Wow, the posts are coming fast and furious this week, huh? Well, I’ve had trouble in the past coming up with topics, but meanwhile a friend keeps sending me links to science articles to explain or debunk, and my responses keep getting longer. In fact, this will be the third entry here that started there. So, what the hell? I’m going to keep posting them, and I invite you all to take part by sending me new articles! You can do that through the comments section, my Twitter account, or my Facebook Page.
This Monsanto Man Just Squared Off with an Idaho Mother (and Lost the Debate with This One Sentence)
There are several problems with this that have to be broken down individually. First of all, the result of a debate has nothing to do with science, and everything to do with who's better at thinking on their feet and communicating with that particular audience. That’s just how debates work. The media and Mrs. Easley's group have done a thorough job of stacking the deck against this guy, but he took it upon himself to help educate this audience anyway. (His motivations for doing so are likewise irrelevant).
Next, the specific exchange they say lost the debate for Monsanto could only have borne weight with an audience with no understanding of what was being said. Easley's description of the process may well be accurate, (I don't know), but that doesn't invalidate Clark's statement that his engineers know what they're doing. She described a test to make sure that the specific genes the engineers wanted to add properly took hold in the target strand. No other method of breeding allows the addition of such a precise section of DNA, and in fact using more traditional methods pretty much requires you grow the product before determining if it's useful, instead of testing it before potentially (and very likely) wasting resources.
Finally, the site doing the reporting showed their own ignorance and bias with this line: "once again conflating traditional plant breeding with lab-created, gene-spliced GMOs in a possible effort to confuse the audience". This was not a confusion, but a clarification. Molecular manipulation of DNA is simply the latest in a long line of breeding methods, and it happens to be the most accurate, flexible, and reliable one to date.
It's also pretty manipulative of them to describe the debaters as "Monsanto Man" and "Idaho Mother". Their family status is meaningless in this context, and his is appropriately ignored. (If you’re really curious, he has two daughters and a son). It sets her up to be more sympathetic, burying her status as an activist leading a special interest group further down in the article. I imagine there's also a feminist argument to be made about this emphasis on her motherhood… but I’m not well versed in the language of those arguments.
As an aside, the article also adds that he ignored a UN report on how to feed the world's growing population. I followed their link, and his reasoning should be obvious. The report's findings advocate a shift from large-scale factory farming to a more distributed system of small scale operations. It had nothing to do with GMOs, because the purpose of GMOs is to provide a more reliable and robust harvest regardless of operational scale.
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