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by KingMob
3426 days ago
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The best argument against GMOs are Black Swans, which, due to their rarity, don't appear often/soon enough to dissuade people in advance. Probably 99.99999% of GMOs are fine, but that one in a million will have disastrous consequences for an ecosystem. It could also be that since our knowledge of human biology is still woefully incomplete, we optimize for the wrong things, leading to lower overall health (we've probably already done this without GMOs just by selecting for size/sturdiness over nutrients.) Multiply the complexity of individual organisms with entire ecosystems, and the reality is we just can't predict the likelihood of an adverse outcome at all. This would be fine if we had a backup Earth. I'm all in favor of biotech on Mars, isolated moon labs, and interstellar colonies, if we had any. But the current irreplaceable nature of Earth means we have to be extra cautious with it. Our usual standards are insufficient, and thinking otherwise is hubris. |
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This really doesn't make any biological sense and kind of goes against all of our understanding of evolution and ecology. Can you describe this theoretical situation in any kind of detail? I find it completely incoherent and unimaginable.
GMOs have a huge advantage over traditional methods of crop development because they can be engineered to be safer: they can be designed to not survive off of human farms, and not reproduce with wild plants, or have other safety measures.
The idea that we can create a single organism that could cause an ecological catastrophe (bigger than any of the ecological harm caused by simply moving around invasive natural species) is science fiction; the idea that we could do so accidentally while trying to create food to eat is a complete delusion. We've already created outlandish, strange, non-natural super plants: every single vegetable that you and I eat. We did so with no regard to safety, nor understanding of what we were doing. GMOs only improve enormously on this process.
Again, the utter failure of this argument is apparent in how it can be applied to any technology: we shouldn't make software because that 1 in a million program could destroy the power grid / Internet / cause nuclear war, we shouldn't make medicine because that 1 in a million vaccine will cause people to drop dead en masse 10 years down the road, etc. If those seem preposterous to you, I assure you that to plant scientists, geneticists, and EcoEvo folks, your worry seems equally preposterous.