Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

flow maps

Here is an interesting paper proposing design principles for flow maps, which “visualize movement using a static image and demonstrate not only which places have been affected by movement but also the direction and volume of movement.”

Design principles for origin-destination flow maps

Origin-destination flow maps are often difficult to read due to overlapping flows. Cartographers have developed design principles in manual cartography for origin-destination flow maps to reduce overlaps and increase readability. These design principles are identified and documented using a quantitative content analysis of 97 geographic origin-destination flow maps without branching or merging flows. The effectiveness of selected design principles is verified in a user study with 215 participants. Findings show that (a) curved flows are more effective than straight
flows, (b) arrows indicate direction more effectively than tapered line widths, and (c) flows between nodes are more effective than flows between areas. These findings, combined with results from user studies in graph drawing, conclude that effective and efficient origin-destination flow maps should be designed according to the following design principles: overlaps between flows are minimized; symmetric flows are preferred to asymmetric flows; longer flows are curved
more than shorter or peripheral flows; acute angles between crossing flows are avoided; sharp bends in flow lines are avoided; flows do not pass under unconnected nodes; flows are radially distributed around nodes; flow direction is indicated with arrowheads; and flow width is scaled with represented quantity.

What a Fish Knows

What a Fish Knows is what it sounds like – a book about what fish are thinking. From the publisher:

Do fishes think? Do they really have three-second memories? And can they recognize the humans who peer back at them from above the surface of the water? In What a Fish Knows, the myth-busting ethologist Jonathan Balcombe addresses these questions and more, taking us under the sea, through streams and estuaries, and to the other side of the aquarium glass to reveal the surprising capabilities of fishes. Although there are more than thirty thousand species of fish—more than all mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians combined—we rarely consider how individual fishes think, feel, and behave. Balcombe upends our assumptions about fishes, portraying them not as unfeeling, dead-eyed feeding machines but as sentient, aware, social, and even Machiavellian—in other words, much like us.

What a Fish Knows draws on the latest science to present a fresh look at these remarkable creatures in all their breathtaking diversity and beauty. Fishes conduct elaborate courtship rituals and develop lifelong bonds with shoalmates. They also plan, hunt cooperatively, use tools, curry favor, deceive one another, and punish wrongdoers. We may imagine that fishes lead simple, fleeting lives—a mode of existence that boils down to a place on the food chain, rote spawning, and lots of aimless swimming. But, as Balcombe demonstrates, the truth is far richer and more complex, worthy of the grandest social novel.

Highlighting breakthrough discoveries from fish enthusiasts and scientists around the world and pondering his own encounters with fishes, Balcombe examines the fascinating means by which fishes gain knowledge of the places they inhabit, from shallow tide pools to the deepest reaches of the ocean.

Teeming with insights and exciting discoveries, What a Fish Knows offers a thoughtful appraisal of our relationships with fishes and inspires us to take a more enlightened view of the planet’s increasingly imperiled marine life. What a Fish Knows will forever change how we see our aquatic cousins—the pet goldfish included.

Tobler’s first law of geography

Since I seem to be on a kick of writing about key theories I didn’t learn in school (and perhaps I am a bit burned out thinking about politics and climate change, and I don’t have any amazing new technologies to share today), here is the first law of geography:

The first law of geography was developed by Waldo Tobler in 1970 and it makes the observation that ‘everything is usually related to all else but those which are near to each other are more related when compared to those that are further away’.  This observation which Tobler made is closely related to the ‘Law of Universal Gravitation’ and the ‘Law of Demand’ as well. The concept was first applied by Tobler to urban growth systems and was not popularly received when it was first published.  It wasn’t until the 1990s when this formulation of the concept of spatial autocorrelation became an important underlying concept in the field of GIS.

best practices for writing code

Here’s another R post I am saving for my own reference – some best practices for writing code. This is something I actually can say I learned in engineering school – it was a covered in 15 minutes or so in a required intro to computer science course I took around 1994. Perhaps it’s time to brush up. Again, these are skills that are useful these days in many fields beyond just computer science and software development.

relational algebra

R bloggers has a nice post on the theory behind database organization, and some tools that can used to manage and manipulate data through R. Maybe this seems very specialized, but many of our jobs involve dealing with data these days, so this knowledge and tools is potentially relevant to us, and yet I don’t think many of us even in technical fields outside math and computer science learn this stuff in school.

