Neil deGrasse Tyson recently argued that liberals should "chill out" about genetically modified foods. Humans have been altering crops through various breeding methods for many thousands of years, he said — and genetic engineering isn't fundamentally different:
“Traditional crop breeding” isn’t nearly as traditional as you think
Practically every food you buy in a store for consumption by humans is genetically modified food. There are no wild, seedless watermelons. There’s no wild cows. … We have systematically genetically modified all the foods, the vegetables and animals that we have eaten ever since we cultivated them. It’s called artificial selection.
Not everyone’s convinced, though. Over at Mother Jones, Kevin Drum called this the “lamest defense of GMO foods ever”*:
It’s true that we’ve been breeding new and better strains of plants and animals forever. But this isn’t a defense of GMO. On the contrary, it’s precisely the point that GMO critics make. We have about 10,000 years of evidence that traditional breeding methods are basically safe. That’s why anyone can do it and it remains virtually unregulated. We have no such guarantee with artificial methods of recombinant DNA.But Drum’s objection above isn’t quite right. “Traditional breeding methods” for crops have actually changed a lot over time — they haven’t just remained static for 10,000 years.
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