Technology

2016 NAS Report on GMOs: Safe With Relatively Minor Concerns

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Image result for gmo

The National Academy of Sciences released a comprehensive report earlier this year that “builds on previous related Academies reports published between 1987 and 2010 by undertaking a retrospective examination of the purported positive and adverse effects of GE crops and to anticipate what emerging genetic-engineering technologies hold for the future.” Here are the highlights from the press release:

  • Effects on human health: “The committee carefully searched all available research studies for persuasive evidence of adverse health effects directly attributable to consumption of foods derived from GE crops but found none. Studies with animals and research on the chemical composition of GE foods currently on the market reveal no differences that would implicate a higher risk to human health and safety than from eating their non-GE counterparts. Though long-term epidemiological studies have not directly addressed GE food consumption, available epidemiological data do not show associations between any disease or chronic conditions and the consumption of GE foods. There is some evidence that GE insect-resistant crops have had benefits to human health by reducing insecticide poisonings. In addition, several GE crops are in development that are designed to benefit human health, such as rice with increased beta-carotene content to help prevent blindness and death caused by vitamin A deficiencies in some developing nations.”
  • Effects on the environment: “The use of insect-resistant or herbicide-resistant crops did not reduce the overall diversity of plant and insect life on farms, and sometimes insect-resistant crops resulted in increased insect diversity, the report says. While gene flow – the transfer of genes from a GE crop to a wild relative species – has occurred, no examples have demonstrated an adverse environmental effect from this transfer. Overall, the committee found no conclusive evidence of cause-and-effect relationships between GE crops and environmental problems. However, the complex nature of assessing long-term environmental changes often made it difficult to reach definitive conclusions.”
  • Effects on agriculture: “The available evidence indicates that GE soybean, cotton, and maize have generally had favorable economic outcomes for producers who have adopted these crops, but outcomes have varied depending on pest abundance, farming practices, and agricultural infrastructure. Although GE crops have provided economic benefits to many small-scale farmers in the early years of adoption, enduring and widespread gains will depend on such farmers receiving institutional support, such as access to credit, affordable inputs such as fertilizer, extension services, and access to profitable local and global markets for the crops. Evidence shows that in locations where insect-resistant crops were planted but resistance-management strategies were not followed, damaging levels of resistance evolved in some target insects. If GE crops are to be used sustainably, regulations and incentives are needed so that more integrated and sustainable pest-management approaches become economically feasible. The committee also found that in many locations some weeds had evolved resistance to glyphosate, the herbicide to which most GE crops were engineered to be resistant. Resistance evolution in weeds could be delayed by the use of integrated weed-management approaches, says the report, which also recommends further research to determine better approaches for weed resistance management. Insect-resistant GE crops have decreased crop loss due to plant pests. However, the committee examined data on overall rates of increase in yields of soybean, cotton, and maize in the U.S. for the decades preceding introduction of GE crops and after their introduction, and there was no evidence that GE crops had changed the rate of increase in yields. It is feasible that emerging genetic-engineering technologies will speed the rate of increase in yield, but this is not certain, so the committee recommended funding of diverse approaches for increasing and stabilizing crop yield.”

Add this to the statements by the World Health Organization, the American Medical Association, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science that GMOs are safe. Concerns over increased chemical use may be somewhat legitimate, though this tends to be complicated. However, fears about herbicides like glyphosate are often overblown, seeing that both the EPA and the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization and WHO declare that it is not a cancer risk. Furthermore, it is important to note that uncontrolled weeds are actually a potentially huge threat, making weedkillers all the more important. As for increased herbicide resistance, science writer Ronald Bailey explains in his book The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century,

