We're doing pick your price music on http://anjuno.com and for some reason no one is paying $22,500 per song. I wish those RIAA lawyers would start using Anjuno, it would really help our bottom line.
> I liked Avatar, but to me the obvious science fail was the telepathic connection between the Na'vi and the animals. Evolution doesn't work like that! Rattlesnakes do not grow rattles for your benefit! I'm afraid that yon astrophysicist knows rather a bit more about physics than about evolutionary biology if the inter-species universal complex adaptations didn't jump out at him.
You should check this out: http://www.i-sis.org.uk/paris.php The latest science suggests that evolution is less random than we thought, and that unrelated species often swap genetic information. Inter-species universal complex adaptations may be a bit more plausible than we think.
I am not an expert on evolution, but much of this article strikes me as incorrect. The fact that genes are capable of modifying other genes (turning them off/on, splicing in new genes, etc.) doesn't refute the concept of natural selection of random mutations unless you're ALSO positing a new mechanism by which this modification ability can be acquired. I skimmed through and didn't see one, even though he strangely implies that the fact that genes behave in a complex fashion means that organisms aren't coded by them. His (apparent) creationist sympathies and tacit endorsement of the gaia concept leads me to believe he thinks there is some sort of magic at work, which is not a very useful explanation.
I'm equally perplexed by his overall point of "genetics is complicated, therefore genetic engineering and capitalism is immoral."
Lawsuits? Who wouldn't want a nice, insulating layer of fat to protect their heart? I use a Pepsi IV daily and haven't gotten sick in at least a week and a half.
On a more serious note, the food industry has an immense amount of power in Washington and I think change in just a few years is highly optimistic, but I hope you're right.
I agree, but Washington isn't the only game in town. These socioeconomic/medical issues are costing European governments plenty too, and it would suit them just fine to denounce high-fructose corn syrup as an American imposition as a sop to their domestic farming lobbies (even though European food scientists are just as concerned with maximizing saleable weight at minimum cost as their counterparts here).
It may not take all that long: consider the history of tobacco litigation (also a powerful lobby) and the fact that federal and particularly state finances are in a tight squeeze, in which soaring medical costs play a significant part.
Countries with first-world (i.e. universal) healthcare systems tend to be a lot more proactive in regulating their food supply and environment than we are, because they view health problems as a common cost, whereas we view them as an individual cost.
This is one of many positive side effects of universal healthcare.
There is no way that humanity has figured out all the complexity that billions of years of evolution has created when it comes to animals eating each other.
Corporations are now coming up with new types of 'food' that they can sell for much more profit than the things our species have been surviving on for thousands of years. Take margarine for example - no cows to raise and milk, therefore a much bigger profit margin than butter. They also tell us it's much healthier too. But then studies like this come along http://www.nytimes.com/1993/03/05/us/study-links-heart-disea... , and the whole french paradox, which indicate the opposite may be true.
"When In-Vitro Meat (IVM) is cheaper than meat-on-the-hoof-or-claw, no one will buy the undercut opponent." I seriously doubt it. Even though a grass fed, dry aged steak is quite expensive, many people splurge because they are delicious. Has the author heard of the organic movement growing 20% a year over the past decade? People buying more expensive food because it's healthier and tastes better, that defies logic.
The article claims that this IVM is also healthier for the planet, but it neglects to mention where all the raw ingredients for the IVM will come from. Mother nature already created the perfect way to stay healthy - plants get energy from the sun to grow, animals eat plants, and excrete fertilizer to grow new plants. This happened for millions of years before humans came along. Unfortunately, our farms are no longer run using this perfect natural solution (another issue entirely), but I don't see how IVM would solve this.
My favorite quote from the article: "We won't even choke to death because IVM contains no malicious bones or gristle." It's amazing our species has survived so long with so many malicious bones and evil gristle after us. Malicious bones - I cant stop picturing zombies, haha.
