I was raised to believe that genetically-modified foods are unhealthy to eat and bad for the environment, and given a variety of reasons for this, some of which I now recognize as blatantly false (e.g., human genetic code is isomorphic to fundamental physical law), and a few of which still seem sort of plausible.
Because of this history, I need to anchor my credence heavily downward from my sense of plausibility.
The major reasons I see to believe that GMOs are safe are:
I would probably think they were dangerous even if they were safe, due to my upbringing.
In general, whenever someone opposes a particular field of engineering on the grounds that it's unnatural and dangerous, they're usually wrong.
It's not quite obvious to me that introducing genetically-engineered organisms to a system is significantly more dangerous than introducing non-native naturally-evolved organisms.
The major reason I see to believe that GMOs are dangerous is:
I might believe they were safe even if they were dangerous, due to "yay science" (which was also part of my upbringing).
We are designing self-replicating things and using them without reliable containment, thereby effectively releasing them into the wild.
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.
I was raised to believe that genetically-modified foods are unhealthy to eat and bad for the environment, and given a variety of reasons for this, some of which I now recognize as blatantly false (e.g., human genetic code is isomorphic to fundamental physical law), and a few of which still seem sort of plausible.
Because of this history, I need to anchor my credence heavily downward from my sense of plausibility.
The major reasons I see to believe that GMOs are safe are:
The major reason I see to believe that GMOs are dangerous is:
So: green goo, yes or no?