Middle East Quagmire

How many troops does the U.S. have in Iraq? According to The Daily Beast:

Officially, there are now 3,650 U.S. troops in Iraq, there primarily to help train the Iraqi national army.

But in reality, there are already about 4,450 U.S. troops in Iraq, plus another nearly 7,000 contractors supporting the American government’s operations. That includes almost 1,100 U.S. citizens working as military contractors, according to the latest Defense Department statistics.

And I think we can expect the number to increase:

“We’re looking for opportunities to do more and there will be boots on the ground and I want to be clear about that,” Secretary of Defense Ash Carter told CNBC last month. “But it’s a strategic question whether you are enabling local forces to take and hold rather than trying to substitute for them. That is a strategic intention that we have.”

The next U.S. administration has publically committed to large defense spending increases. It has already lifted a long-standing rule intended to require a civilian to head the Department of Defense. A retired general has been put in charge in homeland security. An executive from the oil industry, which is just fine with taxpayer funded boots on the ground advancing its interests in the Middle East, is going to run the State Department.

We also have boots on the ground in Afghanistan, of course, plus Syria and Libya. Of course, we have advisors in Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states, and are participating with Saudi Arabia in a proxy war against Iran in Yemen. In 2012 Seymour Hersh told us that U.S. Special Forces are actively involved training proxy forces inside Iran itself, a claim which official and media U.S. sources quickly shot down. I have no evidence to the contrary, yet Seymour Hersh has some past experience telling truths that the government and media find inconvenient.

I’ve rambled a bit here. But my basic thesis is that we can expect the oil industry and the military-industrial complex to be running our country’s foreign policy for the foreseeable future. They seem increasingly to be drawing us into a proxy war with Iran and Russia on one side, and the Gulf Arab states on the other side. Maybe this is the way Cold War II will unfold. There is no sign of the checks and balances we all learned about in elementary school. The only checks that matter are the ones the public writes to the IRS, and the only balances that matter are the ballooning ones on our credit card statements. This won’t change until the public feels poor and realizes why they feel poor. Well, we do feel poor but we are buying into propaganda that it is mysterious foreign and internal enemies that are the problem, and not the worsening global economic and geopolitical climate our actions are continuing to destabilize. Not to mention the actual climate.

garden wrap-up

We’ve finally had a hard freeze in Philadelphia, a little over a month past the average historical first frost date. So I’ll go ahead and do my garden wrap up for the year.

I was excited about gardening this season because my family bought a house last summer, and it is the first time I have had a patch of land to my name since I was about 10 years old. The patch of land we are talking about is small – about 25 feet long by 5 feet wide, plus a fair amount of space for container growing on a brick patio. This is all south facing and not shaded by any large trees. So like I said, I was excited. I ordered a lot of seeds last winter, started them in late winter, and transplanted them in early spring. This post is my wrap up on what worked well, what didn’t, and my thoughts on where I might like to go next year.

Let me first bore you a bit with my gardening philosophy. I find it to be a fun and relaxing hobby for one thing, but it also fits in with the theme of this blog, which is the future of our species and civilization. As our civilization and species has displaced, co-opted and poisoned nature to an increasing degree, gardening gives us a possibility to experiment on a very small scale with a vision for people and nature to coexist in ways that benefit both. Along that theme, my gardening objective is first and foremost to create some biodiversity and habitat in a highly urbanized environment. That might seem like a hard thing to do, but almost anything you do will improve on what would be there otherwise. So one of my objectives is just to plant a large diversity of plants. I lean towards ones that provide food or habitat for bees, butterflies, and birds. That means a bias toward native plants and native ecosystems as analogs, but I don’t go for extremes. I have a bias toward plants that are edible by people, although I don’t always go to the trouble of picking them and eating them. Just knowing that I have some experience and ability to grow some of my own food gives me a little peace of mind. If we all did that, we could be a more resilient society. I use lots of mulch, don’t use chemicals and haven’t bothered with soil testing, although I might at some point out of curiosity. If plants don’t do well I don’t worry about it too much, I just take some notes and try to find plants that will. I go for mostly perennials, self-seeding plants that are tough as nails and able to out-compete the urban weeds.

