ale oplati sa to precitat cele

C. GMOs in detail
The systemic global impacts of GMOs arise from a
combination of (1) engineered genetic modifications, (2)
monoculture—the use of single crops over large areas. Global
monoculture itself is of concern for potential global harm, but
the evolutionary context of traditional crops provides important
assurances (see Figure 8). Invasive species are frequently a
problem but one might at least argue that the long term evolu-
tionary testing of harmful impacts of organisms on local eco-
logical systems mitigates if not eliminates the largest potential
risks. Monoculture in combination with genetic engineering
dramatically increases the risks being taken. Instead of a long
history of evolutionary selection, these modifications rely not
just on naive engineering strategies that do not appropriately
consider risk in complex environments, but also explicitly
reductionist approaches that ignore unintended consequences
and employ very limited empirical testing.
Ironically, at a time when engineering is adopting evolu-
tionary approaches due to the failure of top-down strategies,
biologists and agronomists are adopting top-down engineering
strategies and taking global systemic risks in introducing
organisms into the wild.
One argument in favor of GMOs is that they are no more
"unnatural" than the selective farming our ancestors have been
doing for generations. In fact, the ideas developed in this
paper show that this is not the case. Selective breeding over
human history is a process in which change still happens in a
bottom-up way, and can be expected to result in a thin-tailed
distribution. If there is a mistake, some harmful variation,
it will not spread throughout the whole system but end up
dying out due to local experience over time. Human experience
over generations has chosen the biological organisms that are
relatively safe for consumption. There are many that are not,
including parts of and varieties of the crops we do cultivate
[12]. Introducing rapid changes in organisms is inconsistent
with this process. There is a limited rate at which variations
can be introduced and selection will be effective [13].
There is no comparison between tinkering with the selec-
tive breeding of genetic components of organisms that have
previously undergone extensive histories of selection and the
top-down engineering of taking a gene from a fish and putting
it into a tomato. Saying that such a product is natural misses
the process of natural selection by which things become
“natural." While there are claims that all organisms include
transgenic materials, those genetic transfers that are currently
present were subject to selection over long times and survived.
The success rate is tiny. Unlike GMOs, in nature there is
no immediate replication of mutated organisms to become
a large fraction of the organisms of a species. Indeed, any
one genetic variation is unlikely to become part of the long
term genetic pool of the population. Instead, just like any
other genetic variation or mutation, transgenic transfers are
subject to competition and selection over many generations
before becoming a significant part of the population. A new
genetic transfer engineered today is not the same as one that
has survived this process of selection.
An example of the effect of transfer of biologically evolved
systems to a different context is that of zoonotic diseases.
Even though pathogens consume their hosts, they evolve to
be less harmful than they would otherwise be. Pathogens that
cause highly lethal diseases are selected against because their
hosts die before they are able to transmit to others. This is
the underlying reason for the greater dangers associated with
zoonotic diseases—caused by pathogens that shift from the
host that they evolved in to human beings, including HIV,
Avian and Swine flu that transferred from monkeys (through
chimpanzees), birds and hogs, respectively.
More generally, engineered modifications to ecological sys-
tems (through GMOs) are categorically and statistically dif-
ferent from bottom up ones. Bottom-up modifications do not
remove the crops from their long term evolutionary context,
enabling the push and pull of the ecosystem to locally extin-
guish harmful mutations. Top-down modifications that bypass
this evolutionary pathway unintentionally manipulate large sets
of interdependent factors at the same time, with dramatic risks
of unintended consequences. They thus result in fat-tailed
distributions and place a huge risk on the food system as a
whole.
For the impact of GMOs on health, the evaluation of
whether the genetic engineering of a particular chemical
(protein) into a plant is OK by the FDA is based upon consid-
ering limited existing knowledge of risks associated with that
protein. The number of ways such an evaluation can be in error
is large. The genetic modifications are biologically significant
as the purpose is to strongly impact the chemical functions of
the plant, modifying its resistance to other chemicals such as
herbicides or pesticides, or affecting its own lethality to other
organisms—i.e. its antibiotic qualities. The limited existing
knowledge generally does not include long term testing of the
exposure of people to the added chemical, even in isolation.
The evaluation is independent of the ways the protein affects
the biochemistry of the plant, including interactions among
the various metabolic pathways and regulatory systems—
and the impact of the resulting changes in biochemistry on
health of consumers. The evaluation is independent of its
farm-ecosystem combination (i.e. pesticide resistant crops are
subject to increased use of pesticides, which are subsequently
present in the plant in larger concentrations and cannot be
washed away). Rather than recognizing the limitations of
current understanding, poorly grounded perspectives about the
potential damage with unjustified assumptions are being made.
Limited empirical validation of both essential aspects of the
conceptual framework as well as specific conclusions are being
used because testing is recognized to be difficult.
We should exert the precautionary principle here – our non-
naive version – because we do not want to discover errors
after considerable and irreversible environmental and health
damage.