What about “superweeds”? Again, the evolution of resistance by weeds to herbicides is nothing new and is certainly not a problem specifically related to genetically enhanced crops. As of April 2014, the International Survey of Herbicide Resistant Weeds reports that there are currently 429 uniquely evolved cases of herbicide resistant weeds globally involving 234 different species. Weeds have evolved resistance to 22 of the 25 known herbicide sites of action and to 154 different herbicides. Herbicide resistant weeds have been reported in 81 crops in sixty-five countries. A preliminary analysis by University of Wyoming weed scientist Andrew Kniss parses the data on herbicide resistance from 1986 to 2012. He finds no increase in the rate at which weeds become resistant to herbicides after biotech crops were introduced in 1996. Since Roundup (glyphosate) is the most popular herbicide used with biotech crops, have the number of weed species resistant to Roundup increased? Kniss finds that the development of Roundup resistant weeds has occurred more frequently among non biotech crops. Glyphosate resistant weeds evolved due to glyphosate use, not directly due to GM crops,” he points out. “Herbicide resistant weed development is not a GMO problem, it is a herbicide problem (pgs. 155-156).

In summary, GMOs are indeed safe with relatively minor concerns. Or, as Slate‘s William Saletan puts it,

The more you learn about herbicide resistance, the more you come to understand how complicated the truth about GMOs is. First you discover that they aren’t evil. Then you learn that they aren’t perfectly innocent. Then you realize that nothing is perfectly innocent. Pesticide vs. pesticide, technology vs. technology, risk vs. risk—it’s all relative. The best you can do is measure each practice against the alternatives. The least you can do is look past a three-letter label.

Natural Gas: The Bridge to Renewable Energy

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Most people are in favor of renewable energy such as wind and solar, yet many supporters tend to look at natural gas with disdain. However, a new NBER study finds that this position is untenable. As one of the authors writes in The Washington Post,

Because of the particular nature of clean energy sources like solar and wind, you can’t simply add them to the grid in large volumes and think that’s the end of the story. Rather, because these sources of electricity generation are “intermittent” — solar fluctuates with weather and the daily cycle, wind fluctuates with the wind — there has to be some means of continuing to provide electricity even when they go dark. And the more renewables you have, the bigger this problem can be.

Now, a new study suggests that at least so far, solving that problem has ironically involved more fossil fuels — and more particularly, installing a large number of fast-ramping natural gas plants, which can fill in quickly whenever renewable generation slips.

Er…Solar!

…In the study, the researchers took a broad look at the erection of wind, solar, and other renewable energy plants (not including large hydropower or biomass projects) across 26 countries that are members of an international council known as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development over the period between the year 1990 and 2013. And they found a surprisingly tight relationship between renewables on the one hand, and gas on the other.

…“Our paper calls attention to the fact that renewables and fast-reacting fossil technologies appear as highly complementary and that they should be jointly installed to meet the goals of cutting emissions and ensuring a stable supply,” the paper adds.

Image result for earth captain planet gif
…which is where the natural gas is found.

The study seems to indicate that natural gas is “a so-called “bridge fuel” that allows for a transition into a world of more renewables, as it is both flexible and also contributes less carbon dioxide emissions than does coal, per unit of energy generated by burning the fuel.” Or, as Reason‘s science writer Ronald Bailey puts it, “Anti-fracking pro-renewable energy activists are walking contradictions.”

 

Innovation and Its Enemies

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Calestous Juma, Professor of the Practice of International Development at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, has a recent article based on his new Oxford-published book Innovation and Its Enemies: Why People Resist New Technologies. He explains,

[T]he answer is not simply that people are afraid of the unknown. Rather, resistance to technological progress is usually rooted in the fear that disruption of the status quo might bring losses in employment, income, power, and identity. Governments often end up deciding that it would be easier to prohibit the new technology than to adapt to it.

He uses the example of the Ottoman Empire forbidding the printing of the Koran for nearly 400 years. “By banning the printing of the Koran,” he writes, “Ottoman leaders delayed employment losses for scribes and calligraphers (many of whom were women who were glorified for their mastery of the art). But protecting employment was not their main motivation…[Religious knowledge] was both the glue that held society together and a pillar of political power, so maintaining a monopoly over the dissemination of that knowledge was critical to maintaining the authority of Ottoman leaders. They feared going the way of the Catholic pope, who lost considerable authority during the Protestant Reformation, when the printing press played a key role in spreading new ideas to the faithful.”