seedlings that sprouted, transplanted, and grew well outdoors

  • white clover, Trifolium repens. I love clover as a ground cover because it spreads quickly, is able to out-compete all but the toughest weeds, and comes back year after year. These are exactly the same reasons my neighbors consider it a weed. But I also love it because it stays low, bees love it, it creates lots of nitrogen-rich mulch at the end of the season, is drought tolerant, and I personally like the look of both the leaves and flowers. And even though it is a tough competitor, it is very easy to pull it out of spots where you don’t want it and plant something else. Taller plants seem to coexist with it just fine, as long as you give them a head start to grow tall enough before it comes back in. Chickens, rabbits, sheep and goats will all eat clover. People will not eat it gladly but it is supposedly nutritious if you really had to eat it in a pinch. It’s not native, but I see it as a valuable plant for all the reasons above. I don’t understand why people prefer their ivy and Pachysandra ground covers, which cover the ground but have no other redeeming features. I consider these weeds and am trying to hold the line on their invasion until my clover army is ready to counterattack.
  • dandelions, Taraxacum officinale. Another non-native that people consider a weed. I have left wild dandelions alone in my garden, and have added some more marketed as “culinary French dandelion”. I like dandelion greens – you can get used to bitter greens over time, but if dandelions are too much you can mix them with lettuce or spinach until you get more used to them. When I was a kid I thought dandelion flowers and seed heads were pretty, and I was sad when my dad would mow them. Actually, I haven’t changed my mind! They spread, obviously, are drought tolerant, and come back from year to year, again things that make them a “weed” to people who don’t like them, and a desirable plant to people like me who do.
  • chicory, Cichorium intybus. Yet another weed I like the look of. Domesticated chicory comes in a lot of shapes and sizes. The leaves are edible when young – the endive and radicchio in spring mix are both varieties of chicory. The variety I have was marketed as “Italian dandelion”. They spread, come back from year to year, are drought tolerant, look cool, are tough as nails, and have pretty blue flowers supposedly although mine haven’t bloomed yet. The roots are commonly ground and mixed with coffee in Southeast Asia and India, and people I know in Appalachia do exactly the same thing. By the way, supposedly you can grind up dandelion roots and roast them for your coffee too.
  • butterfly milkweed, Asclepias tuberosa. Well, finally we get to a native. These are a preferred food source for native and migratory butterflies, produce cool orange flowers, spread, and are drought tolerant. Rumor has it they are not as poisonous as people think, but that doesn’t mean I have plans to eat them.
  • Thai basil, sweet basil, holy basil, Ocimum basilicum, Ocimum tenuiflorum. I lost track of which was which, but these quickly spread to fill my big half-barrel type pots out front, and provided us with all the basil we could use in stir fries and soups all season. Bees and wasps loved the flowers. They smelled great in the garden, in the house, and in our food. I suspect we could just bring some plants in for the winter and put them back out in the spring, but they grow so well from a handful of seeds that we don’t bother. We had some Italian basil but it succumbed to the heat the first time we were out of town for a couple days, whereas the Asian types would wilt after a couple days of heat but bounce back quickly with a little water.
  • sunflower, Helianthus. Just a fun, easy-to-grow plant. A few pennies worth of seeds dresses up your house nicely for several weeks, or more if you stagger their planting. I tried a “three sisters” thing which didn’t work because the beans and squash wouldn’t grow with the sunflowers, but the sunflowers themselves did great and looked spectacular. Sunflowers actually go back to a native North American ancestor but were bread extensively in Russia for some reason, so they are roughly to the native ancestor what a poodle is to a wolf. Bumble bees, which are native, seem to prefer sunflowers to almost anything else. Granted, this puts bees right outside your door at head level, which if you are allergic could be an issue. But I have never been stung by a bumblebee or any type of bee for that matter, just yellow jackets and hornets.
  • Chinese long bean, Vigna unguiculata subsp Sesquipedalis. I only planted a grand total of one bean, didn’t give it any kind of support, and paid it very little attention. It did nothing until the sunflower it was planted with keeled over. Then it exploded and produced a bunch of delicious beans at least a foot long, and sometimes 2 feet or more. Some rotted because they were on the ground. These are so easy and delicious that I may never go back to growing any other type. They have purple varieties too.

