General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Rather than be naive enough to imagine this GMO article would change many minds... [View all]Silent3
(15,569 posts)...and showing you took the trouble to read the article. In simply doing that I think you did better than many people would, who either wouldn't bother reading the article at all, or who would just skim for keywords and phrases that set them off and trigger canned responses.
Beyond that, however, I think you took the purpose of the article to be something that it wasn't, a flat-out denial that there could possibly be anything to worry about at all. Then, having misconstrued the purpose of the article, you claim that the article "fails" wherever it concedes any point of concern about GMOs, or call it "hand waving".
Also, what you're calling "straw men" I'd simply describe as (1) In many cases, a fair portrayal of the way many people's fearful responses make them act -- e.g. as if eating any GMO food is the moral equivalent to ingesting poison, not merely taking a small risk that some undiscovered danger lurks within, and (2) simply verbal shorthand that's perfectly reasonable when you're not taking these perhaps oversimplified versions of claims and attributing them as exact positions voiced by specific people.
1) One could argue semantics over how different from "normal" something has to be before it becomes "radical", but why does crossing species lines when manipulating genes, whether you call that "radical" or not, seem so scary that, unlike traditional crossbreeding, the product of such genetic manipulation is highly suspect, that it must be deemed dangerous until proven safe under such an exceptionally high burden of proof that even twenty years of use just isn't good enough to make one feel a little more secure? While at the same time a new traditional crossbreed is automatically considered safe with no testing at all?
BTW, it's been discovered that some cross-species exchange of genetics, mediated by viruses and bacteria, does happen in the wild as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer
2) Unless you're making the unrealistic and unattainable goal of absolutely certainty of safety your standard -- a standard that even traditional crossbreeding might not meet if anyone bothered to subject crossbreeds to intense scrutiny -- I'd say that 20 years is a pretty decent span of time to earn a shift from "questionable until proven otherwise" to "safe until proven otherwise".
3) The business practices of Monsanto and the like are one of my biggest gripes about GMO -- but that's not a GMO-specific problem, it's a corporate takeover of government problem. At any rate, unless you're considering the author's necessary goal to be total negation of concern about the given point, rather than adding moderation or alternate perspective, I don't see what's wrong with what was written on this point.
I've run out of time to go further point by point, but hopefully what I've written so far gives you an idea of where I personally stand (even though where I personally stand wasn't really the point of the OP): I'm all for continued case-by-case study of various issues related to GMO, but the idea doesn't fill me with "ERMERGERD!!! FRANKENFOOD!1!!!" fear, that it's kind of silly to treat GMO as if it's all one phenomena representing one unified set of risks, and that I think that the driving fear of GMOs is reflexive fear of the unknown and the "unnatural", not data-driven safety concerns (whatever you may think about the amount and quality of negative data on the issue).