The speed is substantial, yes. That was my point. They are essentially the same; one simply uses the organism's own natural genetic variation mechanisms, while the other introduces new variations manually. Yes, that is a difference that requires separation of the two in certain circumstances, but not when it comes to whether or not we've genetically modified all strains of modern agricultural corn, GMO-labeled or not.

Claiming selective breeding is the same as producing a GMO is like saying an eagle and a Boeing 747 are both utilizing mechanisms that allow them to fly, which is true.

Selection technically isn't modification, since the modification had to have already occurred for it to be selected for. However, modification certainly did occur, and all crops are genetically modified. Indeed, all living creatures are genetically modified, as without modification, evolution can't occur.

The public fear of GMO's is largely due to Monsanto, who aggressively protect their GMO crop patents to the point where farmers who just happened to have some seeds blow into their fields have been sued.

The issue with GMO's isn't the modification, it's the lax patent laws that allow companies like Monsanto to exploit people for profit, giving a bad name to the field as a whole, in spite of the immense potential good it can do, for which Golden Rice is a prime example.

There's no such thing as fair when innocent people are being gunned down. There's only doing what's right, and failing to do so.

Fair enough, and I also just like the mystery of it all; I understand that a large philosophical question can't be definitively answered in a tweet. I would say that, while knowledge requires truth and justification, there's something more to it than just the presence of those 2 factors.

If I had never seen the sky, but believed it was blue, I'd be right, but I wouldn't be knowledgeable; I'd just be a lucky guesser due to the lack of justification for my belief. But would I be justified if I had read a book that said it was blue, and based my decision off of that? It seems arbitrary - what if the book was wrong? What if there were another book I had access to that described the sky as being green, but I simply decided I better liked the blue book?

I think real knowledge requires a level of certainty that a single point of justification can't reasonably provide, and that a "true justified belief" is a step between an arbitrary belief and real knowledge. Knowledge would essentially be a belief so well-justified that it requires no "belief" at all. In the end, I'd probably say that real knowledge is totally outside of human ability, but that's not a new concept.

You're absolutely right that circumstances aren't always perfect... Which is exactly why you need a vehicle that can maximize safety in all situations. A union jack blinker is dumb, but if you're EVER in a situation where you can't tell what side of a car a blinker is going off on, you're in a situation where you need to pull off to the side of the road, turn off your car, and call for someone to pick you up.

I've driven for tens of thousands of hours in my lifetime so far, and I've never even been close to a situation like what you've described. Even in a snow squall or dense fog I've always been able to see where other nearby cars on the road are, and where their blinkers are. Not being able to do so goes well beyond "not ideal;" that's well past the line of too dangerous. And the fact that THAT is how extreme your scenario has to get before the union jack becomes a considerable issue shows how much more concerning your scenario is than that one.

So it's... forbidden to modify it into something that kills even more people. There's a reason I didn't use the word "illegal."

I certainly don't think that the housing market is a wallstreetbets style gamble. If you're getting a loan that you can afford on a house that's not falling apart, it'll generally rise in value over time. The only reason my house didn't appreciate even more in value is because it was a cheap house in a bad neighborhood, and I did nothing to improve it while I was there. My sister's house doubled in value in a little over twice as long as I had mine, and she already paid off her mortgage in just 10 years, albeit due to near-fanatical saving and planning. Even through 2008 people's values usually went up if they managed to hold onto the house for a few years - it was a rocky time to be getting into or out of the market, but if you just stayed put, you made it out on top in the end.

I agree that it shouldn't be necessary to finance a purchase that's worth several times more than your annual salary, hoping that nothing too bad happens in the meantime before you can cash it out, but it's still the best investment your average low/middle class person has access to, and it's a hell of a lot better than spending a comparable amount of money on an apartment that you've got nothing to show for in the end.

How many times do I need to tell you that I'm specifically saying that religion CAN exist? It CAN! I've never said nor implied that it's impossible, and I'm not saying we should believe it's impossible! I'm saying that it's just as bad to believe it's specifically real as it is to believe it's specifically fake when we can't measure it. To believe in religion is just as wrong as to believe in a lack of religion. We cannot know, so to believe anything about it is nothing more than an opinion and not a measurable fact. It's fine to have an opinion, but to think about something scientifically is to remove any preconceived notions about whatever you're studying and focus solely on what you can measure; since you can't measure religion, you can't think about it scientifically, which makes it the antithesis to science.

Yes, some things that are immeasurable end up being true - of course they do, but until they become measurable, they should not be assumed to be anything. If God shows up and we measure him, then he can be thought about scientifically, but until that point he can't, and he shouldn't be. Until we have something to measure, we should not assume any baseless ideas about its existence or lack thereof are true.