seedlings that had some problems

  • bee balm, Monarda didyma. This is a pretty, edible native wildflower pollinators are supposed to love. I had a hard time getting it started but did eventually get a couple started and in the garden. Surprisingly, it has been swamped by daisies but I think it is still in there somewhere.
  • lemon balm, Melissa officinalis. This is supposed to be an easy, tough plant that pollinators love and you can make a nutritious tea out of. I only managed to get one started out of many seeds sowed, but sure enough that one seems to be tough and growing quickly.
  • chives, Allium schoenoprasum. I had no trouble getting these started and in the garden. They seem to be doing fine, but the kind I started from seed seem to be so thin they can’t even stand up. I have some older ones I bought as plants and brought from my last home, and they have much thicker leaves and are doing well. They are edible, obviously, and I love their purple flowers although maybe not everyone would.
  • wild strawberry, Fragaria virginiana. This is a native that has a reputation for being very hard to start from seed. Sure enough, I was not able to start it from seed. I “cold stratified” it in the refrigerator like all the books and websites suggested, got a grand total of one to sprout, and it didn’t make it.
  • anise hyssop, Agastache foeniculum. This is another pretty, edible, pollinator supporting, tough native wildflower that a lot of people consider a weed. None of the books say this is hard to start from seed, but I have had zero success.
  • Chinese purple eggplant, Solanum melongena. I got a couple of these to start, and one actually produced about 5 fruits, which were good. You would have to plant a lot of plants to get a significant crop.
  • Thai chili, Capsicum annuum. These shouldn’t be that hard but I had no success starting them from seed. I did get some Thai chilis though as I will mention in a minute.
  • mountain mint, Pycnanthemum spp. This is a native that pollinators are supposed to love. None of the books and websites suggest it should be hard to start from seed, but I have had zero success.
  • miner’s lettuce, Montia perfoliata. This is native to California and is supposed to be delicious. It’s an annual but supposedly self-seeds easily over there. I was sure it would survive a Philadelphia summer but I decided to try it anyway. Ultimately the plan is for it to get some shade from my persimmon tree, which is only a six inch seemingly lifeless twig as I will mention below. The miner’s lettuce was doing just fine until it had a run-in with a neighbor’s weed whacker. Whether it was an accident or they were trying to do me a favor, I have not figured out but it seems to have been ripped out by the roots and never came back.
  • sorrel, Rumex acetosa. This has a reputation for being touch, but I only got one of these started and it seems to be having a tough time competing with the clover. It’s hanging on though.
  • Thai eggplant, Solanum melongena. I had no success getting any of this started.
  • acorn squash, Cucurbita. I got plenty started but none set any fruit. The ones planted with the sunflowers were stunted, and the ones planted with the sunchokes were doing well until it got just a little hot and dry, and the sunchokes seemed to suck all the moisture right out of them and they died.
  • sunchoke, Helianthus tuberosus. This was my biggest disappointment after everything I have heard about these being a great-looking, impossible-to-eradicate, native wildflower with abundant potato-like tubers. In fact, I have heard these described as “famine food” because they are incredibly prolific in almost any soil, spread quickly, reproduce by both seed and tuber, and supposedly no matter how much you harvest you can’t get rid of them. Well, mine attracted some kind of leaf cutter ant that devastated them all summer, were not drought tolerant at all, and their flowers were not impressive. Maybe it was the particular variety, or maybe they just don’t belong in pots, but I probably wouldn’t try that variety again if I try sunchokes at all. It’s a shame because I have lots of the tubers which would be happy to grow back next year, so what do I do? throw them away, chuck them in a vacant lot?

