this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2025
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I Didn’t Have Eggs
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Selective breeding isnt GMO tho. Gmo is modifying genetics directly. Selective breeding is manipulativing the natural processes and hoping the offspring carried the desired genes. Its like saying placing bets on a roulette table is investing.
It absolutely is.
Going by the second sense of the definition in the excerpt you shared, every human-domesticated plant or animal is GMO. And that is not exclusive to bananas.
Which again begs the question why the Original Commenter (OC) would make this distinction in the first place.
Actually I'd say that investing is gambling, and selective breeding is a form of genetic engineering.
Investing isnt gambling because if you had all the knowledge of the world, you could guarantee to "win" every single time. Its practically just predicting the future. While gambling, is pretty much a random event, some games may allow for some prediction (such as card counting), but casinos ussually thwart that by constantly introducing more randomness.
Thats the same analogous for selective breeding. You have some idea what could happen, because at the very least you know the offspring will a random selection of genes from their parents, but you can never predict which genes. But in genetic engineering, you know exactly what genes you're targeting, and how and where those genes will be expressed.
Perfect knowledge still doesn't fix insolvency, fraud, or outright irrational actors. Tell me you haven't ever touched the stock market without telling me you have never touched the stock market.
I mean it would... but good job at missing the point
Then your "perfect" information is a paradox. I will always act in the disinterest of you, regardless of logical or financial sense, what can you do if the capital I have outweighs yours?
Again, perfect information is either a fallacy, or basically a state machine because you can only have one unchanging frame of information without a paradox. Markets are not state machines, they are also not synchronous. They also have unfaithful actors acting irrationally.
I don't think you are getting your own point, or my response to it.
Except perfect knowledge of the world isn't possible and there is sufficient complexity in the systems that lead to stock value changing to make it effectively random luck whether any particular investment will pay off (you've invested heavily into office real estate; welcome to the global pandemic and the rise of remote work).
Selective breeding doesn't care which genes are in play, it is outcome orientated. The result is the same, genes that don't give the desired result are filtered out, genes leading to the desired result are promoted. The fact that you aren't targeting specific genes doesn't matter.
Except youre also a big executive at your company and you tell all your peasants workers to go back to the office. And you collaborate with your rich friends to do the same and rake in all the cash.
But that doesnt change anything. Any amount of knowledge gives your a advantage because it reduces risk. A roulette table has the same amount of risk everytime because the previous spins has zero effect of the future.
Right... but it took humans ~5000 years to breed corn. Perhaps millions if not billions of iterations. And it was all random chance that the offsprings resulted with desirablity traits. There is a reason farmers dont grow apple trees by seed anymore. Noone can guarantee the offspring will produce quality apples, and it takes a decade to produce apples.
Now we're quibbling over details, I never said it was a fast method of genetic engineering. It's also not so much a matter of chance that the offspring has the desired traits, all that matters is that on average each generation is slightly better than the one before. That's why it takes so long.
Ok... think it about this way. Selective breeding is completely possible under natural circumstances, because we are purely manipulating natural evolutionary processes. The only reason domestication dont naturally occur is becuase generally the desirable traits are often lethal to wild organisms. We are the evolutionary pressure. If we die, so would the majority of our crops and livestock.
Genetic engineering completely bypasses that process, and can even introduce genes from other species that would be so improable to breed, you might as say its impossible. You'll never be able to breed glow in the dark corn because no parent you can breed with will have the genes, so you would be left with two natural choices... a random mutation, or a random horizontal gene transfer.
I mean, the line between gambling and investing is a lot thinner than most people would like to believe.