Given your attitude I expect you wouldn't be really happy getting to know how selective breeding works(it's waay more random - to the point where you get mainly unwanted side effects).
Where does the assumption that I don't know how selective breeding works comes? Because if someone has concerns such as mine they must obviously be some anti-scientific luddite?
For one, selective breeding has been going on for millennia -- and from people who had to eat its results, not mega corporations 10 times removed and interested in short term profit.
If it was that dangerous we'd know it by now.
Second, the species must be already related and/or compatible to a certain degree -- the same reason we don't have cat and snake hybrids in nature. Whereas with GMOs you can have arbitrary changes and mixes.
So it's not "waay more random" as it has way more limited scope. It's only random in that practitioners are not certain of the successful inheritance of the desired traits.
But it's like comparing playing with lego bricks to playing with creating stuff at the molecule level.
> For one, selective breeding has been going on for millennia -- and from people who had to eat its results, not mega corporations 10 times removed and interested in short term profit.
Yeah, modern selective or “traditional” breeding uses completely novel methods of introducing diversity (including artificial mutagens), is done by exactly the kind of megacorps you are concerned about, and has less oversight or regulatory control than GMOs.
> So it's not "waay more random" as it has way more limited scope
No, it is way more random than inserting a known gene at a known location, and verifying he product in the ways done with modern GMOs. And the scope of genetic change in any one product is greater than in a GMO, not more limited.
My wife works in ag biotech, and has worked on both transgenic (GMO) and non-transgenic platforms.
> But it's like comparing playing with lego bricks to playing with creating stuff at the molecule level.
A less imperfect analogy might be that it's like comparing writing code by hand with a reasonably comprehensive test suite with making random bit flips to machine code until it passes a much more limited test suite. And just to be clear, the latter is the non-GM option.
> Where does the assumption that I don't know how selective breeding works comes?
Easy: You're against the less random of the two. This means that apparently you don't know how GMO and/or selective breeding works.
> If it was that dangerous we'd know it by now.
This same logic applies to GMO, which has been around since the nineties. Aside from some late capitalism-esque economic effects nothing interesting happened.
> Whereas with GMOs you can have arbitrary changes and mixes.
