Selective breeding isn't genetic engineering though. GMO is used when genes from a species are inserted into another, not for strains that are produced through artificial selection of organisms with desirable traits.

A traditional method of breeding new plants is to expose them to mutagens and see what happens. The results of these experiments are in the food supply and not labeled as GMOs.

> Selective breeding isn't genetic engineering though.

Yes, selective breeding is far less controlled and predictable as to unintended changes; people think of it as safer because of the way it used to be done which operates over longer time scales, which, aside from not actually providing any kind of safety, neglects the fact that modern methods allow selective breeding to operate over much shorter time scales.

I've mentioned elsewhere in the thread that golden rice has yield problems, as do many GMO foods. That's partly because this kind of genetic modification isn't actually all that controlled; one of the side effects is that it disrupts a random selection of completely unrelated genes.

> I've mentioned elsewhere in the thread that golden rice has yield problems, as do many GMO foods.

So do many non-GMO engineered crops where the trait that is the focus of optimization isn't yield, since a “yield problem” is deteemined by comparison to mainstream crops which are engineered for yield traits.

> That's partly because this kind of genetic modification isn't actually all that controlled

That's even more true of selective breeding, whether by traditional or more rapid modern means, so that's not a problem with GMOs compared to any real alternative, it's a problem of all existing methods compared to a hypothetical state where we have both perfect modelling to predict phenotypical effects of genetic changes and perfect ability to make arbitrary, error-free edits to genetic code. And even then we are stuck with the fact that some traits at inherently in conflict.

Selective breeding performed slowly over longer time scales did at least give the breeders time to notice some kinds of severe problems. If you're breeding wheat and accidentally introduce a toxic mutation, you might notice the resulting pile of dead horses. There won't be a warning like this in every case, but it's not right to say that there's zero benefit to going slow.

That said, I don't really have an opinion on GMOs. I'm fine with you partaking first, though. :-)

Selective breeding doesn't create fundamentally new organisms like transgenic GMOs, however -- organisms for which there is no method to predict their interactions with our one and only environment (Earth, if that wasn't clear :p).

> Selective breeding doesn't create fundamentally new organisms like transgenic GMOs,

Yes, selective breeding (both artificial and natural selection) create fundamentally new organisms.

> GMOs are not necessarily any more fundamentally new than hybrids and mutated strains produced through other techniques.

"Not necessarily" but sometimes.

That is incorrect. GMOs are not necessarily any more fundamentally new than hybrids and mutated strains produced through other techniques.

What you are describing is transgenics, GMO just means that the genetics were modified using gene editing tools rather than breeding techniques the vast majority of GMO food products are not transgenic.

That's a distinction without a difference. What do the methods matter? It's the end result that counts.

That seems unlikely, given that we waste ~40% of all food produced (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_waste#Global_extent). I think distribution is a bigger issue than production methods.

And that discounts any Black Swans lying in wait from transgenic organisms; we may still yet have a disaster, since GMOs don't yet have same track record as pre-industrial agriculture. OTOH, industrial agriculture has been pretty awful, so maybe GMOs are a step up from THAT...

> given that we waste ~40% of all food produced

That's a non-sequitur, and you're adding the loss stats in with waste.

> And that discounts any Black Swans lying in wait from transgenic organisms; we may still yet have a disaster...

Once it's a black swan, it's already discounted, the term itself means the thing is unlikely.

I think the subject deserves more study, but we have people dying of hunger right now, and that's plainly more compelling than "something really bad might happen, we have no idea what, why or how likely it is."

I think you should read Taleb's followup Antifragile sometime. The point is not that black swans are unlikely, but that they are catastrophic, and we can't even quantify how unlikely they are, so we have to find ways to prepare for them without basing it on probability estimates.

That "something really bad" might be localized ecological collapse, which I find pretty compelling, too.

Exactly. Possibly getting cancer when you are 70-80 would be a minor price to pay to not be guaranteed to starve to death when you are 5.

This is especially true if they only need a few years of GMOs to break bad cycles with conventional agriculture (such as eating next years seeds because they have no food now).

A black swan would be less on the scale of "higher long-term risk of cancer", and more like "unintended side effect wiped out pollinators and now the local agriculture is imperiled".

That is not "plainly more compelling." There is no undo button for GMOs -- once they are out in the wild there's no eradicating them.

For well over half a century we have understood that most famines are a result of entitlement failures, not lack of food availability.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theories_of_famines#Failure_of...

> given that we waste ~40% of all food produced

If you can come up with a technology or logistical process to make a significant change to that without causing famine, you've got a company with billions in revenue.

While I understand your logic, I don't think you can make this claim universally. Our food distribution systems are set up to be efficient, but they are also set up to be beneficial for a very small number of players.

For example there are very few distributors for grain: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/the-big-five...

The systems we have in place are meant to protect that near monopoly as much as they are to distribute food. On top of that, countries give loans to poor countries in exchange for 2 promises: 1) that they use the money to buy grain from the country lending the money 2) they don't grow grain themselves. In that way, we actively undermine world agriculture.

If your massive improvement disrupts these players, I think you're going to be in for a very rough time of it. Things like GMO further solidify the near monopolies, by restricting where you can buy seed, etc. This is one of the reasons you see a big political push for them.

Hmmm... I'd be interested to know more about this. Its going to be fairly hard to fight this I suppose. The US does have a powerful military interest* to be doing this, but I've not read about them actually doing so.

* To understand why, watch the movie Grave of the Fireflies. Or watch Indy Neidel on youtube talk about the "turnip winter"