Corn 🌽

Thats a teosinte seed; teosinte is the grass ancestor of corn that still grows in Mexico.
- TIL
- So its the corn that is genetically modified.
  
  Ancestor is not the same as non GMO. One could say that primates in Madagascar are ancestors to human. But there's no human population that is either GMO or went through the process of selective breeding.
  
  Indeed.

Back then you would get 5 popcorn per bucket at the movies.

Gregor Mendel entered the chat ...
- "You again! Ya filthy pea fondler!!"
  
  And I will fondle yours too, give them here!

Not sure what this is trying to say, but this seems to conflate genetic modification with selective breeding!
- Selective breeding is a form of genetic modification. That’s what it’s trying to say.
  
  By the individual definitions of the words, yes. However in actual use, genetically modified means modification through direct methods such as chemical agents, enzymes, or electroporation.
  Edit:
  This isn't my opinion. Here is an article in Nature: https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/genetically-modified-organisms-gmos-transgenic-crops-and-732/
  You can selectively breed rabbits for 1000 years and not get a glow in the dark rabbit that can be made in a week in a lab.
  https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/13/glow-in-dark-rabbits-scientists
- Selective breeding modifies the genes, so... No.
  
  Or, yes?

Thanks to capitalism however we can re buy the seed every season and insure Monsantos earnings please the shareholders
- Thanks to assholes
  Ftfy
  Because we will never be free of assholes, regardless of the system.
  
  But surely you can see how a system that rewards asshole behavior is part of the problem here? Maybe we'd have fewer assholes if the system didn't reinforce the behavior and train new assholes every day. Maybe over time, over multiple generations, we could eliminate assholes almost completely

You may not like it but this is what peak corn looks like

the problem isn't that GMOs exist it's that all GMOs that exist are either sprayed with 10x pesticide or are GM'd to make their own super potent pesticide
- Golden rice does neither of these two things. Not that the facts matter when it comes to our irrational fear of gmos.
  
  what % of GMO biomass does golden rice constitute
  
  Golden rice doesn't actually exist, not in any meaningful sense

Which person decided to domesticate that thing. Just like "hey I found this weird looking grass fruit wanna enslave it" and chief's like "hell yeah of course I wanna enslave it!" and then they just ate increasingly beady grass for a few thousand years
- They just realized it was edible, thought to save some to plant, and then the big idea was whenever they realized they should save the biggest ones to replant
- Wrong, the grass enslaved humanity. It was like "I hear wheat is doing well, I wanna get a hominid slave species that will protect me from pests and propagate my genetic line whilst literally clearing away all competing plants for miles."
  And corn got their slaves, and as the plant relaxed over successive generations they grew more bready and delicious because the only predator eating them was also ensuring their monocrop dominance so get fat and whatever who cares!
- You need to stop, you’re too corny for anyone too like you, and honestly when you showed everyone cream corn at the family gathering it was not what anyone wanted to see, and really pop corn? Nobody should ever want pop corn. Anyway if you really like corn you can have it at home, but not while we’re eating out.

We should recognize the tremendous efforts of prehistoric American botanists for selectively breeding so many major food crops. Maize, tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, squash, beans, avocado, cacao, peanuts, papaya, and pineapples are among the many crops first developed in pre-1492 America.

Do people use breed and generically modify interchangeably? Are they actually the same
- No they are not the same. GMO is defined as using genetic engineering to modify an organism. Breeding, or recombination, does not qualify as GMO. But I’m sure there are a lot of people that lump breeding with genetic engineering, so it’s really all in who you ask.
- We get to choose the genes when genetically modifying, and it usually takes a few years (plus health metrics and research once complete).
  Contrary, when selectively breeding we can breed for traits which we are not guaranteed to actually get, and it takes a few decades (plus health metrics and research once complete).
  
  when selectively breeding we can breed for traits which we are not guaranteed to actually get, and it takes a few decades (plus health metrics and research once complete).
  Nobody will make you confirm your randomly bred variant is actually healthy, or even non-harmful, and you can sell it without publishing a thing.

Hard core corn

Country girls made do.

EDIT: OP cleared up the confusion, thanks for that I ... what? This is such a gigantic leap, going from Teosinte to modern day mazie and calling it a GMO, what is it even suppoed to mean? We shouldn't use domesticated plant? I am seriously scared by the lack of what I consider to be general knowledge of breeding in the general population, have people stopped going to school in the last 5 years?
- It's pro-GMO, showing we've always modified plants.
  
  Well, alright thanks for clearing that up. I understand the meme now, although I still struggle with the ... unusual use of terminology. But yes, it very much makes sense to show teosinte then!
  
  Well golly gee, I guess that means GMO crops that are bred to survive glyphosate and other pesticides must be the same thing then!
  All I see here is an attempt to amalgamate GMO's and selective breeding to manipulate public perception... which leads to higher profits.

Brilliant

This message brought to you by the Monsanto and Unit 731 gang.
- Monsanto creates GMOs based on nothing but greed - they have complete disregard for the environmental impact of the wanton use of pesticides that their resistant strains encourage. But that's just one GMO application - other crops use genetic modification to produce greater yields or better nutritional value.
  Golden rice is a great GMO that can bring vitamin C and other essential nutrients to previously-deficient areas of the world, but it keeps getting delayed and disrupted by people who think that the reason Monsanto is terrible is because they make GMO's, rather than their sketchy business and science practices they use. GMO's as a whole are neutral, and there are amazing benefits we can get from them if we understand the difference between good and bad use of genetic modification.
  OP's post points out that beneficial old-fashioned GMO creation through use of selective breeding has immensely improved agricultural yield from the original source - the process of using our own observations to modify organisms on a genetic level is not new, and without it, we wouldn't be where we are now as a species.
  
  The origin of GMOs trace directly back to Shiro Ishii and Unit 731 (Imperial Japan's war crime squad). They did a bunch of other weird shit besides poisoning people. Particularly, they developed dawrf species of wheat so they could soak up a shit ton of chem fertilizers without getting too tall and falling over. This is the genesis of modern GMOs, and if we didn't Paperclip^tm Ishii, things would be very different right now.

Thanks, Monsanto