And then it was 5am. I slept till one, then continued playing at about 4. Because of the way the game was made, each successive fight was tougher than the one before, and eventually I just couldn't continue. Tonight I vow not to repeat this.
Anyway, today's comic... Well, I'm not sure where Hagrid in a Mario costume came into Jack and the Beanstalk, but uh, okay. Anyway, the point is, genetically modified foods should not be an issue. According to what I gather from a recent article in the Straits Times, pretty much all our staples are genetically modified in some way. I don't see people dropping dead on the streets for no reason. Even if GM food really did increase our chances of getting cancer or diabetes, I doubt that it would be a very significant factor. We all know that diseases like these arise from an inexorable number of factors, genetic and external. Take for instance the correlation between left-handed people and schizophrenia. Studies have shown that basically, lefties have weird brains, and this adds one grain to the pile which is mental illness.
But a more irrelevant but interesting topic occurred to me at the time of viewing! But I forgot it. So instead I'll just blather on about why people concerned about GM foods should just kill themselves and stop annoying me.
Does it not seem to be a very far leap, to state that the consumption of genetically modified foods leads to long-term ill effects on the human genetic structure? As far as we know, food does not modify our genetic structure. It only destroys it. But that is already happening, and has been happening, since the first self-replicating proteins randomly turned into DNA. Can you believe that this was one of the reasons in my geography text for why GM food might be unsafe?
Also, let's take for example a potato. You modify it to grow bigger, faster, and taste better(subjectively). All you've done was to change the genes which control these aspects of future french fries. While this is a grossly simplified explanation of the actual processes, you would agree that the rest of the potato's genetic structure would be pretty much the same. I mean, if it weren't, it wouldn't be a potato anymore. It would be... Like a carrot, or something else. So basically what's been done here is that you sped up the process of artificial selection by a whole lot, bypassing selective breeding by just tweaking with genes.
There. Genetically modified foods are no different from allowing nature to take it's course through random mutation, or us performing artificial selection on them. It's just that genetic engineering is a whole lot faster, and we can control pretty much everything, assuming we know which genes controls what.
One day in the distant future.
Oh, oh! I remembered what I was thinking. Fairy tales, you would notice, usually have a common element in them known as magic. Magic, sorcery, witchcraft and the like. It may not always be mentioned explicitly, but it's pretty obvious that something magical goes on at some point in just about every English fairy tale. And it's not surprising, either, considering that magic is a great way to explain things without making kids develop a hate for reading at a young age(Though sadly, many kids hate reading anyway).
In today's The Big Scope comic, a reference was made to Jack using genetically modified beans to grow that famous beanstalk. Now... I was just thinking... What if one day, the story actually changed to that? I mean, fiction now includes stories of mutants, aliens, and posthumans, diverging from the more traditional tales of wizardry. Now, amazing things in fiction can happen in more ways than just the metaphysical. We have science now. So all I'm saying is that a hundred years from now, it might be stories of genetic modification and rips in space and time that will be the fairy tales which little kids hear before they go to bed.
I want to get cryogenically frozen so that I can see the future...
*Yes, that is a repost. But it's still funny.
-Joe