Let me do my best to convey some potential concerns. To say that they’re all GMO so what’s the problem is sort of either an ignorant or disingenuous overloading of the term. Sexual reproduction in a way sort of fits with that category (I mean it’s just selective breeding crowdsourced). But if we restrict GMO to only mutations, yeah there are actually legitimate issues.
Mutations occur naturally, and overtime nature has evolved methods to withstand this. Like the one thing that all organisms share, DNA-wise, is the code to faithfully copy DNA. You literally never see mutations in this code because nothing survives. Beyond that we do see random mutations all the times, but they’re usually harmful or at best don’t do much. Then occasionally there are beneficial mutations but they’re very rare and they happen over long periods of time. Atomic gardening is using this exact process albeit speeding it up bu increasing the speed that mutations occur.
On the other hand, genetic engineering is selective in a way that there is no natural precedent for. We literally have no idea if it’s not harmful or not. I’m not trying to say this to sound alarmist I just mean philosophically speaking you can’t prove that.
I’ll add as an aside that I don’t think the condescension that you see all the time regarding GMO is a food faith argument. There are plenty of scientific reasons to give pause to testing this stuff out in production.
As to concrete, practical reasons why we should give pause before engineering life with such wild abandon, I’d say recombinant DNA is one, but also so is the danger of just good ok’ mono-crops.
Now let me explain that I’m not personally and categorically anti-GMO. I think it’s wonderful technology that we can do so much with. I just think it’s dumb for people who don’t have degrees in genetics to go on the internet and say that people who have any concerns are “amusing” or stupid or whatever because science. The truth is it all depends abd there’s absolutely zero reason to think the GMO can’t go horribly wrong as some kind of rule.
I’m on my phone so some of this may read weird but I hope my point comes across as I meant it. Basically science is a philosophical branch rooted in skepticism.
One last thing I’ll say is there’s a bit of selection bias happening. You never hear from scientist who raise legitimate concerns because industry has a huge influence in people’s ability to do research and this their careers.
So in summary, mutations happen all the time in nature. Some “good” some “bad”. There are dangers but there’s been billions or years of evolution to buffer against it. Targeted genetic engineering like CRISPR is only the same un that there’s mutations but that’s where the similarities end. Like natural mutations they can be good or bad. There’s nothing unscientific or amusing about giving a second thought if maybe there are additional differences yet to be seen downstream. To say otherwise is categorically unscientific. We should absolutely proceed with caution and there are absolutely problems like the ones I listed. I mean, many of the people here are programmers. How many of us trust any code?
It’s a spirit of temperance and skepticism that im putting fourth, and I actually think the burden of proof should lie on a case by case basis.
Does that make sense?