It’s amazing to me how the public can get so worked up about
nonsensical issues they don’t even understand. We seem to have issue fads just
like we have diet fads.
One of the current hot issues is about genetically-modified
foods. Hello? Nature has been making genetically
modified foods for about 4 billion years, and still does so all around the
world every day in every species – that’s
what evolution is all about (except for those whose religious ideology requires
them, against all evidence, to believe otherwise). The difference is that nature does it randomly,
with sometimes terrible results (think flu or ebola or HIV epidemics), while humans
do it carefully in an attempt to do something useful, like increase the vitamin
or protein content of a food.
When microwave ovens first came out there was a big fuss
about how dangerous the radiation was, mostly by people who didn’t know the
difference between ionizing radiation (nuclear weapons) and non-ionizing
radiation (light bulbs, fireplaces, microwave ovens). This GM issue is about as
silly as that one was.
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