The list goes on, from English women petitioning against coffee in 1674 to American dairy farmers spreading misinformation about margarine in the 1800s to the resistance to tractors in the early 1900s. “People almost never reject technological progress out of sheer ignorance,” Juma concludes. “Rather, they fight to protect their own interests and livelihoods, whether that be operating a dairy farm or running a government. As we continually attempt to apply new technologies to improve human and environmental wellbeing, this distinction is vital.” The key in Juma’s mind is “inclusive innovation,” which seeks to help “those who are likely to lose from the displacement of old technologies are given ample opportunity to benefit from new ones. Only then can we make the most of human creativity.”

Opposing GMOs is a first world luxury.

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107 Nobel Laureates just signed a letter slamming Greenpeace over GMOs

In summary:

  1. 40% of children under 5 in the developing world have vitamin A deficiency, which is a leading cause of childhiood blindness and death.
  2. We could prevent up to 2 million deaths per year if we could increase access to Vitamin A.
  3. GMO crop golden rice is genetically designed to provide vitamin A. Since rice is an inexpensive staple crop for much of the world, this has a lot of promise.
  4. And yet anti-GMO protesters, including Greanpeace, are trying to block the use of golden rice, even destroying research crops.

I guess they have a point. We wouldn’t want to feed children anything “unnatural.” Better to let them suffer natural handicaps and die natural deaths.

golden rice

Digital Globalization

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A couple months ago, I had a post on research by economist Andreas Bergh which highlighted the importance of information flows in battling poverty. A new McKinsey report on digital globalization supports this view:

To measure the economic impact of digital globalization, we built an econometric model based on the inflows and outflows of goods, services, finance, people, and data for 97 countries around the world. We found that over a decade, such flows have increased current global GDP by roughly 10 percent over what it would have been in a world without them. This added value reached $7.8 trillion in 2014 alone. Data flows directly accounted for $2.2 trillion, or nearly one-third, of this effect—more than foreign direct investment. In their indirect role enabling other types of cross-border exchanges, they added $2.8 trillion to the world economy. These combined effects of data flows on GDP exceeded the impact of global trade in goods. That’s a striking development: cross-border data flows were negligible just 15 years ago. Over the past decade, the used bandwidth that undergirds this swelling economic activity has grown 45-fold, and it is projected to increase by a factor of nine over the next five years[.]

Check out the full article to see how digital globalization is reshaping business.

Linguistics, AI, and Garden Path Sentences

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Parsey Mcparseface

It’s been a while since I’ve shared a post on DR just for the sheer coolness factor, but there’s no way I couldn’t pass along the Washington Post’s article on Google’s natural language parser: Parsey McParseface. What the parser does is fairly easy to explain:

McParseface does what most students learn to do in elementary school. It takes a sentence and breaks it down, identifying nouns, verbs and so forth — and how all of these parts relate to one another. It can tell you, for instance, what the root verb of a sentence is; what is being done to whom and who is doing it.

Along the way, however, the article introduced me to the notion of garden path sentences. These are sentences which, although they are perfectly correct, are incredibly hard for human brains (and AI language parsers) to figure out. Here are two of my favorite examples (from the article):

  1. The horse raced past the barn fell.
  2. The old man the boat.
  3. The coach smiled at the player tossed the frisbee.

Yes, those are all really real sentence. The funny thing is that, now that I’ve wrapped my head around them, it’s hard for me not to understand them effortlessly when I read them. But I remember that the first time I tried to figure them out, it was like a gear in my brain was stuck. They’re called garden path sentences because they are deliberately constructed to make your brain think a word is being used in a certain way when, to understand the sentence, you have to let go of the initial impression and reinterpret a word to make sense of the sentence. So, for example, “the old man” is a phrase that naturally makes you think of the word “man” being used a noun. But, in order to understand that sentence, you have to discard your first impression and realize that it’s being used as a verb in this case: The old [people are the ones who man] the boat.

While I was reading, I couldn’t help but remembering a book I read a couple of years ago called Lexicon. The central conceit of the book is that if you can master language at a truly fundamental level–beneath the level of conscious human understanding–you can use the constituent sounds and their implications to effectively mind-control people. It’s an incredibly cool blend of fantasy magic and technology in a way I’ve never quite seen anywhere else, and feeling your brain struggle to wrap itself around those garden path words is definitely the closest real-life experience you can get to the fantastic mind-powers discussed in the book.

