Re: The anti-GMO video. 

I currently work in the field of genomics, and we have a saying for guys like this one: he's so far off he's not even wrong. The idea that there is an ideal natural genome is wrong, and guys like him wouldn't know how to tell the difference if there was one. So when one compares one genome to another, one *expects* them to be different. Further, by now we realize that the genomes of most organisms have dna copied from almost any other organism they came into contact with over the eons, so we are hardly pure sweet things, now, are we!

The following refers to the human genome, but can be applied to other genomes, since most organisms have genomes:

> Plato essentially asserted that things like chairs and dogs, which we observe in this physical world, and even concepts like virtues, are but imperfect representations or instances of some ideal that exists, but not in the material world. Such a Platonic ideal is "the human genome," a sequence of about 3 billion nucleotides arrayed across a linear scale of position from the start of chromosome 1 to the end of the sex chromosomes. What we call the human genome sequence is really just a reference: it cannot account for all the variability that exists in the species, just like no single dog on earth, real or imagined, can fully incorporate all the variability in the characteristics of dogs.

> Of course, a reference like this would have to be constantly updated, and still could not keep up with the changing frequencies at each position as people die and babies are born all the time. But there’s a more important and even deeper problem—with Platonic implications. Every time an individual cell divides, new mutations arise; no two cells even within any individual have the identical sequence. Because of this somatic mutation, the single sequence obtained from each individual is an imperfect representation even of that person’s genome. We can never know the variants in each of his/her billions of cells.

Ken Weiss | August 17, 2012 | http://the-scientist.com

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