GMOs in animal agriculture: time to consider both costs and benefits in regulatory evaluations

In 2012, genetically engineered (GE) crops were grown by 17.3 million farmers on over 170 million hectares. Over 70% of harvested GE biomass is fed to food producing animals, making them the major consumers of GE crops for the past 15 plus years. Prior to commercialization, GE crops go through an extensive regulatory evaluation. Over one hundred regulatory submissions have shown compositional equivalence, and comparable levels of safety, between GE crops and their conventional counterparts. One component of regulatory compliance is whole GE food/feed animal feeding studies. Both regulatory studies and independent peer-reviewed studies have shown that GE crops can be safely used in animal feed, and rDNA fragments have never been detected in products (e.g. milk, meat, eggs) derived from animals that consumed GE feed. Despite the fact that the scientific weight of evidence from these hundreds of studies have not revealed unique risks associated with GE feed, some groups are calling for more animal feeding studies, including long-term rodent studies and studies in target livestock species for the approval of GE crops. It is an opportune time to review the results of such studies as have been done to date to evaluate the value of the additional information obtained. Requiring long-term and target animal feeding studies would sharply increase regulatory compliance costs and prolong the regulatory process associated with the commercialization of GE crops. Such costs may impede the development of feed crops with enhanced nutritional characteristics and durability, particularly in the local varieties in small and poor developing countries. More generally it is time for regulatory evaluations to more explicitly consider both the reasonable and unique risks and benefits associated with the use of both GE plants and animals in agricultural systems, and weigh them against those associated with existing systems, and those of regulatory inaction. This would represent a shift away from a GE evaluation process that currently focuses only on risk assessment and identifying ever diminishing marginal hazards, to a regulatory approach that more objectively evaluates and communicates the likely impact of approving a new GE plant or animal on agricultural production systems

A Computational Model for Children’s Language Acquisition Using Inductive Logic Programming

This paper proposes a computational model for children's word acquisition based on inductive logic programming. There are three fundamental features in our approach. Firstly, we incorporate cognitive biases developed recently to explain the efficiency of children's language acquisition. Secondly, we design a co-evolution mechanism of acquiring concept definitions for words and developing concept hierarchy. Concept hierarchy plays an important role of defining contexts for later word learning processes. A context switching mechanism is used to select a relevant set of attributes for learning a word depending on the category which it belongs to. On the other hand, during acquiring definitions for words, concept hierarchy is developed. Thirdly, we pursue resemblance to human brain in functional level.We developed an experimental language acquisition system called WISDOM (Word Induction System for Deriving Object Model) and conducted virtual experiments or simulations on acquisition of words in two different categories. The experiments shows feasibility of our approach

Structure-mapping processes enable infants' learning across domains including language

Humans have an astounding ability to acquire new information. Like many other animals, we can learn by association and by perceptual generalization. However, unlike most other species, we also acquire new information by means of relational generalization and transfer. In this chapter, we explore the origins of a uniquely developed human capacity-our ability to learn relational abstractions through analogical comparison. We focus on whether and how infants can use analogical comparison to derive relational abstractions from examples. We frame our work in terms of structure-mapping theory, which has been fruitfully applied to analogical processing in children and adults. We find that young infants show two key signatures of structure mapping: first, relational abstraction is fostered by comparing alignable examples, and second, relational abstraction is hampered by the presence of highly salient objects. The studies we review make it clear that structure-mapping processes are evident in the first months of life, prior to much influence of language and culture. This finding suggests that infants are born with analogical processing mechanisms that allow them to learn relations through comparing examples