r/technology • u/lurker_bee • 23h ago

Biotechnology Burkina Faso says no to Bill Gates’ plan of creating modified species of mosquitoes

https://africa.businessinsider.com/local/lifestyle/burkina-faso-says-no-to-bill-gates-plan-of-creating-modified-species-of-mosquitoes/xyk7xm8
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u/McToasty207 20h ago

And yet I suspect they eat domesticated plants and animals, which are similarly man made.

Its a position many hold but its one that fundamentally ignores how much change humans have made to our foodscources.

Many wildtype crops are completely inedible, and somewhat posionous.

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u/Expert-Diver7144 20h ago

Why do you believe this person

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u/Punman_5 19h ago

Nothing they said is wildly incorrect.

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u/Expert-Diver7144 18h ago

How do you know? They’ve left no evidence.

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u/Punman_5 18h ago

I used common sense

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u/Hot_Demand_6263 17h ago

You should stop doing that.

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u/Expert-Diver7144 16h ago

that’s just called guessing

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u/help_me_im_stupid 12h ago

We should trade usernames.

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u/Dapperrevolutionary 20h ago

Big difference between natural methods of alternation and artificial methods

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u/sunjay140 20h ago

There's no difference at the genetic level.

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u/Abedeus 20h ago

Appeal to nature fallacy. Also, it's hardly "natural" if humans forced the changes on purpose. The only difference is efficiency.

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u/Dapperrevolutionary 20h ago

Disagree. Humans are natural and used natural methods. That kind of change is still natural. Once we include unnatural tools like gene editing however that's not the case.

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u/Alive-Beyond-9686 20h ago

Selective breeding is gene editing. Whether it's done in a lab or in the field, it's still "man made".

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u/Dapperrevolutionary 20h ago

Disagree. Animals selectively breed themselves all the time by selecting for certain traits in partners, that's just the natural process.

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u/rainzer 19h ago

using your logic, gene editing is natural humans naturally using their natural discovery to naturally select what genes pass on.

np, naturally

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u/STEELCITY1989 19h ago

"But why male models?"

"Are you serious i just told you..."

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u/Klinky1984 18h ago

That's not how evolution works. Environmental pressures play a much bigger role than conscious decision making, and these changes often take a long time to manifest. Environmental changes or bad adaptations can cause negative outcomes to occur as well, such as huge antlers that then get you stuck in trees or suddenly the climate shifts and the fruit tree your species relied on dies off and so do you. Those that do adapt pass on their genes strengthening the adaptation. It's more random and less choice driven than you're stating.

Humans making a conscious choice to sustain species and genes through selective breeding is the opposite of natural evolution. "Survival of the fittest" no longer applies, unless you consider "fittest" to mean "is capable of being engineered into something humanity deems useful to it". I don't think any plant or animal is making such choices consciously on their own without human involvement.

You can also look at human medicine as completely going against natural evolution, as typically the way serious disease was "eradicated" was having large die offs of humanity until those who had mutations that protected them proliferated. Obviously that is less than ideal (to sane people, antivaxxers on the other hand).

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u/Punman_5 19h ago

Domestic and plants and animals are GMOs

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u/Abedeus 19h ago

Arsenic is natural.

Toxins and poisons are natural.

Something being "natural" doesn't make it good or bad. How it's used is important.

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u/einmaldrin_alleshin 5h ago edited 4h ago

If you ask me, anything that goes beyond traditional selection processes should be considered artificial, as in made by humans.

But calling plants natural that were bred under radiation exposure, in synthetic growth medium, under artificial light and with manual pollination is completely ridiculous.

Edit: a word

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u/McToasty207 20h ago edited 10h ago

The mechanism is different but the end result is the same.

Functionally modern corn and ancestral corn are completely different, and the reason for that difference is changes to the plants genome.

Thats genetic engineering no matter how you split it

https://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/evolution/corn/