Genetic engineering on agriculture?

Question

What are some things that a parent would say about genetic engineerinng on agriculture. What are some of the cons that the parent woyuld say?

Answer 1

Agriculture has always been about genetic engineering.

Let me give you a few simple examples.

First, farmers have always selected particular animals and plants to raise.  By raising a particular crop, other species that could have lived on the same land are put to a genetic disadvantage.  The population genetics changes when a particular species is grown more rapidly than other species.

Second, farmers have been breeding plants and animals for particular traits.  This changes the population genetics of those species.  

My point is that selective breeding and growing are genetic engineering, and this has been going on since the start of agriculture.  In fact, gene selection even preceded agriculture because selective hunting also causes a change in the gene patterns, especially when animals are hunted into extinction.

The current issue with genetic engineering concerns the methods of changing the genes.  Changing the genes directly through molecular biology is more efficient than through breeding and selective raising, but both are genetic engineering.  Thus, it is not the technique that matters, it is the outcome.  Even the old fashioned methods of genetic engineering have had both good and bad consequences, including extinctions.

Answer 2

Everything in nature is a circle. the good and bad  will always come on you.

If a fruit is genetically engineered to grow larger or taste sweeter for exmple, and the bloom of that flower produces an altered  nectar and, in turn, produces a stronger bee and the bee sting is more deadly, then, That is a con. Again this is just an example,and i don't actually know if anything like this has happened but it illustrates the 'Cycle of life' consequence.

Answer 3

Just Google genetic engineering or GM crops and you will be given tons of cons. Read up on it and try to be objective and tell you child the truth, the good and bad aspects of genetic engineering. Too much about genetic engineering wrote about is feat tactics and propaganda put out by activists groups like Greenpeace, and not based of facts. There are two sides to every story and it is important that our children be told both sides.

Answer 4

Genetic engineering is not all that happens when genetic engineering is done. We start by modifying an individual from a species, then proceed to propagate that individual, its offspring etc. What we have here is a near clone... plant or animal that is genetically invariant over a very large population, often a population that goes on for mile after mile, for many miles.

If that one germ line happens to become a host to  any disease, the disease will rip through the millions of almost identical plants. The whole population lives or dies as one plant would.

This sound like theory. But we have examples of clone populations, Ireland with potatoes, China much more recently with almost a complete failure of the cotton crop which was an example of GM to stop an insect pest, that was wiped out by a mutant variant of that  original pest.

Anti-GM people felt that this proved how wrong GM is. But in reality the problem is also common to many 'improved varieties' of anything, in which almost no genetic variability has been retained.

This points out a problem that is most consistently a problem with GM, but is not exclusively a GM problem.

Answer 5

genetic engineering is simply altering the genes of something to change how that something works. for example a gene from bacteria that kills inscets when consumed was inserted into some crops giving a natural pesticide, reducing the need to spary it with pesticides.

don't believe the "nature knows best" arguement because that is only true for the individual organism's survival, nature didn't have us eating corn in mind when it evolved.