More, actually. I’m not sure what they go through before selling GMO food for human consumption, but I’m pretty certain peanuts wouldn’t have passed the test.
The peanut is an interesting example. I think projects are underway to produce modified varieties that lack the allergens which people tend to react to.
The assumption that we can better determine toxicity with our current understanding of human biology than thousands of years of natural selection seems questionable, but peanuts are certainly a good lower bound on selection’s ability.
I also don’t have much confidence that the parties responsible for safety testing are particularly reliable, but that’s a loose belief.
Find me one plant that has been genetically modified enough to make it as different from its original version as corn is from maize.
In addition, genetic modification only changes specific genes. Selective breeding ends up with a lot of other changes. As such, selective breeding is more dangerous for a given modification.
That’s technically true, but in practice the results of selective breeding have undergone “staged deployment”—populations/farmers with harmful variants would have been selected against. Modern GMO can reach a global population much more quickly, so harmful variants have the potential to cause more widespread harm.
Corn has been bred to grow six feet tall, among other things. What’s a little GMO in comparison?
Less selected for human non-toxicity?
More, actually. I’m not sure what they go through before selling GMO food for human consumption, but I’m pretty certain peanuts wouldn’t have passed the test.
The peanut is an interesting example. I think projects are underway to produce modified varieties that lack the allergens which people tend to react to.
The assumption that we can better determine toxicity with our current understanding of human biology than thousands of years of natural selection seems questionable, but peanuts are certainly a good lower bound on selection’s ability.
I also don’t have much confidence that the parties responsible for safety testing are particularly reliable, but that’s a loose belief.
Natural selection wasn’t attempting to make it harmless to humans. Especially in plants that didn’t evolve nearby humans.
A few generations, or even a few hundred generations, of selective breeding is not comparable to what an intelligent designer can produce.
Find me one plant that has been genetically modified enough to make it as different from its original version as corn is from maize.
In addition, genetic modification only changes specific genes. Selective breeding ends up with a lot of other changes. As such, selective breeding is more dangerous for a given modification.
That’s technically true, but in practice the results of selective breeding have undergone “staged deployment”—populations/farmers with harmful variants would have been selected against. Modern GMO can reach a global population much more quickly, so harmful variants have the potential to cause more widespread harm.