You're completely right, and I am guilty of not properly RTFSing. It sounds like Bt resistance is naturally occurring and the silly people were just trying to stave off selection for it—and this story isn't even about Monsanto, so there's another derp point for me. That being said, there's always the 'chemical cocktail' problem, and it's hard not to look at a chemical as synthetic and toxic as Roundup and not wonder how much it's contributing to the problem.
The results were mostly "scientific socialism"—are you aiming for Soviet biologists or socialist cultural evolution? The Wikipedia article on Lamarckianism might also be of interest.
As an evolutionary biologist it is my sworn duty to make fun of helpless species that evolved to fill an ecological niche in the absence of predators. Like Walmart shoppers.
Come to think of it, given that Roundup is such a powerful mutagen, it's probably why the insects evolved so quickly to overcome it. This story is more worthy of Idiocracy than I initially realised.
It may amuse you to learn how the Monsanto people "engineered" their genetically modified and patent-protected seeds.
They hit them with random mutagens until they found something that was resistant to Roundup. And then they bred them like pedigree cats to enhance the effect. The grass genome (from which corn, wheat, and a number of other crops are derived) is absurdly complex, believed to contain four to six times as many genes as the human, and comes in five copies. Engineering it is very hit-and-miss. So they didn't even bother. Instead they patented the outcome of a directed natural process. It's like patenting the domesticated cow genome. (The grass-eating variety, not the mother-in-law variety.)
Actually, Roundup doesn't have any electrolytes in it, but it does cause cancer. And I hear it's going to be responsible for a dustbowl if civilization continues on its present course. I guess that sort of counts.
We didn't expect it to happen so quickly, that's all. Bacteria evolve much more rapidly than insects: E. coli splits once every 8 hours under optimal conditions in colonies of millions of cells, and may mutate up to 0.003% of their genome with each cell division under stress. That's a lot of brute forcing power. Insects, by contrast, have much more elaborate and stringent eukaryotic mutation controls, and most species take a couple of weeks to hatch.
It's a common abuse of semantics in science, but you're correct. Insects aren't spontaneously becoming resistant, their descendants are being selected for resistance. The belief that major evolutionary adjustments can occur within a single lifetime is an abandoned evolutionary theory called Lamarckianism, the classic example of which is a proto-giraffe's neck stretching out to reach higher and higher leaves, and this stretchedness being passed on directly to the offspring (as if someone who becomes muscular as an adult will pass on their musculature directly to their children!) Incidentally, there actually are two evolutionary elements that function according to a Lamarckian model: epigenetics (censorship applied to DNA that can be changed in response to environmental stressors) and culture (many mammals and birds, amongst others, can pass on innovations to their offspring through teaching.) It appears that an organism that can change itself during its lifetime is preferable to one that must evolve over generations, but the good ol' nucleotide tape is stuck in Mendel mode.
It's been doing this for millions of years. Plants evolve pesticides constantly. There are species of cacti that grow in perfect grids because they toxify the soil against even their own seedlings (a common trick amongst trees, to prevent crowding) and it's why wild almonds contain cyanide. The only real surprise is how fast the insects coevolved—but perhaps, given the rate of adaptation of bacteria to antibiotics, that's foolish of us.
Still, don't take this as an excuse to be ecologically destructive. Species that are already under stress don't have much leeway, and any shot to biological diversity is bad for the biosphere's durability as a whole, excepting perhaps idiotic birds like the kakopo.
Also.edu, [...] costs have recently been exploding.
I know how you feel! Those domain registrars are nuts. How are we supposed to get by if the fake university websites we set up to fool our parents are unaffordable? ICANN should do something.
I thought about doing that when I had the opportunity, but decided I'd develop chronic back pain as a teenager by unnecessarily lugging my 3e D&D core rulebooks to school every day instead. Worked out pretty well.
Posting anonymously is supposed to protect someone from the repercussions of making a strong statement. No one should be heckled for speaking their honest beliefs behind that protective cloak. You just made the "if you aren't doing anything bad, you have nothing to hide" fallacy, which is disappointing. (Moreover, there's more to civilization than the length of one's work week. Stop waving your dick around. It gets you flamebait mods.)
