Science and Exploration

[Hollylane]

Originally Posted by dreadgeek

Thanks for the response. Can I ask you a couple of follow-up questions?

1) Since you agree that a protein is just a protein, why does it matter where it came from? I mean I could understand if the protein were, say, one that causes persons with an allergy to peanuts to have a reaction but provided its *not* one that causes an allergic reaction why does it matter?

2) What do you mean by maybe the pathways don't exist in nature for a multitude of reasons?

This is the deeper question, to me, and the reason I'm a little confused about it is this; it seems to me that the explanation I gave, just to take one for instance, why strawberries never developed anti-freeze on their own is sufficient to explain why that genetic pathway had to wait until we came along to show up in that species. For example, it would be extremely useful if humans could see down into the infrared and up into the ultraviolet. We *know* it's possible because there are other animals that can see into either one but our genome was simply never faced with the correct set of problems that would push us toward being able to do so. It's not that there's some grand design nor is it that there's something *wrong* with being able to see a little farther along the EMF spectrum than we already do, rather it's that not only Homo sapiens but primates as a whole were never in any environment where the selection pressure pushed *any* of us toward being able to see into the IR or the UV parts.

That explanation is sufficient to explain why we can't see UV or IR and there doesn't need to be any other reason. Likewise, the fact that strawberries--because they are flowering plants--never had the problem of "what do you do when your entire life-cycle is spent underneath an ice pack" is sufficient to explain why they never developed anti-freeze. Since strawberries are native to latitudes where winter is, more or less, what those of us living in the temperate zones are used to the long-standing plant solution toward the cold (e.g. produce seeds which can spend the winter underground) and that has been sufficient to preserve strawberry genes down the ages. No other explanation is really required. Why go to the trouble of evolving anti-freeze when the cold that could kill you is only 90 days long and you can just keep your genes in a seed for that period of time? No reason. Just like primates came up with a pretty decent solution for not being able to see well in the darkness--don't be active at night. Hominids came up with an even more elegant solution--fire.

I'm asking these questions of you not because I'm trying to prove some point but because most of the time when I've engaged others in this topic they haven't understood the science and so they've had some rather profound misconceptions about the nature of genes, the nature of proteins, the nature of DNA or they haven't really grasped that, for instance, while fruits *want* to be eaten vegetables, on the whole, *don't*. (I'm speaking metaphorically, of course, neither fruits nor vegetables 'want' anything.) So what is the problem with genetic engineering, in general? Not Monsanto's business practices (that's a separate issue) but with genetic engineering specifically?

Why is it unnatural to take a gene that does precisely what we want done and *only* that thing and implant it in a species unnatural when if we simply selectively bred for resistance to cold and got to, more or less, the same protein but it took us a thousand generations (plant not human) to get there it would be natural? It's the same protein, it does the same thing, the only difference is one is a one-step process and the other is a blind, multi-step process with each step along the way having a risk of picking up genes we don't want and which might have deleterious effects.

Thanks for answering. It's a rare treat to be able to ask someone who understands the biology, can do "gene's eye view" thinking, grasps the 'central dogma' of modern molecular biology (that genes code for proteins) and still is opposed to genetic engineering in the terms you've expressed above.

Cheers
Aj

I haven't been on much lately, and I just saw this. I'm prone to being succinct in my answers Aj, even more so when I've just arrived home from work. So, I hope that my short answer helps.

Basically, I think that necessary evolution of plants and animals happens in its own time. It is probably my Native American side that recoils from tampering with plants and animals, and changing them by inserting proteins or anything else into them, that would not be possible through a natural evolutionary process or through selective processes.