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I’m going to be that guy about GMO crops. If we were modifying them to be drought resistant or need less water, I’d be all for it. Instead, what we modify them for is to be “roundup ready” meaning that glyphosate can be sprayed liberally on it without killing it making weeding the field much easier. I am not concerned about the GMO crop, but I am concerned with all my food being covered in Roundup.
As someone who’s graduating in biotechnology, we want and we do, but there are a few things that make this not reach the market.
Round-up ready plants are incredibly easy to make, you insert only one gene (effectively, there are some little extra things but details) and now your plant can resist glyphosate, which means you can make many different species resistant to it much more easily, or make all of the different lines of whatever crop you sell also be restaurant to it.
For making drought resistant plants, there isn’t exactly one gene that makes the plant resistant. Just one example would be root length. If a plant has longer roots it can access moist soil for longer periods of time and thus making it more resilient against droughts, but to make the roots grow longer you have several genes that interact and changing one might not result in deeper roots in a drought environment since that gene is activated by a phytohormone that is upregulated during long days (summer time) but this location only encounters droughts during early spring when the days are still short, and for you to regulate that gene to change when the phytohormone is upregulated you’d need to change a BUNCH of other things on the plant that would result in a complete mess of how the plant develops as now it acts like summer during spring but only for the roots and the roots send signals that the leafs must ignore until the correct time of the year and that changes when the seeds are going to be released because the plant is now blooming at a completely different time and oh fuck we’ve developed the equivalent of ancient Egyptian inbreed pharaohs but for plants, which is horrible but incredibly impressive given that most plants can self fertilize… This is one route of trying to just make longer roots, if we go through giving the root growth gene sensibility to another phytohormone that is upregulated on short days, the roots now will release other phytohormones in higher levels than the plant is used to (more length = more roots = more cells making said phytohormones) and since plants develop through gradients of hormones and the proportion of one vs another, the amount of work to make it so that the plant actually develops correctly will also be huge! And this is just for one single characteristic that we think would help in many cases but wouldn’t actually make plants fully resistant to droughts, just able to get a few extra days of water, unlike how roundup ready is still just add this gene that allows the plant to break down glyphosate fast enough that it doesn’t die.
Now the other side of the issue is funding. Yeah, droughts are a really bad problem for farms, but the BUG farms are either in places that they don’t suffer from droughts that much, in places that they can buy a lot of water cheaply (government subsidies) or can produce a lot of crops even when there’s a drought vs what they’d loose against weeds competing with their crops for water, nutrients and diseases spread by those weeds
In the end, we have the same reasons that tuberculosis and malaria are not funded and researched flash much as they should, it just doesn’t make sense (commercially) to do so for big corporations like monsanto/bayer and the subject is complex enough that several universities having small teams researching it will tackle it from so many different angles and have such a difficult time with it that progress is really slow. The researchers want to work on cures for malaria, tuberculosis and to make plants resistant to droughts, soil acidification, nutrient content of the final produce and much much more, but we’re fighting against capitalism and spaghetti code with no annotations written by thousands of not millions of different coders that didn’t talk with each other through the millions of years of development of said code
Unfortunately you don’t really have a choice. Organic and GMO free doesn’t mean herbicide free, and plants with natural tolerance to herbicides either have genes to detoxify or sequester them in their cell walls. If the sequester them, then you get to eat nice bioaccumulation of herbicide. Glyphosate itself is pretty safe mechanistically, however everyone forgets about the adjuvants its formulation.
You’re absolutely not alone with GMO concerns.
Celiac enters the chat.Sounds right
I think equally important as teaching these things to begin with is letting students know when they’re being taught a simplified model, and that serious academic discourse of the subject is still evolving and/or involves much more nuance (which is pretty much always). some people who do pay attention in science classes nonetheless think that what they learned is gospel and never re-examine it, or stubbornly refuse to acknowledge when said nuance is relevant because it seems to contradict the simplified model they’ve cemented in their brain as the whole truth. the kind of people who say things like “I know there’s two genders because I learned it in high school biology” and apparently never considered why there would be collegiate and post-graduate studies on biology and gender (or why those are two entirely different fields of study) if we all already learned everything there is to know in high school.
To be fair, most schools give those classes only out of obligation. Doing dumb calculations of mols and atomic masses in high school is definitely teaching kids to ask “why the fuck am I even doing this?”
Learning some chemistry basics is probably still good though. Not that we’re using it daily but just in the “hey mixing this stuff can kill you” or, in the same vein, seeing how it only requires small amounts to make big changes.
We’re surrounded by chemicals in our everyday lives, learning a healthy fear of them is probably for the best.
Also high school is meant to prepare you for further education, if you want to pursue that, so it really does cover a lot of ground for basic concepts you need to learn to understand and gain further education in whatever field applies.
Yeah, like an German Comedian said, while the Teacher shows how an Morse communication works, the childrens with their Smartphones already are logged in his Pacemaker.
