Devon Peña responds to Neil Degrasse Tyson's defense of GMO's

Is Tyson the Red Queen of GMO myth-making?

Big Bang About Chilling-Out?

ASTROPHYSICIST TYSON WAXES POETIC ABOUT GMOS

Devon G. Peña | Seattle, WA | August 1, 2014

In an interview posted on YouTube on July 24, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, the charming and brilliant host of the popular TV documentary series, Cosmos, defended the  use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) for food crops. Tyson emphasized that opponents needed to “chill out” and characterized opponents as unwitting victims or manipulative purveyors of the “fear factor”.

Responding to a question from a French journalist, the usually humorous interlocutor seemed somewhat stumped at first and then responded by rifting away with an explanation of how humans have been genetically modifying plants for more than ten thousand years; ever since people first domesticated wild plants and animals in the invention of agriculture. Fair enough.

Are conventional (Mendellian) breeding techniques and the beautifully varied and highly localized forms of cultural selection really the same in nature as a technology derived from lab-based gene-splicing, qua recombinant DNA (rDNA), of genetic materials engineered together from plant, animal, bacterial, and viral sources? Hmmm. Maybe astrophysicists don’t understand that this sort of combination across the boundaries not just of species but phyla does not occur in conventional breeding, so any presumed similarities end there.

TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE:
http://ejfood.blogspot.com/2014/08/geo-watch-modify-qualify-politics-in.html