You are being ridiculous. Please stop mischaracterizing what I say. You clearly have no idea about any of my views or philosophies. Notice how instead of refuting any of my points, you simply went into an attack on my character as a whole.

I have a BS in Biochemistry. I am working towards a PhD in bioengineering. This does not make me a fascist biotechnology dictator. It does not make me an agricultural shill. It does make me more qualified to talk about this topic than you.

You're argument all along has been that GMOs are unsafe and should be banned. I have refuted that point several times, giving you several examples of evidence to the contrary. I have pointed out that the only evidence showing GMOs are unsafe has come from scientific hacks. I have pointed out that there is no correlation between the introduction of GMOs into a country and the markers of that country's health.

Do you know what labels I am perfectly fine with?

I used to manage food for a house of 60 hippies. I'd buy all of the above. I support opt-in labels driven by consumer desire. I support farmers choosing the stock of seeds amenable to their practice. But I don't support the FUD you bring to this discussion.

So I'm blocking you. Good day.

"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice."

Upon seeing this, the thundara was enlightened.

I know it can be tempting to make fun of people who abuse the (sex | cis | hetero | race | class)-ist terminology, but I do agree there is something to be said of the topic your facebook friend is complaining about here. Let me share you a story.

In undergrad, I lived in a massively shared housing organization. In Berkeley. It was one of the hippiest of the hippie strongholds. I was surrounded by naked yoga on the roof, group meditation sessions, and friends who spent their weekends at the local Thai Buddhist temple. Mostly harmless stuff, as long as you didn't mind the bare flesh. A lot of college students exploring themselves and finding who they wanted to be.

But once a year, we had a celebration. A party, meant as a spiritual experience, where members were led from room to room, taking substances and seeing "life" as told from a script of settings. From birth, to your first job, to your first rave, to your parents catching you with drugs, to death. I helped with the retirement home, where I'd let my guests have a moment of quiet while I cheated at scrabble.

Trouble was, the event was conceived about a decade ago after a wave of students were kicked out of another house for noise complaints and a death involving a four-story house, a zip line, and the concrete surface next to a pool. Some off the events were, to your present storyteller, perhaps in... poor taste. In the kitchen, you were "mixed" into pizza dough while a man yelled at you in a poor Italian accent. In heaven, you were lathered in lotion, while David Bowie sang to you. And pre-birth, the Guru handed you a baked treat infused with weed butter.

One member of the house, who spent much of his childhood in India, took offense to a white person taking on the name of a spirtual leader from a culture they did not understand, and using it as a core element of a college rager. He brought up the fact that most people didn't understand what "guru" meant, its importance in the context of sacred traditions, its differences across Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sikhism, nor the clash between "heaven", eastern religions, and a party that ended with Superstar and Cbat blasting at full volume while a bunch of college students danced naked, drunk, high, and covered in chocolate. He was ignored, brushed aside, and told not to spoil the fun. All this from a house that lauded itself on acceptance of traditions from all over the world. At one of the most liberal institutions in America.

From similar groups of people, there were parties involving: a Japanese space wedding and Cinco de Mayo beer fest. Both were received as an insult by people from Japanese and Mexican cultures, but both were also accepted as okay by the dominant white cultures of the house. All three were alienating to anyone from those respective cultures, but justified because "the parties weren't actually meant to make fun of them."

I can see why the individuals putting on these events might not see their actions as racist or xenophobic. Most college / American events take some pleasure out of bastardizing some tradition in the name of fun or capitalism. But there's a lot to be said about peoples' willingness to continue these parties even after being told by minorities that they were insulting.

You see a lot of similar stuff in the fetishization of eastern religions among college youth: embracing and appropriating cultural elements without an understanding of where they come from. I've seen white yoga instructors give lectures on Buddhism (not bothering to specify which branch, omitting all mention of Jainism, and emphasizing the elements of mysticism) to rooms full of only white participants. Then said participants repeat the few words they remember from the session afterwards, feeling a bit more spiritual and enlightened, but still ignorant of the tenants of those religions and regions.

To me, it comes across as deliberate ignorance and deliberate white-washing of foreign cultures. When local: stupid and alienating. When widespread: dehumanizing and, fuck-it, I'll use the word: oppressive. Suddenly, the religion of East Asia becomes "Buddhism", and all other sects, religions, people, languages, and cultures become merged together under the one banner and forgotten.

Badger? I hardly know her!

Got it. Instead of going in a curve / spiral, you go out a ways, circle away to maximal distance from the monster, then go out again. There's a distance where you can still circle the lake faster than the monster. That head start lets you win.

This is true. Alright, let's see if I have this whole -os thing figured out:

Ethos: Arkin is a division director at a national lab and is involved with everything biology from megagenomics of soil microbes to open biofab facilities. He's one of the oldest names in both systems biology (how do all the moving parts come together to make a cell work) and synthetic biology. You'll find he's on a large fraction of the references in any textbook on either subject.

Pathos: at the risk of abusing the word cool, synbio (synthetic biology) is cool. It's boarding on topics of sci-fi, it had promise in biofuels, medicine, agriculture, ecology, medicine, and many more. It had the goal of turning biology into a true engineering discipline. There are a ton of major hurdles to overcome before this goes from a pipe dream to any sort of reality though.

