Comment by consideranon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by consideranon | Hacker News Reader

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While I agree that GMO crops are no more dangerous from a human health perspective, there is a very real concern that the rapid introduction of entirely new varieties of crop, that under cultivation would take hundreds or thousands of years to develop and introduce, can have negative and unforeseen ecological effects.

This more reasonable side of the anti-GMO argument tends to get drowned out and dismissed when people see the pseudoscience 'natural' health arguments brought out front and center. It's pretty evident that arguments for restraint for reasons of long-term sustainability take a lot of effort to get any traction, especially when fighting profitability.

All this to say, the GMO debate, like everything in life, is not as simple as most people tend believe. It is something that should be proceeded with caution, but certainly continued. This I think is where I think the almost religious anti-GMO fervor really causes harm, in the same way anti embryonic stem cell research causes harm.

Move fast and break things is a great slogan when the systems you're moving are relatively simple and the consequences of breaking them are relatively minor. Global ecology is an extraordinarily complex system that we don't fully understand, and breaking it can cause real and life threatening damage to the people of the world. Not to mention the fact that reverting negative changes operates on the same time scale as the original negative change. If it happens that GMO breaks shit, you can't just submit a patch and have things working again in a couple hours.

> there is a very real concern

Also e.g. anti-vaccine people have very real concerns. They just are not scientifically founded.

Here is a summary report on 10 years, 200 million euros of research in Europe:

"The main conclusion to be drawn from the efforts of more than 130 research projects, covering a period of more than 25 years of research, and involving more than 500 independent research groups, is that biotechnology, and in particular GMOs, are not per se more risky than e.g. conventional plant breeding technologies."

ref.: A decade of EU-funded GMO research (2001 - 2010) http://ec.europa.eu/research/biosociety/pdf/a_decade_of_eu-f...

Can you give any scientific references to support your "very real" concern?

> Also e.g. anti-vaccine people have very real concerns. They just are not scientifically founded.

They also have some very real concerns. It makes it all very complex to weed out who what to listen for and from who. The answer is probably that you should listen to arguments, not persons, and that you should begin with the arguments you find strongest.

(See for example Ben Goldacre's Bad Pharma about medicine research.)

When I see good people getting energized over something like GMO, I just feel kind of disappointed that that energy isn't going to a cause worth supporting. The fear of eating tainted food seems to be a sort of primal fear or archetype and I think the GMO issue taps directly into this. True, the concerns around GMO mostly involve things like remote ecological ramifications, not literal poisoning; but the fact that GMO is in the food supply (or could be) seems to raise the emotional temperature 100x. At any given time, there are people suffering because they can't afford to eat any food -- that concerns me more than the risks from GMO.

GMO might lie in a kind of nexus of overlapping fears; there are definitely others in there, too.

In my more cynical moments I think there is some sort of Conservation of Worry law. Human society is designed by evolution to be worried about stuff. If you render irrelevant all the more traditional threats such as starving or getting eaten by a lion, people just focus the same amount of worry on ever-smaller threats.

From that point of view it seems like a real luxury that we can now afford to waste brain cycles on stuff like global warming or GMOs. We've gone from worrying about threats that are actually visible NOW - getting hit by a car, getting eaten by a bear - to threats that somebody intuits might conceivably start to harm somebody at some point in the distant future if current trends continue in some specific predicted direction.

It's the social equivalent of an auto-immune disorder.

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