IP: Re: Who needs Monarch Butterflies anyway?

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

> X-Sender: sb () popmail gbn org
> Date: Thu, 24 Jun 1999 18:20:44 -0800
> To: farber () cis upenn edu, ip-sub-1 () admin listbox com
> From: Stewart Brand <sb () gbn org>
> Subject: Re: IP: Who needs Monarch Butterflies anyway?
>
> Sigh.  Rifkin is, as usual, largely wrong and greatly overstated.  Remember
> the Recombinant DNA panic of the 1970s?  Same issues, same alarm, same
> rumors.  No actual harm occurred apart from the panic.
> "Genetically-modified!" scares some people the same way "Internet!" scares
> other people.  (Lefties are knee-jerking at the corporate angle of
> genetically modified, while Righties knee-jerk at the out-of-control angle
> of the Internet.  Both developments are mainly great good news for
> civilization.)
>
> I was trained as a ecologist back when it was a science only.  I do
> encourage caution and controls and the like, but emphatically not freakouts
> and bans.  The biologists I know these days are rolling their eyes at the
> Rifkinesque alarm in Europe.  Check the current cover story in The
> Economist.
>
> By the way, Monarch butterflies are famously adaptive.  Their caterpillars
> are the only insect that can metabolize the ferocious natural insecticide
> in milkweed.  They keep that poison in their tissues to gag birds who try
> to eat them.  That's why Monarchs are bright orange and fly slow, to
> advertise how poisonous they are.