How the Green Movement Can Trigger the Great Human Dieoff
Just in time for the great green engineered human dieoff, biological scientists have devised the perfect method of genocidal species extinction.
IN THE urban jungle of Juazeiro in Brazil, an army is being unleashed. It is an army like no other: the soldiers' mission is to copulate rather than fight. But they are harbingers of death, not love. Their children appear healthy at first but die just before they reach adulthood, struck down by the killer genes their fathers passed on to them.
These soldiers are the first of a new kind of creature - "autocidal" maniacs genetically modified to wipe out their own kind without harming other creatures....the approach should work with just about any animal - from invasive fish and frogs to rats and rabbits....it could transform the way we think about genetically engineered animals.
... the autocidal approach could not only be used to control invasive species such as cane toads, but that it is the only method that could work in many cases. "It's the only hope we have for the long-term control and eradication of these pests," he says. "Other efforts help, but in the end they are Band-Aids in the absence of a real solution."
Thresher has come up with a way to create fish that produce only male offspring. Releasing enough of these "daughterless" fish into the wild, with each passing on the daughterless habit, would turn a thriving invasive population into a bunch of reluctant bachelors destined for extinction.
...Models suggest that releasing enough daughterless carp to make up 5 per cent of the total population would effectively eradicate carp in the Murray-Darling basin by 2030. Thresher's models also suggest pests such as cane toads and rats could be tackled this way.
... One [approach] that has particular promise exploits chunks of "selfish" DNA that can spread themselves through the population and kill only when two copies are inherited. In theory a one-time release of just a few insects, rather than the continual release of millions, could wipe out a wild population (New Scientist, 22 March 2003).
_NewScientist
The last paragraph from the excerpt above describes the most subtle approach, and perhaps the easiest approach to genocide for greens to take. But they should be prepared to wait several generations to see the completion of their grand project. Such an approach should also allow environmentalists to create an antidote, so they they themselves and their associates could continue to live and procreate indefinitely. Think of it: a master race of environmentalists, sitting back and watching most of the rest of humanity fade away.
It is an approach without gas chambers, without germs, poisons, bullets, or bombs. A clean, test-tube approach that could propagate death and genocide far more broadly than any method previously devised.
Labels: dieoff, energy starvation, faux environmentalism, genetics
posted by al fin at 9:52 am
13 Comments:
Humane genocide, you might call it. Genocide with a smiley face.
go green.............
um...
you got any proof that greens are actually considering this for humans, or that it is even physically feasible *for* humans?
You really think that people are going to stand for physical imprisonment and/or genetic manipulation without a full blown totalitarian state? And that that requirement would sort of negate the threat of this actually happening from the lunatic left fringe?
All the cases mentioned look like positive ones to take, given the destructive nature of the invasive species in question.
Bob: Good one. ;-)
h22: The linked article looks at the various methods of advanced genocide as forms of "pest control." If you frame genocide in terms of pest control, it can seem quite positive, as you say.
It is not difficult to find powerful and influential greens spouting off about the need to drastically reduce the human population -- by force if necessary.
Take a moment and expand your imagination to fit the possible scenarios involved here. There is no need for actual imprisonment, as long as authorities are on board.
Societies already have a variety of "prisons" for normal people, often referred to as schools, clinics, hospitals, rehab centers, dorms, and many more.
The trick is to insert genetic material without the subject being aware of what is actually being done. Even if your imagination is not up to that task, be assured that such limitations are not as widespread as you might wish.
Biological pest control operates on creating a large sterile population and letting them mix freely with the wild population. The numbers required to the technique to work on the human species are very large. The world seems to me too large to cause any significant impact. And any reduction in the population would be temporary.
J: Science has progressed significantly since you last updated your knowledge in this area. (see New Scientist article linked above)
Several new and improved methods of species genocide are being tested in the field, and even more are being developed in the labs.
The new methods go far beyond the old "sterile male" technique.
Even the old methods are quite permanent if you and your family are the "pests" who are successfully eliminated.
snakeoilbaron said...
It was several years ago, after hearing about such suggestions for causing the extinction of malaria hosting mosquitos using a gene which violates normal inheritance rules, that I realized that a relatively small research program combined with access to a few fertility clinics could sterilize most of the human race in a few generations. With new means of inserting DNA into chromosomes at specific places on a bodywide scale, it will become much easier and faster.
But it was the original revalation that causing the human population to crash to levels where civilization could collapse and other calamities could finish us off, without cooperation or consent from society at large which was rather shocking. It wouldn't need to be greenies. That Japanese cult from a few years back that did the subway gas attack would be one possible model. Any apocalyptic religious sect/cult that feels chaos must precede their end-times prophesies would be a possibility. Or maybe a misanthropic guy with some money and time could do it. We wouldn't necessarily be defenseless but it would be expensive and time consuming to limit the damage. The fix would involve a sophisticated molecular biology industry--which would probably be less popular after being unfairly blamed for the problem caused by genocidal/terrorist.
