A recent diary implied in defense of Neil DeGrasse Tyson's comments about the "consensus" among scientists that GMOs as currently defined are perfectly safe that all of us that see GMOs as a major threat to health and the environment as conspiracy theorist crackpots.
I say currently defined since the argument took the tack that all that we currently know of "organic" food is the result of hybridization.
Although this is true in a historical sense the current connotation of that term is in reference to something altogether different than the limited selective cross breeding that's been done for ages. Mixing individuals within a species or generally crossbreeding in nature that we as humans take advantage of is where we actually fit in nature.
When we mix things that would never mix on their own in nature, that's another story.
No matter how much we think we aren't governed by nature anymore, we still are.
I know that many think we have conquered Nature but the environmental degradation that has occurred so far and is not being addressed in any adequate way while I write this can leave this only home of ours one more dead rock in a cold, inhospitable universe. The human race is the biggest threat to it remaining a viable habitat for life forms as we currently know them.
Nature doesn't care if we annihilate ourselves. Nature is what we call the system of principles that can be discovered by science via thoughts, theories and experimentation to produce an accurate view of "reality".
Many times in our history we've had scientific consensus that was just plain wrong. Mostly, because our vision was not far sighted enough to see the potential danger of what we considered "safe". Madame Currie was a great scientist that died of radiation poisoning because her discovery looked harmless enough to play with since she couldn't even see it.
The current problem with GMOs has no relationship to our manipulation of plant and animal genomes that helped us accelerate what possibly could have occurred in nature without our interference.
The major behavior I've observed about nature is that it takes its time in producing major changes to what has been working for a species and that those changes are confined to clear dividing lines at the species level.
Like it or not, our bodies are the result of a long lineage of adaptations over time. It's fairly obvious to me that the way we've manipulated the elements of our diet over the past 100 years has not produced the wisest way to be healthy but now GMOs offer a risk that's off the charts; not only to us but to all the life forms here.
What makes any logical person think that something impossible to occur in nature, like mixing genes from totally different species, could be usable much less safe in organisms that are introduced to them within one generation? Or, for that matter, ever.
This leads inevitably to the current political, cultural, fundamental state of affairs we Americans find ourselves in. When capitalism is the system, capital rules. When corporations like Monsanto are legally considered a person while it doesn't drink water, doesn't breathe air and it doesn't eat food at all like you or me but has all the power that capital affords it, what makes anyone think the consensus of scientists isn't influenced to the point of ignoring all that they know about Nature otherwise?
Science has been wrong many times in its initial consensuses. I believe short sightedness is epidemic in this country now and it isn't long when all the short term fixes catch up in that paradigm.
Even in my personal life I've seen times when I thought the downside of a proposition was acceptable until Murphy's Law showed me all the elements that could conspire to go wrong to make me regret my snap judgement.
I'm afraid it's probably too late to stuff the GMO genie back in the bottle with the cross pollination that has already happened but, like climate change, we may have jump started the apocalypse already and it's all a moot point.