292
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2024
292 points (98.7% liked)
Asklemmy
43645 readers
1128 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
If by "a lot" you mean "nearly all commonly grown crops in the last 200 years or more", then yes. There are very few crops we haven't altered in our quest to feed more people with less work, and even things such as heirloom produce are just varieties that breed true (and may have been around longer than the other varieties).
I have some concerns about GMOs, mostly because we aren't very good at it yet. When we start producing things with the behavior of cucumbers producing cucurbitacin (not a desirable trait, but highly targeted), or if we're adding benign genes that make something produce beta carotene, I'm all for it.
I wasn't sure how many crops are actually bred in a significant way, and I didn't feel like researching so I just wrote "a lot".
Yeah, i think it is more like thousands of years. wiki origin of species (Darwin)
But breeding and GMO are different tech entirely, even if they might have similar results.
Breeding plants probably started before egypt (they just the earliest with decipherable writing ) even just as an unintended biproduct of agriculture, just planting stuff together then weeding out the plants with less desirable yield, or selecting seed from the most productive plants for next year would do it. t may not hve been conscious or scientific, but it would have been effective over the generations.
Yeah, GMO is not the same as breeding. Its just that the comment I originally replied to claimed that, unless I didn't understand them correctly
My qualifier for the 200 years or more is because we have some crops that we've only grown extensively for a couple hundred years, and the almost is because I don't know the details for some new world crops such as quinoa and amaranth.