plants/trees we bought and planted

  • parsley. We planted some in window boxes, where it did well as long as we kept watering it. One interesting thing was that black swallowtail butterflies kept laying eggs on the parsley all summer and fall. These are particularly pretty butterflies to see in an urban environment, and make really interesting fat green caterpillars. Unfortunately, they were so easy in the window box that birds kept picking them off all summer, and I don’t think any made it to adulthood. I suppose it was good to feed the birds. Next year I’d like to plant a whole bunch more parsley both to provide more caterpillar habitat and to feed the birds.
  • Thyme. We bought some and planted in a window box, where it did well.
  • mint. We planted several types in a window box, where it did great as long as we watered it, but fizzled out as soon as we were out of town for a few days during a hot spell. Mint is great but I don’t really want it running rampant in the garden so I will keep it in pots and window boxes.
  • Asian persimmon, Diospyros kaki. I ordered a nursery-grown sapling in a pot in the spring, planted it, and it seemed to be dead on arrival. The nursery provided a replacement in the fall, which I planted and we will see if it leafs out in the spring. These are really delicious.
  • Asian pear, Pyrus bretschneideris. I ordered and planted a bare-root tree and it has done well, shooting up at least 8 feet high in its inaugural year. These are delicious and pest resistant. Both the Asian pear and persimmon should only grow to 10-12 feet high. I intend these to be the book ends of my urban garden, providing some shade for the garden and house but not dominating the entire landscape. They both should have flowers in the spring and fruit in the fall. There just is nothing native that quites fits the bill like these two.
  • violets, Viola sororia. This is another tough, native, edible, pretty perennial “weed” that I happen to like. I have bought some and there are also volunteers in the garden and in my pots. They can have as much space as they would like.
  • green and gold, Chrysogonum. This is a pretty, native, perennial groundcover that is actually listed as threatened in the wild in Pennsylvania. Mine are nursery grown of course. Seeds are not available as far as I can tell. They look well-established although they are overgrown with clover at the moment.
  • chives, Allium schoenoprasum. Chives are easy to find at farmer’s markets and even hardware store, so I pick up a couple every now and then. The ones I have bought are thicker and more robust than the ones I have started from seed.
  • strawberries. I picked up a couple plants at a nursery, and they are doing great and spreading. They produced flowers and fruit in their first year, although something was clearly nibbling on them (squirrel, rat, opossum) so I did not.
  • garlic chives. I bought these at a Buddhist temple plant sale a couple years ago. They are doing great, are a hardy perennial with nice white flowers that pollinators love, and taste great in dishes like omelettes. They have a reputation for spreading aggressively – fine by me!

volunteers (my favorite category)

  • Thai chilis. I had zero luck starting Thai chilis from seed, then a very healthy chili bush decided to spontaneously sprout in one of my pots, probably from seeds in compost. It still looks great in early December!
  • cucumbers. I have never intentionally planted cucumbers, so these must have been from rotten cucumbers I threw in the compost bin a year or more ago. They popped up and produced a lot of little cucumbers, which tasted great!
  • pumpkins. They sprouted all over the garden and pots, I suspect because I tossed last year’s Halloween pumpkin in the compost bin. They didn’t set fruit unfortunately, but they looked cool.
  • black eyed Susan. There were lots of these in the garden to begin with, and I have not only left them but purposely scattered their seeds. They are a pretty native wildflower that native bees and wasps are supposed to like. They can spread and out-compete other plants, which is fine with me.
  • Purple coneflower. These started off well, but had an unfortunate run-in with a neighbor’s weed wacker and didn’t seem to recover. We will see if they show up again next spring.