Yes, I was going to go on to make the point that once you have everyone cheating, it's no longer a human-directed game—unlike the intricate art of the tool-assisted speed run, which is basically a mission to explore the best possible playtime assuming perfect luck and skill, or reliving an old classic (I'm a strong proponent of the five-second rewind in ZSNES myself), a multiplayer game boils down into a pure struggle of code-versus-code. Suddenly, the arms race evolves into a 3D version of Core Wars played with other people's algorithms, a fabulously boring thing to watch if you don't intimately understand what the agents are doing and why.
The incentive to cheat in moneyless games like Valve's FPSes is unfortunately quite simple and immune to your logic. It's a desire to torture and torment non-cheaters. Most people who are simply bad at the game don't download aimbots and wallhacks, because that would be admitting defeat. Putting up a "trolls OK here!" sign doesn't generally stop trolls from attempting to troll other communities.
Yes, but we've known forever that the desire to jerk off to one's own ego greatly exceeds any sense of honour or human decency that may exist in online gamers. It's sort of like anarcho-capitalism, except with rankings instead of coffers.
Absolutely. Can't stand the stuff. It's all "no more than one biological mother" this and "no posthumous questionnaire data" that. It would be so much easier if sometimes people just accepted that production databases occasionally contain test tubes of purified DNA with the ID number "gregs sample" and that the laboratory freezer apparently contains a dead cat, but noooooo, I have to write validation suites all day to fix number padding errors created during data entry. Well, the joke's on you! Say hello to "000gregs-0sample"! Ha!
I like the ambiguity of the parsing in that sentence. "This just in: parents who are against Nike violence have been found to also be against small children!"
Slashdot Mirror
Oh damn. The error is on me; they're ursidae proper. I blame the koalas. Clearly I am not a taxonomist.
Hmm. Okay. "Like Volvo drivers." Does that work?
You're completely right, and I am guilty of not properly RTFSing. It sounds like Bt resistance is naturally occurring and the silly people were just trying to stave off selection for it—and this story isn't even about Monsanto, so there's another derp point for me. That being said, there's always the 'chemical cocktail' problem, and it's hard not to look at a chemical as synthetic and toxic as Roundup and not wonder how much it's contributing to the problem.
The results were mostly "scientific socialism"—are you aiming for Soviet biologists or socialist cultural evolution? The Wikipedia article on Lamarckianism might also be of interest.
Marsupial, not ursine. It's remarkable sometimes how much confusion remains about that.
It's still several magnitudes below bacterial reproduction, which was the only well-studied case.
...yes. It's a pair of stable counter-ions, and they can most definitely conduct electricity. I should probably be getting to bed.
As an evolutionary biologist it is my sworn duty to make fun of helpless species that evolved to fill an ecological niche in the absence of predators. Like Walmart shoppers.
Come to think of it, given that Roundup is such a powerful mutagen, it's probably why the insects evolved so quickly to overcome it. This story is more worthy of Idiocracy than I initially realised.
It may amuse you to learn how the Monsanto people "engineered" their genetically modified and patent-protected seeds.
They hit them with random mutagens until they found something that was resistant to Roundup. And then they bred them like pedigree cats to enhance the effect. The grass genome (from which corn, wheat, and a number of other crops are derived) is absurdly complex, believed to contain four to six times as many genes as the human, and comes in five copies. Engineering it is very hit-and-miss. So they didn't even bother. Instead they patented the outcome of a directed natural process. It's like patenting the domesticated cow genome. (The grass-eating variety, not the mother-in-law variety.)
Actually, Roundup doesn't have any electrolytes in it, but it does cause cancer. And I hear it's going to be responsible for a dustbowl if civilization continues on its present course. I guess that sort of counts.
We didn't expect it to happen so quickly, that's all. Bacteria evolve much more rapidly than insects: E. coli splits once every 8 hours under optimal conditions in colonies of millions of cells, and may mutate up to 0.003% of their genome with each cell division under stress. That's a lot of brute forcing power. Insects, by contrast, have much more elaborate and stringent eukaryotic mutation controls, and most species take a couple of weeks to hatch.
