Source: Taleb NN, R Read, R Douady, J Norman, Y Bar-Yam. 2014. The Precautionary Principle (with Application to the Genetic Modification of Organisms). EXTREME RISK INITIATIVE —NYU SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING WORKING PAPER SERIES
The premise is that genes from a GMO crop will somehow move into other crops and make them so desirable that it will get planted as a monoculture around the world. Then, a new disease will come, wipe out the crop, which at this point has become the global food supply, and humanity will starve to death. In the process, it totally ignores biological realities and constraints.
This is another paper that exemplifies what happens when mathematicians with no background in biology use a bunch of formulas with little if any relevance to biology, and then fail to validate their results, thus proving the old adage that when it comes to computers, garbage in gives garbage out.
The main reasons why this paper fails:
- Theoretically, a non-GM plant could do the same thing. There is no reason why a GM plant would be more likely to have this behavior. In both cases, the odds of any plant being able to do this are almost zero.
- There is no known way by which the necessary level of gene movement needed to achieve this scenario could be achieved.
- Then there is the premise that it is possible to develop a crop variety adapted to grow everywhere. Such as crop variety has never existed; for that matter, there is not a single plant species that grows everywhere. Instead, it is necessary to tailor each variety to individual locations, considering each location’s unique combinations of temperature, daylength, and soil type among many parameters. What is clear to date is that it takes a lot more than one or even a few genes to adapt a crop variety to any given region. While the exact number is not known, it is far greater than any type of gene movement documented to date.
- If creating such a plant was possible, it should likewise be possible with conventional modification. The qualitative difference between human-made vs natural gene transfer is never made clear; in fact, continued insights into the plant genome make it apparent that human-made changes simply mirror on a small scale what nature does on a large scale.
- The same goes for the disease-causing pathogens that would destroy the crop– strains of a plant pathogen known to grow everywhere on earth are rare, if they exist at all. Most are confined to specific environmental conditions.
- The times when disease epidemics result in widespread crop failure disappeared decades ago. Today, there are crop protection agents that can be used if need be, and to maintain viable crop production until resistant varieties can be developed and deployed.
Additional expert assessments:
- Nassim Taleb’s False Dichotomy of Top-Down and Bottom-Up Approaches to Farming With Respect to GMOs
- The nonsensical GMO pseudo-category and a precautionary rabbit hole (behind a paywall)
- Inexact science
- Physics arXiv
- Genetic Literacy Project
- Debunking Denialism
- Black Swans, Frankenfoods and Disaster Fairy Tales
- The Motley Fool
- The National Review