new things I might try next year

  • frost seeding. For some of the seeds I had trouble starting indoors, I might just toss a handful in the garden in the winter, particular ones that need to “cold stratify” like wild strawberry and anise hyssop. I could also plant some seeds in pots in the winter and see if they sprout in the spring.
  • direct seeding. I may try more direct seeding next year.
  • heat mat. I’d like to get a heat mat and see if that makes it easier to start seeds like peppers and eggplant.
  • seed starting mix. I haven’t made an attempt to use a fancy, sterile seed starting mix. Maybe I’ll try that for some of the more delicate natives.
  • sunflowers as a buffer. Since sunflowers did such a good job at suppressing growth of other plants, maybe I will try a sunflower border and see if it can suppress some of the neighbors’ ground covers I don’t particularly like.
  • lots of parsley for caterpillars. lots more.
  • lots more Asian long beans. I have a fence I can grow these up. They are just fantastic and easy.
  • try again to establish wild strawberry, mountain mint, anise hyssop, and miner’s lettuce. These are all perennials I tried and failed to establish last year.
  • start lots more eggplant and chilli seedlings, earlier and with heat
  • if I try any type of squash again, look more carefully at their nutrient needs. They may need more phosphorus to set fruit.
  • add a new species or two – maybe wildflowers, or a small bush in a pot. In general I don’t like bushes in a small urban garden because they dominate too much space and are too permanent.

Obama and Israel

This is not a blog about Israeli-Palestinian politics. But there is some speculation that Obama could take some last-minute action, or more specifically, not taking the usual action of vetoing resolutions introduced by other Security Council members. This would obviously be a big deal,

The most likely scenarios for Obama action in the [United Nations Security Council] are variations of the following three:

● First: unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state within specified or approximate borders following the 1948 armistice lines where no Palestinian state ever existed. In virtually all world forums, this would more juridically move the status of Israel’s administrative presence in Judea and Samaria from disputed to occupation.

● Second: abstain from vetoing a pending French resolution that would impose settlement lines and/or recognize a Palestinian state within 18 months absent agreement by the parties.

● Third: impose a territorial settlement within a two-year deadline if the parties do not craft one themselves.

Bill Gates’s Favorite Books of 2016

Don’t you just hate it when a multi-billionaire retiree says, “Even when my schedule is out of control, I carve out a lot of time for reading”? Anyway, Bill Gates has released his favorite books, and a couple caught my eye.

The Gene, by Siddhartha Mukherjee. Doctors are deemed a “triple threat” when they take care of patients, teach medical students, and conduct research. Mukherjee, who does all of these things at Columbia University, is a “quadruple threat,” because he’s also a Pulitzer Prize– winning author. In his latest book, Mukherjee guides us through the past, present, and future of genome science, with a special focus on huge ethical questions that the latest and greatest genome technologies provoke. Mukherjee wrote this book for a lay audience, because he knows that the new genome technologies are at the cusp of affecting us all in profound ways.

The Myth of the Strong Leader, by Archie Brown. This year’s fierce election battle prompted me to pick up this 2014 book, by an Oxford University scholar who has studied political leadership—good, bad, and ugly—for more than 50 years. Brown shows that the leaders who make the biggest contributions to history and humanity generally are not the ones we perceive to be “strong leaders.” Instead, they tend to be the ones who collaborate, delegate, and negotiate—and recognize that no one person can or should have all the answers. Brown could not have predicted how resonant his book would become in 2016.

Honorable mention: The Grid, by Gretchen Bakke. This book, about our aging electrical grid, fits in one of my favorite genres: “Books About Mundane Stuff That Are Actually Fascinating.” Part of the reason I find this topic fascinating is because my first job, in high school, was writing software for the entity that controls the power grid in the Northwest. But even if you have never given a moment’s thought to how electricity reaches your outlets, I think this book would convince you that the electrical grid is one of the greatest engineering wonders of the modern world. I think you would also come to see why modernizing the grid is so complex and so critical for building our clean-energy future.