Real talk: those “boring” science classes aren’t about memorizing facts — they teach you how to spot bad claims and check sources. That skill pays off forever.
The “do your own research” people need to have it explained to them that even experts in their respective fields aren’t automatically capable of parsing scientific literature. A family doctor with 50 years experience who prescribes antidepressants every day will have no deep understanding of what any particular scientific peer reviewed study on SSRIs is telling them. They need a grounding in statistics more than anything else, which most people just don’t have. So the idea that a non-educated, non-scientist can read peer reviewed studies and come away from them with some sort of understanding of the issue is the thing that needs to be highlighted, preferably in high school science class (earlier, frankly). A willingness to slog through scientific papers in pursuit of deeper knowledge is admirable, but is dangerously misguided without proper training. I don’t even mean training in the specific science, but just in how to speak the language of peer reviewed studies more generally. It’s very much its own discipline.
I want someone to ask Joe Rogan what ‘regression to the mean’ means. I want someone to ask him what a ‘standard deviation’ is and how to apply the concept. I don’t want to know what papers he’s read, because you could read 50 true scientific papers a day on one topic and still have no idea what the current scientific consensus is on said topic, absent the requisite training. You’ll almost certainly come away from it with a very wrong but very confident belief. Dunning-Kruger on steroids.
The sad thing is those people did take those classes.
Ignorance is piss
Kiss my piss
There are something like 10 million students attending Christian school and the like, and another 5 million or so being home schooled.
They don’t really believe in the scientific method and critical thinking, in general. At least in my experience as a student of a Christian school. I had no idea.
On a related note having 6 different classes a day 8 hours total times 5 days a week made it impossible to learn properly.
If we want children to learn these things, we should teach them these things directly, instead of relying on science classes. I’m not saying we should get rid of science classes, but the people who are saying these stupid things did actually take science classes in school.
We desperately need to teach classes that are specific. I learned a lot about problem solving from math classes, but I was shocked when I tutored other kids, and they only learned the math, but had no idea how to approach problems. And I don’t mean just word problems, but literally even if you just give them multiple equations and variables.
My tutoring often went like this: “I can’t solve this!” “What information to they give you? What answer do they want? What can you do with the stuff that they’ve given you to get the answer?” And then they get the answer. Then repeat. Literally no math involved in the tutoring for math class.
So, we need required classes, early, like in elementary school, that specifically teach problem solving, critical thinking, how to detect misinformation, and what I’ll call empathy. By “empathy”, I mean the ability to imagine yourself in another person’s shoes so that you can predict why they’re doing what they’re doing. It’s essential for detecting misinformation because you need to trust somebody at some point, so you need to understand how to tell who is more likely to be trustworthy. I also think we should teach children meditation techniques.
But how do you teach those skills directly
Science classes
Okay, but what are electrolytes?
You simply apply your problem solving skills as an adult. You want students to understand how to do these things. Well, how do you do these things? Then teach the students the method that you use. That’s the simplest version. But there’s been a lot of research about how to teach things, so following the best research is the better version.
I think I gave a small example of teaching problem solving in my 3rd paragraph where I described tutoring math. But you can use any problems instead of simply math problems.
Really, I say this as a very introverted person with a strong STEM background, I think the most important skills children learn from school are their interpersonal skills, but we rarely teach them directly. So, you can work through typical problems in class, like for problem solving, say, you want to use the gaming console, but your sibling is using it. What can you do?
Similarly, how do YOU know when something is misinformation? Just teach the children to take the same steps you do. “I doubt this information because based on these previous incidents, I’ve seen that this person has a reason to lie about this.” Or, “If I think about it, there is somebody who is profiting from people acting on this information, and so I that makes me dubious about this.”
How do you know when a conspiracy theory is very unlikely? The more important it is and the more people who must participate in it, the less likely the theory is to be true. That’s why you can write off flat earth theories almost instantly with very little knowledge of science.
You can teach critical thinking via debate class, for example, but I think there are some other methods, too. Critical thinking is probably the hardest to imagine a way to teach.
You take time to answer questions in class rather than force feeding standardized test questions down their throats. Kids don’t lose their curiosity. They just get tired of hearing some variation of, “I’ll answer that later.”
Art! Where logic fails to motivate, artistic expression can lead to emotional understanding
Internet contains the whole knowledge of humanity… the other 98% are influencers, ChatGPT posts, memes, cat photos, fake news, bots and flat earthers.
that’s the same people who later get to helm companies and say “who the fuck needs market research when you have the force of will”
This whole thread is a box of rocks.
Does that mean that the people who got an A in biology are more right than people who got a B in biology?
Tbf this does kind of imply we are doing something wrong. Maybe instead we should teach people to learn and judge information, rather than train them to take information presented to them at face value.
There are as many irrational science fanatics as there are religious fanatics.
There are as many irrational science fanatics as there are religious fanatics.
I really doubt that.
Also, how are they to judge information presented to them if there is no agreed upon valid source?