Munk Debate: Humankind’s Best Days Lie Ahead

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Harvard’s Steven Pinker and science writer Matt Ridley went head-to-head with essayist Alain de Botton and author Malcolm Gladwell in the Canada-based Munk Debates on the subject of human progress: “Be it resolved that humankind’s best days lie ahead.” Given Pinker and Ridley’s past books, they were obviously on the PRO side. A portion of the debate can be found below:

I came into this debate heavily biased, but I still think Pinker and Ridley wiped the floor with their opponents. Here are some highlights:

Pinker argues that the world is getting better based on 10 major factors of human well-being:

  1. Life itself: lifespan is increasing.
  2. Health: diseases are declining.
  3. Prosperity: the world is wealthier and extreme poverty is continually declining.
  4. Peace: wars are becoming less frequent.
  5. Safety: global rates of violent crime are falling.
  6. Knowledge: the percentage of people with a basic education is increasing.
  7. Freedom: democracy overall is expanding worldwide.
  8. Human rights: the amount of rights and campaigns in favor of them have increased.
  9. Gender equity: women are better educated and hold more positions of power and influence.
  10. Intelligence: IQ scores continue to increase in every country.

He concludes,

Pinker

A better world, to be sure, is not a perfect world. As a conspicuous defender of the idea of human nature, I believe that out of the crooked timber of humanity, no truly straight thing can be made. And, to misquote a great Canadian, “We are not stardust, we are not golden, and there’s no way we’re getting back to the garden.” In the glorious future I am envisioning, there will be disease and poverty, there will be terrorism and oppression, and war and violent crime. But there will be much, much less of these scourges, which means that billions of people will be better off than they are today. And that, I remind you, is the resolution of this evening’s debate.

Ridley

Ridley argues for the why behind these dramatic improvements:

But, my optimism about the future isn’t based on extrapolating the past. It’s based on why these things are happening. Innovation, driven by the meeting and mating of ideas to produce baby ideas, is the fuel that drives them. And, far from running out of fuel, we’re only just getting started. There’s an infinity of ways of recombining ideas to make new ideas and we no longer have to rely on North Americans and Europeans to come up with them. The internet has speeded up at the rate at which people can communicate and cross-fertilize their ideas.

In response to de Botton’s focus on what he himself labels as the “first-world problems” of Switzerland, Pinker says,

Are you saying that you willing to go to a peasant in Cambodia, or Sudan, or Bangladesh, or Afghanistan and say, “Listen, I’ve been there. You worry about your child dying, your wife dying in childbirth, you’re full of parasites, you don’t have enough to eat but, you know, trust me, it’s no great shakes to live in a country like Switzerland. True, your child might not die in the first year of life but, you know, when they’re a teenager they’re going to roll their eyes at you. And you may not have to live under the shadow of war and genocide but people will still make bitchy comments. And you may not be hungry but, you know, sometimes the wine will have a nose that’s a bit too fruity.”

Ridley adds to this:

This world isn’t perfect, definitely not. That’s the whole point of optimism…It means you don’t think the world is perfect, you want to improve it. And if, along the way, that means that when we get to Switzerland, we stop being able to appreciate flowers and we lose our sense of humour [a jab at de Botton], well, maybe it’s a price worth paying.

In response to the problem of “unhappiness,” Ridley correctly points out that “happiness correlates with wealth, between countries, within countries and within lifetimes. It’s perfectly true that you can be very wealthy and very unhappy. But, that’s all right, because it cheers up other people, so…” Pinker backs him up by explaining that “the Easterlin Paradox has been resolved. I think you’re [de Botton] a decade out of date. The idea that wealth does not correlate with happiness, which is what the Easterlin Paradox was, has been resolved.”

