Evolving notes, images and sounds by Luis Apiolaza

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The Precautionary Principle/Critique of GMOs

Nassim Nicolas Taleb and colleagues present an (almost?) tautological view of the effect of GMO (PDF): the large areas of establishment, human consumption and some unspecified risk mechanism (which does not seem to affect non-GMO crops, see next paragraph) may cause ruin to humanity, because, hey, they say so. I could come up with a similar scenario in which we should stop working on any new computing development, because there is a non-zero probability in which we may end-up with non-bottom-up tinkering causing the rise of the machines (a Black Swan event) that has ruinous consequences for humanity (with apologies to the Terminator). For some reason that escapes me, I do not find it compelling.

In making their case Taleb and colleagues also display a very naive view of non-GMO agriculture. Selective-breeding accelerated tremendously since the formalization of quantitative (statistical) genetics theory around the 1930s. Moreover, since the green revolution, the speed of creation of new cultivars, their geographical spread and the reduction of the number of genotypes commercially planted has accelerated. This all happened before the introduction of GMO as part of agricultural breeding programs. Using Taleb et al.’s terminology, crop breeding mostly abandoned ‘bottom-up modifications’ more than half a century ago. Therefore, the comparison between GMO and non-GMO crops is not one of ‘between tinkering with the selective breeding of genetic components of organisms that have previously undergone extensive histories of selection and the top-down engineering of taking a gene from a fish and putting it into a tomato’ but between high-speed, fast-deployment breeding programs and the same program with a few extra plant genes (sorry, no fish for you), sometimes even from organisms that could conventionally breed with each other (cisgenesis).
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