Logos: those hurdles are no joke. What we understand of biology is complex, noisy and almost unpredictable. And that's just what we know. There are all mountains of open questions in all fields of biology. What gene produces what protein? That's been a solved problem for decades, just look up any codon table or scan a genome database. When that gene is expressed? To what degree? Hard. Borderline intractable at the moment.

And that's about where the lecture starts. The progress made in the last decade and a half in building and understanding the very most basic elements of single-cellular biology and slowly fashioning predictable machinery and understanding how to connect it all together to finally begin making nontrivial additions in functionality.

Want anything from gene therapy more complex that fixing single point mutations to dna? This is the that may one day achieve the stuff of dreams.

Synbio is no doubt notorious for hype, but the link above is a nice bit of grounding within the context of the above.

I said to myself "they're going to call it a technical problem" before opening the link. Bitcoins are the ideal libertarian currency, and coupled with that is the expectation that proper security, either physical or digital, is the responsibility of the owner.

If you get robbed, it's your fault for not carrying a gun.

If you get hacked, it's your fault for using insecure software.

Since you poked the question of how people die the other week, The Emperor of All Maladies (2011) is a pretty widely acclaimed book on cancer. I personally liked Natural Obsessions (1999), but it's more from the lab researcher's point of view, and a little bit dated now.

I initially had a few small bits of critique on the facts provided alongside their argument. However, as it went on, I realized it was just an ungrounded tirade based on a loose understanding of a (admittedly slightly overhyped) field. Especially telling, was the launch into inconsistent criticisms of liberals, "big pharma", and genetics for...wtf?

scientific explanations for rape and patriarchy

The author seems to have an impression of the field of genetics that is simply not reflective of what those scientists do or teach. Let's start with the basics:

For a trait such as height, there are about 180 SNPs known to contribute to human height variation

As the author partially pointed out, for each of these associations, you have: Quantitative association (i.e. 0.3-0.5 cm explainable difference), speculation on gene function, speculation on difference between alleles, and analysis of how the findings fits in to the larger picture (i.e. The known mutations explain 10-20% of the difference in height between these groups).

Scientists have observed approximately 12 million SNPs in human populations

Not just that, they look at Tag SNPs, which are SNPs located within separate segments of DNA. Scientists noticed that genetic recombination, the process by which DNA fragments as swapped between chromosomes, occurs at hot spots. Between these hot spots, you have continuous fragments of DNA that are passed down without being scrambled. The Tag SNPs are selected and conserved SNPs that are spread out evenly across these fragments. So, rather than sequencing your entire genome, or every SNP, you pick spots ones that serve as proximity detectors to mutants in nearby genes.

Once you have a suspect region, you knuckle down and sequence it fully. Now, there's a million ways to knock-out or knock-down a protein. You see there are many different mutations in the promoter, frameshifts in the coding region, a missense on top of the terminator. Then you form a model relating these mutants to phenotype (No BRAC1? Cancer risk increased X%. 40+ Q repeats? High risk of Huntington's.

Find an ill-defined trait (like political preference). Find a gene that is statistically overrepresented in the sub-population that “possesses” that trait. Declare victory.

Author missed a few steps: Fail to be published in a journal. Be ignored by field. See no change to the world.

All this is to say that though heritability is a useful concept, it is an abstraction — one that depends entirely on the statistical models (with all their assumptions and prejudices) we use to define it.

It's not just an abstraction. Heritability is defined in both a broad sense (Variation between twins) and a narrow sense (Variation between parent and child). Certain genetically identical crops will grow to nearly the exact same height, under the same environmental conditions. Different strains may grow to different heights in the same soil / sun / air. Those differences can be attributed to genetics, and with some work, you can break down which genes have what quantitative effect.

Currently, GWAS are able to explain only about 6% of this heritability, with no loci (genes) particularly predictive for whether an individual will develop diabetes

It attempts to explain the heritable DNA mutations, to say nothing of mutations in regulatory genes and epigenetic markers. Note how that whole "abstract heritability" thing becomes useful here in establishing the limitations of the results. Scientists studying genetics and genomics know there is still plenty of work to be done.

Putting the validity of IQ tests aside for a moment, studies show a long and sustained increase in IQ scores over the course of the twentieth century (the Flynn Effect), pointing to the importance of environment rather than genetics in determining IQ.

This is literally a textbook example on what happens when you don't properly control your test. Not only do controls eliminate IQ differences between races, but adopted children, raised in environments independent of their parents show no correlation in IQ:

These results convey a cautionary message for whether, how, and how soon molecular genetic data can contribute to, and potentially transform, research in social science. We propose some constructive responses to the inferential challenges posed by the small explanatory power of individual SNPS.

The sheer hubris speaks for itself

"Cautionary message", "constructive responses", how the hell is that hubris?

The author is greatly exaggerating the danger of GWAS. The results of association carry with them the quantification of effect. And often they serve as amazing springboards for investigation into the molecular biology underlying disease.

The issue isn't with the scientists, it's with the media and amateur bloggers who regularly misinterpret their results. Obligatory