Nathanael Johnson makes one brilliant point here against the Taleb's The Precautionary Principle paper.
After you get past that categorical issue, we might still say: OK, even if all biology contains the potential for ruin, we should still compare and contrast and try to figure out which has more risk of causing systemic collapse. Absolutely. But now we are in a different realm: Instead of asking an elegantly simple categorical question, we are asking a down-and-dirty relative-risk question. It has shifted from: Avoid at all costs to let’s figure out if X is significantly riskier than Y.
Taleb and company wade into this a bit. They point out that genetically engineered seed is often globally distributed — it goes big and wide far faster than a species evolving in the wilderness would. I agree that the more we depend on just a few crops, the greater the potential for collapse (causing famine, not extinction). But this is really an argument for diversity and against bigness. We should take those problems on directly, rather than trying to get at them sideways through GMOs. Genetic engineering isn’t the cause of homogeneity or large-scale production. If we did away with GMOs, we’d still have top-down engineered seeds distributed across the globe each year. Modern production agriculture — both conventional and organic — is just a long, long way away from farmers moving in a slow, co-evolutionary relationship with their crops.
After you get past that categorical issue, we might still say: OK, even if all biology contains the potential for ruin, we should still compare and contrast and try to figure out which has more risk of causing systemic collapse. Absolutely. But now we are in a different realm: Instead of asking an elegantly simple categorical question, we are asking a down-and-dirty relative-risk question. It has shifted from: Avoid at all costs to let’s figure out if X is significantly riskier than Y.
Taleb and company wade into this a bit. They point out that genetically engineered seed is often globally distributed — it goes big and wide far faster than a species evolving in the wilderness would. I agree that the more we depend on just a few crops, the greater the potential for collapse (causing famine, not extinction). But this is really an argument for diversity and against bigness. We should take those problems on directly, rather than trying to get at them sideways through GMOs. Genetic engineering isn’t the cause of homogeneity or large-scale production. If we did away with GMOs, we’d still have top-down engineered seeds distributed across the globe each year. Modern production agriculture — both conventional and organic — is just a long, long way away from farmers moving in a slow, co-evolutionary relationship with their crops.
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