You say the logical mind has trouble saying "It might or it might not, for now we can't say" but that has been my entire point this entire time! To be religious is to say "Yes, it does exist," and to be atheist is to say "No, it does not exist," both of which are wrong. The scientific way to think about religion is to specifically not make any decision one way or another, so when a scientist says they're religious, that shows they've made a decision, which shows they've allowed unscientific biases to enter their daily life. Now, we're all human, and we all have biases, but when we start making scientific presentations centered around our biases, as this man did, it's incredibly problematic. Science and religion started out hand in hand, and most of our progress over the years has been due to our slow separation of the two.

It's quite the stretch to imply that all Hitler did was apply the general concept of "survival of the fittest" to humanity. It's true that animals who are unable to find sufficient food or a mate before passing are unable to pass their genes to the next generation, but these changes are incredibly slight; even in the wild, most animals don't die because of their genes - they die because they were unluckily eaten, or fell sick, or any number of other potential issues. Evolutionary changes through natural selection generally only happen over millions of years due to this reason. To say that most people suffer due to some genetic factor, and that their failure to reproduce is having a meaningful, positive short-term impact on the human species is not just overlooking virtually every sociological data point - it's overlooking basic evolutionary theory as well; animals try to live in part because the more living different individuals, the better their species' likelihood to survive.

In the wild it's not uncommon for a gene that was heavily selected for under a certain environment to suddenly be ill-suited for a new environment. Mammoths were well suited to a cold ice-age climate, but died out relatively quickly when weather warmed up. It's humans who attribute evolution to "upward" momentum, when really it's simply lateral change over time, only becoming more suited to whatever arbitrary conditions the creature is currently subjected to, rather than improving any "objective" fitness.

In the end, genetic variety is the most effective way for a species to survive, because any number of different selective factors can suddenly make any particular trait essential for survival and reproduction. For example, baby seals with "ugly" coats ended up having an incredibly fortunate genetic variation when humans decided to massacre them for their fine furs, and now the species has survived in part due to something that otherwise would have been deemed by us to be a meaningless, or even undesirable, variation. Hitler's actions were not natural selection - they were, like the baby seals, a form of artificial selection; the arbitrary culling of genetic variations that were seen, by one man's opinion, as "inferior."

If Hitler and other eugenicists truly believed that human suffering were simply the natural form of evolution, they would have no need to take action into their own hands; if people who are genetically inferior are destined to die, then simply let them - no need for concentration camps and genocide. Their talking points are nothing more than half-baked justifications using data that's cherry-picked at best, and simply made-up at worst, to allow them to force evolution to take unnatural pathways. If they succeeded, it would simply bottleneck our genetic variation and make us less suited for any given environment - not more.

It's possible, sure, but nobody's playing scientist. There are plenty of people around the world that allow exposed breasts and still function. There is no epidemic of sexual deviancy from exposed breasts in any of those societies. France can have nude beaches where woman are free to walk around topless and there aren't scores of men hiding in the bushes. You're acting like this is all hypothetical, but we already know what society looks like without a meaningless ban on exposed breasts - it just doesn't fit your narrative.

Jesus, dude - my whole point is that exposed breasts shouldn't be equated to porn, and the fact that they are is only a stronger reason to allow them to be free right now, to undo that association as soon as possible. A woman choosing to go out to get her mail without a top on shouldn't be equated to a peep show. A woman choosing to play video games on twitch without a bra shouldn't be equated to a strip show. Yes, the current generation of kids will view it as porn, because they haven't seen it outside of porn, which they have already seen, no doubt. It was so easily accessible on the internet that I'd seen my fair share of it before I was out of elementary school in 2002, and it's only gotten even more prevalent. It's an issue, sure, but to let it be the reason not to allow something that shouldn't be equated to porn in the first place is ridiculous.

If breasts are allowed freely in public spaces, it won't be very long before they stop attracting horny boys any more than well-fitting clothing already does. Again, the effect that breasts currently have on boys is already too much - they shouldn't be making men salivate by simply being exposed - they're just breasts, and those in other cultures that have breasts exposed on a regular basis don't have that issue.

As do you, insinuating hormones making people want to do things is reason enough to expect them to do it. Society relies upon people having the self control to not behave based solely on the way their body tells them to, and instead to behave as society deems appropriate. People want to take things, to hurt others when they feel hurt, and to have sex with people they're attracted to, but for us to live together, people need to have control over that. If they don't, they need to be taught, and if society deems something inappropriate that shouldn't be, we need to change society to allow for that act.