[ImaCake]

I am not convinced this is actually true. GMOs in practice tend to be the introduction of a foreign gene into an organism. Breeding is different; you shuffle ~1 million small effect size variants around and see if you can get a combination that has a bigger effect size. This sounds inefficient, but done right it can have spectacular effects (i.e the green revolution).

I also don’t think we have pushed the limits of breeding yet. It is only in the last decade that genotyping tech has become cheap enough to employ it for a breeding program. Combine that big data analysis with breeding and I bet you can produce some spectacular results within 1 or 2 generations.

I think the massive advantages of shuffling a million variants 1000 times is why GMOs are transgenics and not modifications of the existing genome. Traditional breeding is just so much better at this.