Peter Scott wrote:
On 23/03/2011 18:54, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
Peter Scott wrote:


You're just making this up as you go along, with no idea whether it
actually means anything. I find this kind of doomsaying absurd.


I think that you are just being narrow-minded, assuming that because
nothing bad did happen that it could not have done.


If that were a reason not to do something, we might as well paralyse
ourselves now.



Are you sure that
all of the people working on GM knew exactly where their researches
would lead? It wouldn't have been much use if they did. We have never
in the past deliberately combined genetic material from different
organisms. You must know that it is a definition of a species that it
can reproduce. Yes, there has been genetic mixing over time but most
of these mixes died out because they were non-viable or for reasons we
can know nothing about. Yes, a complex organism is the result of
combinations of many smaller organisms over aeons of time, but many
many will have died out as a result of natural selection. I am not
doom-saying at all. Simply pointing out that science has been
conducting an experiment with no real idea if it might go badly wrong.
We have to go on doing it for the sake of feeding the world but should
not ignore the possible consequences.


You remind me of the story about the young prince and the lion: An old
woman cursed him because he was a snotty little brat, and sad 'you will
die when you meet a lion'

Hid parents were so scared, they never let him out of the palace
grounds, and he grew up isolated.

One day, while exploring an old disused part of the palace, he came
across a picture of a Lion. He was furious "WHO left this picture here?"
he screamed and banged his fists on the wall, where an old rusty nail
from another picture, cut his hand, and he died of septicaemia three
days later...

:-)


As we are now leaving rational argument behind

well that was the point I was making

You cannot predicate a course of action on the statistical probability
of an unkown unknown.

Because you don't know it. By definition.

The fact is that by definition also, there always will be unknown
unknowns: Ergo if you are not going to proceed on the grounds that there
are unknown unknowns, you are going to get precisely nowhere.

Which is what the Prince did, but as the story shows, even that didn't
ensure his safety..