Posted by
Nick Thompson on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/speaking-of-old-people-tp7586049p7586056.html
It's the old war between the Dionysians and the Apollonians, between the
grasshoppers and the ants. Your ants and your Apollonians plant tiny
oaktrees in their lawn, build brick houses, develop communities, because
they are confident in their ability to make a future. Your Dionysians grab
for all the gusto they can get, having contempt for the possibility of
making a future. I can't really argue for one position or the other.
Either makes sense to me. What does offend me is when Dionysians represent
their revelry in Apollonian terms -- as making a better future. Let the
technicians invent their toys, play with them, adorn them with skins and
aps, but don't let them ever claim that they are making progress. It's just
what it is, and it will go where it goes, and on balance, we may be happier
or more miserable because of it. Real progress, if there is such a thing,
requires a lot more than innovation.
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:
[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Saturday, February 14, 2015 11:54 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: [FRIAM] GMO and "the evil you know"
On 2/14/15 8:56 AM, Marcus G. Daniels wrote:
> Steve writes:
>
> ``I don't really trust engineering-thinking (GMO) to replace
> evolution... humans and domesticated flora and fauna "co-evolved"...
> just jumping in and replacing things with "new and improved" isn't as
> simple/obvious as one might imagine, I contend.''
>
> Perhaps the only way to learn the constraints in the problem space,
though.
> Risk vs. reward, like anything.
Absolutely. The only question is whether we are aware of the scale of the
risks we take when we take them or are willing to consider the risks we
surely know are there but maybe cannot elaborate in detail (yet)?
Had we known the devastating effects on the biomes and human populations of
many parts of the world during the "age of exploration", I'm sure some would
still have exercised their right/need to abruptly introduce a wide variety
of unexpected creatures (from virus particles and bacteria to pigs, cats and
rabbits) to the "rest of the world", especially islands throughout the
Pacific, as part of their "manifest destiny".
I'm as much of a technophile as anyone here, yet, I believe we live in the
constant fog of "the evil you know", working like crazy to fix the problems
that are in our face today, often caused precisely by the problems caused by
our last round of "fixes", whilst being willfully
ignorant of an evil we "could know" but choose not to apprehend. We
replace cane sugar (sucrose) with cyclamates in our diet only to find the
terrible side-effects a few years later, then we move on to new and improved
saccharines, and then with another turn of the wheel we pull in aspartame
and gawd knows what else all the while building a huge industry on turning
cornfields and soybean fields into food-product streams that are now being
implicated in some of our most tragic
public-health problems (widespread obesity, hormone imbalances, etc.)
And this isn't even
I'm not sure why we need GMO in our foodsources. We can cite world
famine and "improved productivity" as motivations, but those are never
ending cycles methinks... we already have some huge human health and
possibly social dysfunction problems as a consequence of how we have
"engineered" our food-source. GMO doesn't promise to address any of
those problems in any fundamental way, merely to help obscure the problems
in another layer of indirection.
I suspect you (and Glen and others) will insist that the pace and quality of
the march of tech progress is inevitable and maybe even necessary in some
fundamental way, so "get over it" and I have to defer on that point. I
doubt my voice, or the millions of other yet-more-shrill ones will have any
significant effect in slowing this latest fad in agricultural tech.
But that doesn't stop me from wanting to watch the 1.5 billion car-pileup in
morbid fascination whilst muttering to myself "I knew it all along!"
In Glen's immortal words "Get off my lawn!" <shakes gnarly old fist
ineffectually>
>
> Marcus
>
>
>
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