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Comment by causality0 | Hacker News Reader

For some reason, when you take a process that has traditionally been done with a baseball bat and start doing it with a knife, suddenly everyone comes out of the woodwork to talk about how your knife is too dull and it should either be done with a scalpel or not at all.

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Just to tap the brakes for anyone wanting to take your analogy too far: a lot of objections about GMO in general are about the accelerated rate at which the changes can be made, relative to traditional methods (such as breeding). The worry is that we might be introducing altered genomes at a rate faster than we can observe and understand the downstream impacts.

So in those arguments (which are the majority, in GMO debates I've encountered), it's not about the knife being too dull, but being too sharp.

> the accelerated rate at which the changes can be made, relative to traditional methods

Citation needed there. I know the claim is common, but GMO is inserting one known mutation. How many mutations are there from parent to children is not something I can find a citation for, but since most mutations do nothing (or kill the child) there must be a lot of mutations involved in traditional breeding not one which means that GMO is much decelerated vs traditional breeding.

I suppose there's a distinction to be made between quantity and quality of changes, too. Certainly regular sex mixes things up a lot every time, but only within the bounds of the established gene pool (roughly).

Compare this to, say, the famous example of adding firefly genes to tobacco plants, to make them bioluminescent. That's a small change in terms of number of genes, but very "sudden" in terms of how far it is away from the norm — it would have taken a very long time for that to have happened as a result of natural (or even breeding-style) permutations of existing genes. So it's a "big" change in that sense, even if "small" in the other.

As far as citations go, I think the Wikipedia page on GMO foods is decent? [1]

For instance, the "Gene flow" section describes the risk of various unexpected consequences of GMO crops affecting their surroundings: "There are concerns that the spread of genes from modified organisms to unmodified relatives could produce species of weeds resistant to herbicides[303] that could contaminate nearby non-genetically modified crops, or could disrupt the ecosystem,[304][305] "

Of course in general, GMO crops are seen as safe (with lots of of "more long term research is needed" caveats), but the page has various links to concerns and ongoing research along the lines we're been discussing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_food_cont...

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