Wednesday, 14 September, 2011
Comment copied from subsequent thread. Baron, if you want to republish the comment here, I can delete this copy.
Al Fin, I didnt find anything new in the article. In human populations, one can imagine other ways of use of deleterious recessive genes. Think how much cost to society to care for a mongoloid, a gradual increase of defectous children would cripple the economy and reduce a country's economic, political and military capability. Even the Nazis failed to apply eugenics on their own imbeciles, the people rebelled. The genetic disease burden can be increased, and the net effect of African immigration may be exactly that, of weakening the gene pool of the receiving countries.
In theory a one-time release of just a few insects, rather than the continual release of millions, could wipe out a wild population. This could only be if the gene in question has a large competitive advantage, something like sickle cell that when alone provides defense against malaria, but kills when you inherit two of them. Even in this case you need many generations to reduce (but never exterminate) a large population. May be my imagination is too pedestrial and cannot conceive other doomsday scenarios.
Regarding restricted dispersion of mutagens it would never work as mutants rarely reproduce.
J: You point out some important evolutionary principles as applied to population genetics.
And yet given enough time, ingenuity, and experimentation, one can not only devise mechanisms which work against typical evolutionary principles -- one can actually use evolutionary principles against themselves.
Future postings will discuss different ways to achieve that paradoxical effect.
al fin,
I find it exceedingly incomprehensible to think that a society - where the leaking of information is the norm - could hide a project of the magnitude necessary to cause a human dieoff by genetic engineering of the type you contemplate.
hell, we have a difficult enough time keeping *military* secrets secret. You think a large scale left-wing conspiracy to cause in essence genetic sterilization is going to go unnoticed? 5% of 300 million is 15 million. 15 *million* individuals would need to be infected in this way in order to effect this change - and even then you would have to suppose that no countermeasures would be developed to test for the genetic modifications made.
This is a plot of a sci-fi novel, a sheer fantasy. The only thing that is remotely plausible in your post is the idea that groups could have a stealth campaign to introduce a deleterious allele that was fatal when homozygous, but even that is sort of silly. There are plenty of attributes like this in natural populations, and they persist only if the heterozygous form has some natural advantage - the allele for sickle-cell anemia is one such carrier.
So in order to carry out an attack like above, they would need to genetically engineer an allele that caused a significant advantage to the carrier, and caused death to people who were double carriers. And even then population genetics wouldn't kill everybody off. It'd be just another genetic disease, in a world full of genetic diseases.
so sorry, I don't buy it.
h22: It is important to realise that there is a learning curve involved here. And certainly the persons who develop a technology are not necessarily the ones who use it or profit from it.
So it might be best and most generous to assume that the basic technologies will be developed for other purposes than human genocide. No conspiracy will be needed for technology development, for the most part.
Opportunistic uses of a technology for purposes other than what it was developed, is a common occurrence in the human story. So you have to ask yourself in this case, who is looking for an opportunity to reduce the human population of Earth by 90% or more? It is not so difficult a thing to discover.
Now the actual technology of genocide is likely to require only a few people. It may turn out to be a bit more subtle and a bit less subtle than one might anticipate, at the same time.
Consider a viral vector for gene insertion. In medicine, such vectors are generally rendered non-pathogenic, but we are talking genocide here, not medicine.
A blunt instrument of genocide might be a particularly virulent microbe with a high mortality rate, with an intermediate duration of pre-symptomatic survival while infectious. A person might be infected and contagious for a month before exhibiting symptoms, for example.
A more subtle effect of an epidemic virus might occur within the infected cells -- say, the germ cells. The viral vector may transform germ cells in a number of ways.
Many survivors of the epidemic would become sterile. Others would be capable of producing only males, or females who died before puberty, or sterile females who were particularly attractive . . .
If the epidemic becomes a pandemic, and if the virus mutates frequently enough so that vaccines and natural immunity lose their effect with subsequent exposures, the blunt instrument may soften up the society enough so that the subtle instrument can finish it off.
Human societies and civilisations are much more vulnerable than they like to think.
Don't get so hung up on the question of who might do such a thing. You are probably acquainted with several people who are capable of pushing the button.
The more intelligent question to ask is "Are there reasonable precautions which should be taken, given the direction the technology is taking and the more than negligible possibility that opportunists might commandeer the technology for their own purposes?"
A more probable scenario, Al Fin, is that some country or organization will develope some kind of super-population, that will outcompete wild Homo sapiens. It has been tried in the past.
Once started, the dynamics of competition could accelerate the process and make it unstoppable.
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