world still comes under NATURALLY derived genetic variations; we cannot inter-breed cats and dogs or dogs and plants together, because we step back and let nature take its course after bringing the chosen sperm and eggs together. If some strange interbreeding does happen, then nature decides whether the offspring is healthy enough to survive and propagate or not. A woman cannot be impregnated by a plant's pollen. If that happened regularly, then you could be justified in asserting that we are all GMOs.

At an emotional level, claiming that GMOs are the same as all other kinds of breeding, procreation and hybridization comes from the mindset of believing that humans are now evolved enough to take over the powers of God / Nature (a persistent fetish among scientists) and so whatever tinkering humans do (like GMOs) must be considered the same as what Nature does. It's a very anthropocentric philosophy, full of patriarchal ego, directly originating from Christian orthodox belief of Dominion of Man (google it!), and having zero scientific or empirical truth in it. 

Our embryos weren't shot with fish and bacteria genes to make us. We are not carrying terminator genes that will render our grandkids sterile. We don't have Monsanto's trademark embedded into our DNA. We are not intellectual property of corporations. We have lasted thousands of generations and have balanced with the rest of this planet; GMOs die off quickly and need to be artificially reproduced and artificially protected with pesticides and fertilizers - they can't even survive on their own for very long. And worst of all : they have serious incompatibilities with our body's bio-chemistry and our gut (symbiotic) bacteria, which is why GMOs are causing health problems.

Human technologies have simply not evolved enough to replace Nature - the GMO foods in the market are defective products made by inferior technology whose only USP is that it can be patented while Nature cannot.

The statement "we are all GMOs" is GM companies' propaganda; can be traced back to their PR documents and they have been caught paying professors to say it. It is superstition; isn't backed by an iota of scientific evidence. It is the equivalent of saying "Pepsi and Coke are all natural fruit juices". We all start off with believing in the wrong things. We need to unlearn along the way, and staying invested in these propaganda one-liners doesn't help us.

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