overtone

The benefits of homosexuality in the context of caring for children, including support for reproductive humans, defense of the reproductive community, exploration and innovation of the environment, etc etc etc, seem to have attracted little research or attention. The assumption that such benefits do not exist is dubious, given the stubborn ubiquity of homosexual potential among most mammals, birds, and other more intelligent and social beings. The observation that homosexuality would be bred out of the species if it had no value, given the direct hit to reproduction it creates, is a strong argument against the hypothesis that it has no reproductive value.

The word "selfish" creates a lot of confusion, and Dawkins himself has expressed regret for using it. One might as well use "cooperative", "friendly", "successful", etc, alternately. Other than the social connotations of that term, he seems to be essentially correct, though. Cytoplasm and the other environmental factors are not repeatedly passed down with accumulated changes independent of the genes, for example - the environmental stuff, to the extent changes in the genes do not change it, changes by circumstance, back and forth, rather than ratcheting from one step to another. The 20th century advance of bringing eusocial and mutualistic behaviors into the realm of evolutionary biology involved explaining such matters as consequences of advantage for genes, for example.

It may be difficult for outsiders to realize how little factual information, and how little comprehension of what there is, permeates the world of the low information American. Meanwhile, wealthy and powerful corporate actors have a large vested interest, both in their wealth and their power, in using their media ownership and other influence to sell a significant fraction of the public on both the unreality of CO2 forcing in climate systems and the bad character of those claiming otherwise. It will bite their ass, you say? The rich in the US enjoy a worldview in which they are immune from physical disasters of that kind. They simply assume they will not suffer from whatever it is, regardless, so they have no skin the game of accurate assessments.

The genetic modification of crops to incorporate Bt toxin production will almost certainly - odds on basic Darwinian principles - destroy the efficacy of Bt as an insecticide within a few decades, possibly within a few years. It has been a very valuable pesticide for a long time, but its days are numbered now. The situation created is all but ideal for breeding resistance in pests, eliminating natural predators of these pests, and creating serious problems in by now familiar Darwinian ways. It is also set up to be at high risk of spreading the engineered genetics into the wild - the content, methods, and locations of insertion abet cross-species or even higher taxon transfer (which is of course how and why they were developed and used in the first place). So the long familiar and effective practice of using that essentially benign insecticide in spot applications, in place of more dangerous and harmful chemicals, is likely to be ruined. The profits will have gone to Monsanto et al, the costs will be borne by others. - - - - Another: the genetic complex inserted in several crops to create herbicide resistance (glysphophate is the common intended resistant) works by creating modules in the plants cells that chemically bind and sequester the herbicide in organelles. Two things: along with the active ingredient code, comes a complex of other code abetting the transfer, insertion, and activation of the sequestering code - this abets gene transfer of the whole complex to other plants; and the sequestered herbicide is not magically made to vanish: its sequestering compound builds up in the plant. We now know - discovered years after we allowed 4/5 of the US soybean crop to be fitted with this single genetic uniformity - that it is sometimes found in the food made from parts of the plant not supposed to be expressing the genetics. We then recently discovered, years too late to do anything about it, that bacterial digestion in the small intestine can break the herbicide complex down, and release various parts of it to be absorbed as digestion products into the body. No one knows whether this is harmful, and no one will know for many years if it is - by sheer good luck - safe. Meanwhile, as a side note, herbicide resistant and other GM crops are usually somewhat lower yielding per acre than the same breed without the modifications - for the obvious reason that resources diverted into expressing a string of alien genes are unavailable for other plant purposes. But they're higher yielding per dollar in the short run, for a variety of reasons some political, at least for the corporations selling them. - - - - - A couple of examples of the kind of obliviousness, or arrogance, or heedlessness, or whatever one wants to call it, that characterizes the actual commercial employment of GM agricultural tech in the real world. Its theoretical benefits are one thing, but its real world applications are a more immediate concern - and they are worrying, so far. They are not being handled carefully. They are not monitored, regulated, curbed, or well studied for the many and complex and varied effects both economic and ecological. They appear to be doing harm, for the profit of a couple of agribusiness concerns. - - - - A more general point: the recurring assertion, or theme, that GM technology is somehow the same kind of thing as traditional breeding, is flatly and disturbingly dishonest. The whole point of this stuff is that it enables manipulations impossible by ordinary evolutionary means, and dramatically different in their nature, consequences, and potentials. Different in kind, not just quantity. Ordinary recombination does not bring in code from completely different phyla or even artificially assembled, does not set that code up to make it easily transferred across taxa, does not set up a situation in which we cannot even guess well what all the effects of the new code and its expression will be over time. And over it all, the fact that this code reproduces exponentially - if it gets loose, there's no getting it back. It's not like some chemical or radiation leak, some pollution in an ordinary sense. It can grow. It can spread itself. It's explosive.