Dangerville

Phase transitions, fractals, feedback loops and blow back, notions all too familiar when discussing chaos and non-linear systems, is now being applied to the potentially lethal impact of GMOs in a provactive Nicholas Taleb paper titled The Precautionary Principle. BRT talked about this regarding Monsanto in a blurb titled Nature finds a way, always.

Top-down modifications to the system (through GMOs) are categorically and statistically different from bottom up ones (regular farming, progressive tinkering with crops, etc.) There is no comparison between the tinkering of selective breeding and the top-down engineering of arbitrarily taking a gene from an organism and putting it into another. Saying that such a product is natural misses the statistical process by which things become ”natural”. [i.e. evolving over thousands of years in a natural ecosystem, or at least breeding over several generations.]

What people miss is that the modification of crops impacts everyone and exports the error from the local to the global. I do not wish to pay—or have my descendants pay—for errors by executives of Monsanto. We should exert the precautionary principle there—our non-naive version—simply because we would only discover errors after considerable and irreversible environmental damage.

Needless to say, his logic is sound as reality works from the bottom up, not top down, something the Monsanto's of the world, along with the uninformed, will never understand.

Addendum: Click Whether Prometheus to read BRT's take on the ultimate in GMO tinkering via Craig Venter's top down approach to modifying life at the ultimate level in order to produce super bugs, something most disquieting to say the least from this writer's perspective.