The best response I've read to Lynas's comments on GM foods

Brad Littlejohn, writing at Mere O:

Once we recognize that genetic modification is simply a technologically-accelerated way of doing things that already happen naturally (in cross-pollination and random mutation), or that have already happened through human ingenuity (conventional breeding methods), the prima facietheological objection to it should fall to the ground.  There is bad intervention in nature, that degrades creation, or that shamelessly exploits it for human benefit without any regard for its intrinsic value, and there is good intervention, that meets human needs in a sustainable way and enriches creation as a whole at the same time (an example from Lynas’s address: a potato whose genome has been modified to resist fungal blights), and we need to be careful to try and tell the difference. But we must not simply reject something on the basis that it is “intervention” and thereby “unnatural.”

But even if that prima facie objection falls to the ground, we may still have the suspicion that there is always a cost/benefit tradeoff, and that the blight-resistant potato cannot come without a cost to human health.  Surely there may be undesirable consequences?  Indeed, surely there may be, but we cannot automatically assume there will be.  Lynas confidently declares, “We no longer need to discuss whether or not it is safe – over a decade and a half with three trillion GM meals eaten there has never been a single substantiated case of harm. You are more likely to get hit by an asteroid than to get hurt by GM food.”  Even if we want to quibble with his level of certainty, or suggest that a decade and a half might not be long enough for all ill effects to be seen, nonetheless, responsible science (upon which we must be willing to depend on such questions) provides no basis for attributing intrinsic health-risks to GM crops.  (Of course, Lynas does oversimplify here, since to date, most genetic modifications have been to make crops pesticide-resistant, so that they may be sprayed more liberally than ever before; as there is good reason to believe that many pesticides constitute substantial health risks, we may have good cause for preferring “organic” to GM.)

So is there anything that may still be said in warning against GM technology, any shred of my pontification that still stands?  Well yes, I think.  I mentioned above Lynas’s inattention to possible long-term consequences.  By that, I did not primarily mean practical concerns, such as that GM crops may before long crowd out all alternatives, with resulting loss to biodiversity, although such discussions are worth having.  Rather, I want to close by highlighting again the more “spiritual” concern articulated above, that by  embracing wholesale the technological manipulation of nature, we might come to imagine that we are without limits, that we are as gods.  (That this is no idle concern should be clear from the title of Lynas’s most recent book, The God Species.)

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