(Sorry, correction: Darwin mode, not Mendel mode.)
It's a common abuse of semantics in science, but you're correct. Insects aren't spontaneously becoming resistant, their descendants are being selected for resistance. The belief that major evolutionary adjustments can occur within a single lifetime is an abandoned evolutionary theory called Lamarckianism, the classic example of which is a proto-giraffe's neck stretching out to reach higher and higher leaves, and this stretchedness being passed on directly to the offspring (as if someone who becomes muscular as an adult will pass on their musculature directly to their children!) Incidentally, there actually are two evolutionary elements that function according to a Lamarckian model: epigenetics (censorship applied to DNA that can be changed in response to environmental stressors) and culture (many mammals and birds, amongst others, can pass on innovations to their offspring through teaching.) It appears that an organism that can change itself during its lifetime is preferable to one that must evolve over generations, but the good ol' nucleotide tape is stuck in Mendel mode.
It's been doing this for millions of years. Plants evolve pesticides constantly. There are species of cacti that grow in perfect grids because they toxify the soil against even their own seedlings (a common trick amongst trees, to prevent crowding) and it's why wild almonds contain cyanide. The only real surprise is how fast the insects coevolved—but perhaps, given the rate of adaptation of bacteria to antibiotics, that's foolish of us.
Still, don't take this as an excuse to be ecologically destructive. Species that are already under stress don't have much leeway, and any shot to biological diversity is bad for the biosphere's durability as a whole, excepting perhaps idiotic birds like the kakopo.
Also .edu, [...] costs have recently been exploding.
I know how you feel! Those domain registrars are nuts. How are we supposed to get by if the fake university websites we set up to fool our parents are unaffordable? ICANN should do something.
I thought about doing that when I had the opportunity, but decided I'd develop chronic back pain as a teenager by unnecessarily lugging my 3e D&D core rulebooks to school every day instead. Worked out pretty well.
Posting anonymously is supposed to protect someone from the repercussions of making a strong statement. No one should be heckled for speaking their honest beliefs behind that protective cloak. You just made the "if you aren't doing anything bad, you have nothing to hide" fallacy, which is disappointing. (Moreover, there's more to civilization than the length of one's work week. Stop waving your dick around. It gets you flamebait mods.)
Such irony—the Russians invented the art of reverse-engineering American chips. Observe!
Yes, I was going to go on to make the point that once you have everyone cheating, it's no longer a human-directed game—unlike the intricate art of the tool-assisted speed run, which is basically a mission to explore the best possible playtime assuming perfect luck and skill, or reliving an old classic (I'm a strong proponent of the five-second rewind in ZSNES myself), a multiplayer game boils down into a pure struggle of code-versus-code. Suddenly, the arms race evolves into a 3D version of Core Wars played with other people's algorithms, a fabulously boring thing to watch if you don't intimately understand what the agents are doing and why.
The incentive to cheat in moneyless games like Valve's FPSes is unfortunately quite simple and immune to your logic. It's a desire to torture and torment non-cheaters. Most people who are simply bad at the game don't download aimbots and wallhacks, because that would be admitting defeat. Putting up a "trolls OK here!" sign doesn't generally stop trolls from attempting to troll other communities.
Finally! It's all so clear now...
Yes, but we've known forever that the desire to jerk off to one's own ego greatly exceeds any sense of honour or human decency that may exist in online gamers. It's sort of like anarcho-capitalism, except with rankings instead of coffers.
Absolutely. Can't stand the stuff. It's all "no more than one biological mother" this and "no posthumous questionnaire data" that. It would be so much easier if sometimes people just accepted that production databases occasionally contain test tubes of purified DNA with the ID number "gregs sample" and that the laboratory freezer apparently contains a dead cat, but noooooo, I have to write validation suites all day to fix number padding errors created during data entry. Well, the joke's on you! Say hello to "000gregs-0sample"! Ha!
I like the ambiguity of the parsing in that sentence. "This just in: parents who are against Nike violence have been found to also be against small children!"