Meh. Human beings haven't been eating domesticated cattle for all that long, either. I mean, geologically speaking. If you're going to put some faith in evolution, put it in our ability to adapt to available food sources. If we were as brittle as needing to consciously micromanage nutrient input, I doubt we'd have made it nearly this far.
Anyway, I don't see any particular reason to expect 'natural' food to be more healthy. Most of nature, given its druthers, would like to kill you.
>If you're going to put some faith in evolution, put it in our ability to adapt to available food sources. If we were as brittle as needing to consciously micromanage nutrient input, I doubt we'd have made it nearly this far.
It depends on your definition of "need." You can obviously live to be old enough to reproduce on extra value meals from McDonald's - people do - but that doesn't mean its good for you.
>Anyway, I don't see any particular reason to expect 'natural' food to be more healthy. Most of nature, given its druthers, would like to kill you.
Because we're adapted to it and we're messing with systems that are not well understood. Some of this is obvious and well-known - for example, the link between sugar consumption and diabetes.
> Because we're adapted to it and we're messing with systems that are not well understood.
Well, at least we try to understand them. Nature doesn't even do that. Bananas--in any form--are new; a 10,000 year old irreproducible hybrid. Corn and cattle have undergone extreme selection and no small amount of random variation in that time. Nature produces viruses and parasites and mutations on proteins and poisons, none of which have us in mind. And it does it much, much faster than human evolution is going to be able to adapt to changing available food sources. Our generations are long, and little things like cancer at the end of life just don't hurt our offspring that much.
In a contest between engineered food -- whether cloned or GM -- and food that's just been genetically drifting for a few thousand years, I'll take the engineered food every time. Sure, the engineers are working with systems far beyond their ken. I get that. But nature wouldn't be shy about doing even relatively obviously dangerous things. Engineers might make sweeter apples and we discover many years down the road that some protein interaction upsets some delicate balance if you eat them with too many fish and it causes your teeth to turn blue. But nature might decide to make an apple all cyanide and not just the seeds.
Humans are pretty robust and adaptable. We can handle the random, arbitrary garbage nature throws at us. We wouldn't be here if we couldn't. So I'm sure the mistakes of a few engineers who trying very hard not to hurt us won't amount to much of anything.
That's actually a really good point, our bodies have some fairly advanced defenses, but still I'd play it safe and avoid this stuff like the plague until a solid amount of time has gone by.
In the old court days they used to have a person that would taste the food (I don't know the English word for such a person, sorry) and if that person wouldn't keel over within half an hour of tasting the food the food would be considered safe.
I fully intend to use that part of humanity that doesn't care about issues like this for exactly that purpose, but I'll set the time quite a bit longer than half an hour.
(silly old timers, never heard of slow acting or cumulative poisons...)
[...] they used to have a person that would taste the food [...]
"The surnames of the Maltese Islands: an etymological dictionary" by Mario Cassar (http://bit.ly/assayer) confirms what I'd read elsewhere, it's called an "assayer". "food taster" is most commonly used though.
The meat we have now is rather unhealthy and unnatural. Cows are built to eat grass and chickens are built to eat mostly bugs. Instead we stuff them all with corn and soy. This makes the omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acid ratios very wrong. This imbalance is strongly implicated in many human diseases, heart disease in particular. The only truly healthy meat is grass fed.
I'm very skeptical, but it seems at least possible to me that test tube meat could be formulated to better approximate "natural" grass fed meat than the mass produced feedlot stuff we have now. They could fix the fatty acid ratios by "feeding" the meat with algae secretions. The only way to find out will be with experimentation.
Of course this brings us back to the question of what our food market would look like if all grain subsidies were removed. It's quite likely the vast corn fields would be converted to pasture and healthy meat would get cheap. And it's quite likely that proper pastured meat production is more efficient than all the test tube processes.
Not to be too nitpicky, but chickens are omnivores. They will happily eat worms, leaves, bugs, grass, flowers, seeds, flies, small frogs, other chickens, and I've seen them try to attack small snakes.
And trust me when I say they don't have to be forced to eat corn. Next to worms, it's probably their favorite food.