On the topic of climate change and Gladwell’s somewhat disparaging remarks about economists, Pinker states,

I certainly agree that economists are an inviting target and one can always get a laugh by making fun of economists. But the problem of climate change is an economic problem. All the projections of the worst case scenarios all depend on calculations of economists, namely how many people will burn how many units of fossil fuels…Both the analysis of climate change and the possible solutions are economic problems. We know that we can have solar panels, the question is will there be enough solar panels to reduce fossil fuel use? We know that nuclear power can cut into carbon emissions, by how much. We know that people could reduce their consumption enough to mitigate the problem. Will they? Under what kind of incentives…So, it’s very much a problem of economics.

As de Botton continued to obsessively bring the mental states of literary characters, Pinker reminded him that “Anna Karenina didn’t actually exist…neither did Hamlet…I think if your child dies in the first year of life, that deeply concerns the human psyche. I think it’s very relevant to happiness. I think if billions of people do not see their children die, that’s a much more relevant consideration for the human psyche, for the depths of human existence than Anna Karenina…”

Given all this, I applaud Pinker’s conclusion: “It’s irresponsible enough to be a fatalist when the objective indicators say the world is getting worse, all the more so where they say the world is getting better.”

The whole thing is worth the watch.

Making Time for Books

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Since we posted our annual Best Books of the Year review yesterday morning, I thought this recent post over at Harvard Business Review was appropriate. Literary technologist Hugh McGuire describes the constant barrage of digital information day in and day out:

I was distracted when at work, distracted when with family and friends, constantly tired, irritable, and always swimming against a wash of ambient stress induced by my constant itch for digital information. My stress had an electronic feel to it, as if it was made up of the very bits and bytes on my screens. And I was exhausted.

To his horror, he realized that his constant immersion in this easy, instantaneous web of mental overstimulation caused him to

read just four books in all of 2014. That’s one book a quarter. A third of a book per month. I love reading books. Books are my passion and my livelihood. I work in the world of book publishing. I’m the founder of LibriVox, the largest library of free public domain audiobooks in the world; and I spend most of my time running Pressbooks, an online book production software company. I might have an unpublished novel in a drawer somewhere. I love books. And yet, I wasn’t reading them. In fact, I couldn’t read them. I tried, but every time, by sentence three or four, I was either checking email or asleep.

Drawing on new neuroscience research, McGuire points out that the constant novelty triggers the release of dopamine, conditioning us to continually seek out potential pleasure in new things (e.g. new emails, Facebook updates, etc.). This constant bouncing around between topics also depletes our brain’s energy. McGuire suggests three rules by which we can diminish the stress of information overload and learn to read again:

  1. When you get home from work, put away the laptop and iPhone.
  2. After dinner, don’t turn on Netflix, the TV, or the Internet.
  3. No glowing screens in the bedroom (Kindle is ok).

While I don’t do these exactly, I have made a rule of “no iPhone or Internet one hour before bed.” I finally have a set bedtime every night before work. Granted, I’ve only been doing this for about a week or so, but I can already feel a difference. If you saw anything in our Best Books post that you would like to read, but just can’t seem to find the time, give the rules above a try.

 

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: What the Internet Could Be

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802 - Quartz SEP Article

Quartz has a very interesting article describing the genesis and ongoing success of one of the Internet’s most respected repository of comprehensive, up-to-date, and authoritative information (as long as you’re interested in the topic of philosophy): the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I’ve relied on the SEP in the past, and always found it well-written and informative (albeit not as comprehensive as Quartz would have you believe), but I didn’t realize just how rigorously it is maintained.

Best part of the article though? The argument that the SEP doesn’t have to remain a lone unicorn, a solitary bastion of credible, useful information on the Internet. Nope: other disciplines could–and should–seek to emulate it’s success.

Useful, reliable information on the Internet.

Imagine that.

Cell Phone Techno-Panic: Am I Missing Something?

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Sherry Truckle has a new book out, and so she’s making the rounds in interviews and articles. I’d like to know if any of our readers have read the books and can recommend them to me as genuinely interesting or just the latest techno-panic. According to an NYT article, her first book, Alone Together was “was a damning report on human relationships in the digital age.” The book focused on robots and made the case that:

When we replace human caregivers with robots, or talking with texting, we begin by arguing that the replacements are “better than nothing” but end up considering them “better than anything” — cleaner, less risky, less demanding. Paralleling this shift is a growing preference for the virtual over the real.