NAS study on genetically modified crops

The National Academy of Sciences has released a massive study of genetically modified crops. This has been a tough issue to discern the facts because there has been a lot of corporate propaganda coming from one side, and a lot of emotion from well-meaning but not-all-that-scientific activists from the other side. I would consider the NAS to be pretty close to an impartial, science-based source, although you could argue that the academics involved probably do a lot of research funded by the agriculture industry. Still, it is a very large number of academics involved and is very thoroughly peer-reviewed, so I think you could regard this as the academic consensus.

First, on human health effects, they offer some reassuring news:

There have been claims that GE crops have had adverse effects on human health. Many reviews have indicated that foods from GE crops are as safe as foods from non-GE crops, but the committee reexamined the original studies of this subject. The design and analysis of many animal-feeding studies were not optimal, but the large number of experimental studies provided reasonable evidence that animals were not harmed by eating food derived from GE crops. Additionally, long-term data on livestock health before and after the introduction of GE crops showed no adverse effects associated with GE crops. The committee also examined epidemiological data on incidence of cancers and other human-health problems over time and found no substantiated evidence that foods from GE crops were less safe than foods from non-GE crops.

You could still argue, as the Europeans do, that the precautionary principle means new technologies must be treated as guilty until proven innocent. It is somewhat the opposite here in the big-business-friendly U.S. Still, there is no smoking gun here.

Nor is there a smoking gun on the ability of genetic engineering to deliver yield increases. Some are arguing that the smoking gun is evidence showing it has not really done this yet. That is somewhat disappointing, but with biotechnology continuing to accelerate I don’t think you can point to progress so far as evidence that no further progress will be made. That is like saying we have not cured cancer to date, so it is time to give up.

There is disagreement among researchers about how much GE traits can increase yields compared with conventional breeding. In addition to assessing detailed surveys and experiments comparing GE with non-GE crop yields, the committee examined changes over time in overall yield per hectare of maize, soybean, and cotton reported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) before, during, and after the switch from conventional to GE varieties of these crops. No significant change in the rate at which crop yields increase could be discerned from the data. Although the sum of experimental evidence indicates that GE traits are contributing to actual yield increases, there is no evidence from USDA data that they have substantially increased the rate at which U.S. agriculture is increasing yields…

One of the critical questions about the new traits that may be produced with emerging genetic engineering technologies is the extent to which these traits will contribute to feeding the world in the future. Some crop traits, such as insect and disease resistance, are likely to be introduced into more crop species and the number of pests targeted will also likely increase. If deployed appropriately, those traits will almost certainly increase harvestable yields and decrease the probability of losing crop plantings to major insect or disease outbreaks. However, there is great uncertainty regarding whether traits developed with emerging genetic-engineering technologies will increase crop potential yield by improving photosynthesis and increasing nutrient use. Including such GE traits in policy planning as major contributors to feeding the world must be accompanied by strong caveats.

The don’t talk too much about one of my questions, the extent to which corporate profit-driven genetic engineering reduces genetic diversity, potentially making the global food system less resilient in the face of future shocks. They don’t seem concerned about the possibility of genetically engineered crops escaping and wreaking havoc in our remaining natural ecosystems.

I’ll reproduce one graphic I found interesting, distinguishing between the concepts of potential and actual yield. One point they seem to be making is that the focus of genetic engineering to date has been on reducing crop losses to weeds, pests, and diseases. This does not increase the plant’s ability to make full use of water, nutrients, and ultimately sunlight more efficiently than the naturally-derived crop has in the past. So this is why there is still the potential for a lot of progress, as well as the potential for risks to diversity, resilience, human health and ecosystems. This also reinforces my general sense that medical biotech is farther along than agricultural biotech.

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2016. Genetically Engineered Crops: Experiences and Prospects. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/23395.

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2016. Genetically
Engineered Crops: Experiences and Prospects. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi:
10.17226/23395.