>you either do something, or you don’t. There is simply no middle ground.

Only in the narrowest sense.

Another valid response is "you can't do this as-is, but if you make changes X, Y and Z then you can." Or "do more experiments with captive populations first." Or "do this in an area where it's less likely to cause unexpected side effects (eg an unpopulated island somewhere)" Or "use a different set of genes or tweaks"

It's pretty rare that the _only_ possible choices are to do this _one exact thing_, or do nothing at all.

This is all a huge leap from what I said, which is that given action A, you can only either do it or not do it. That does not mean doing nothing at all and not thinking of other options, and that is why framing the disagreement as nothing more than binary thinking is shallow and lazy and wrong. People may ultimately be divided between for and against, but people who are against one thing may be for some other solution to the problem.

You may think it’s narrow, but whenever you can decide between yes or no on an action all arguments considered, that could just mean that the action itself is clear and specific, as in this case.