Her new book is Reclaiming Conversation, and it drops the focus on robots to talk about the lost (?) art of face-to-face conversation.

I’m skeptical.

First, as this XKCD comic illustrates, there always seems to be someone around to tell you you’re doing it wrong. No matter what “it” is. And a lot of the criticism of cell phone usage seems to fall into this category.

Then there’s the simple fact that we’re always panicking about something. And it’s not even like cell phones are the first technological innovation to threaten the art of conversation. How about, I dunno, the newspaper?

From a Liquid-State article about newspapers surviving (or not) in a digital age.

So that’s why I’m curious: has anyone read Sherry Turkle? Is there more going on? Becaus I have only read articles about her and listened to interviews of her, and in those cases the conversation never seems to go beyond the “gee, golly, phones are scary!” talking point, along with the obligatory jokes about how much the interviewer / author depends on their phone. (Isn’t the irony hilarious? No. It’s tiresome.)

It’s not that I think there are no legitimate concerns. I think there absolutely are. Technology (phones, laptops, tablets) are generally a bad idea in the classroom, and they can easily cause problems in the home. I’m not sure when I’m going to get my kids devices of some sort, but I’m planning on holding out as long as possible. (They do have an old iPad, but it was a very conscious decision to have one device they have to share, because that forces actual interaction when they decide what to watch / play together.) And I am not saying there’s no such thing as too much phone time. Yesterday I zoned out for like an hour playing Civilization Revolution 2 on my phone between 5pm and 6pm, and that was definitely sub-optimal parenting.

On the other hand, all those stories about how couples on dates ignore each other for their phones or how people create this fake version of themselves on social media for public consumption: I dunno. That’s bad, yeah, but I feel like there are some pre-existing conditions in those cases. I don’t imagine that the kind of people who can’t look away from their screen to see the person they are sharing a meal with would be hitting it out of the park without a phone. And when it comes to fake versions of ourselves: I think the underlying problem there is a society that prizes career and advancement over home and community, to the point where people habitually uproot themselves and move cross-country to find work. Doing so severs ties with family and friends and more or less obliterates the idea of a “home,” and the way folks desperately reach out for connection on social media seems like just a symptom of the underlying problem.

Now, there is one thing that does stand out to me as genuinely dangerous, and that’s this (quoting from the NYT’s descripton of Turkle’s first book again, with emphasis added):

When we replace human caregivers with robots, or talking with texting, we begin by arguing that the replacements are “better than nothing” but end up considering them “better than anything” — cleaner, less risky, less demanding. Paralleling this shift is a growing preference for the virtual over the real.

Sci-fi authors have been worried about the idea of people losing themselves in virtual reality pretty much since the idea existed. The starkest and most full-fleshed example comes from Dani and Etyan Kollins’ book The Unincorporated Man. Without spoiling the plot, the setup is that a rich billionaire has himself cryogenically frozen in the late 21st century. Not long after that, virtual reality really takes off, and it turns out that people are super-addicted. The result is that society completely collapses, and there are some pretty horrific vignettes of, for example, families saying goodbye to each other as the world crumbles, plugging themselves into their virtual realities, and then enjoying their last hours or days as they starve to death. By the time society recovers (and unfreezes that rich billionaire, who is the protagonist in the first book), virtual reality is strictly forbidden by legal and social taboos and there are museums to indoctrinate each rising generation about the dangers of VR.

This is just the most vivid account of the danger I’ve read, but there are other folks who–for example–think that the solution to the Fermi paradox is that every time societies get close to having viable space travel they also have viable virtual reality, and they invariably choose virtual reality because it offers the chance to engineer an environment specifically to scratch every last possible psychological itch a sentient being can have. If all our desires can be catered to with perfect precision, why bother with anything in the real world ever again? So, instead of the stars, every sentient race just collapses into their own solipsistic virtual paradise. (Whether this means they all die off, as in The Unincorporated Man, or just maintain a level of lonely, self-sustaining production to keep the VR lights on is unspecified.)

So don’t get me wrong: tech can be scary. There may be quite legitimate things to fear. But is Turkle one of those, or just another “something new scares me” hand-wringer?