How so? I agree it's something to be avoided if we can help it, but what was the terrible terrible thing that happened as a result of original maize going extinct millennia ago?
How about the very fact that it made corn more edible and fed millions of more people on it? Allow me to explain...
Grains are not the natural food of humans, and they do poorly on them, their health suffers and they are at risk of getting fat (especially after cooking). They have not co-evolved with it in their environment. Only in times of great food shortages (especially of fruit) did humans resort to eating grains. They survived "ok" on the primordial grains, eating them raw obviously. But humans changed grains dramatically by cooking them, making them a lot more edible and making them able to eat large quantaties of grains together, almost surviving on grains alone... a terrible, terrible mistake.
The natural ecological system of humans went completely out of balance, you might say berserk. Large families no longer went hungry... this is NOT a good thing. In nature if a family went hungry they would typically split up, and not have children themselves until they were sure they could feed them properly. The idea of "monoculture" started, with huge corn fields popping up everything. And no this is not all "okay"... you cannot disturb a natural ecological system like this and expect it will all work the same. Certain people can ignorantly use the words "natural fallacy" until they're blue in the face, all people of any sense at all know that
the natural environment is better suited to an organism than a totally novel environment, because they are co-evolved with it. If someone doesn't believe that then IMO they either don't understand or don't believe in evolution... and it's just a truism that putting an organism in a totally novel environment and they are astronomically unlikely to do exactly as well.
The proliferation of grains forms a big part of overpopulation and the reason we're in this terrible mess today. If it weren't for grains, our lives would far more closely be pulled towards our natural environment, out of necessity and out of instinct.
Let's say we can somehow recover the original genome of the maize plant. And let's say that we get advanced enough where we can use GMO techniques to resequence that genome completely, insert it in a cell and reproduce the original maize plant (albeit with an entirely synthetic genome.) Would you oppose that?
In theory it would be wonderful. In practice, humans make mistakes, there are corporate/financial factors involved and conspiracies. We also don't know that there aren't sub-atomic particles smaller than DNA that make a difference. Anything is possible. If it were to bring back a wild fruit after it had been extinct forever... well, I would prefer to rely on seed banks but as a last resort yes it could be the one thing that would save the wild type.
Well, the intersection of the sets of DNA that are useful and viable is far smaller than the set of "any arrangement of DNA at all." But yes, we will eventually be able to create GMO's with "any arrangement of DNA at all" although 99.999999999% of those will not be viable.
It will be far too late by the time we got anywhere near being able to do this or being able to exactly recreate an original wild type.
We've been going down it for almost 40 years now, and I don't think we are at "complete chaos." So we're doing something right. Doesn't mean it's perfect, of course, and we have to be very careful with what we create so as not to do more harm than good. So far, though, we've done a lot of good.
We went through decades of atomic bomb research also and aren't all blown to pieces. That's hardly a ringing endorsement of a technology... that it hasn't killed/ruined us all yet. But they stopped atomic bombs because at some point somewhere, some intelligence and survival instinct started to creep in and they realized that this stuff was pretty dangerous.
That's great! You should eat whatever you want. I'd add a little meat or dairy, though, since we're not herbivores and can't synthesize some of the vitamins we need from an all-plant diet. (Or you can take supplements.)
I do add a little meat and fish, I'm not some fanatic whose going to eat an unnatural diet because of some dubious and unnatural values.
Understood - your position is different than iceaura's.
Me personally, I think food exists to be eaten and if we end up replacing a wild type of food with a better engineered one, I'm perfectly fine with that.
"Food exists to be eat"...... that's a primitive and instinctive reflex. "Hey it looks okay and tastes okay, why not be brave and eat it?" If you imagine food that looks good, primitively there is no possibility really of you pushing it from you.
That was fine in primitive times, but once you go messing with food GMing it or anything else, you can no longer trust your primordial instincts any longer to tell you what is "good" or "bad" to eat. You'll be depending on others to tell you. And do you really trust the FDA and all these people in government?
The very fact that we have to suddenly remember things, to be careful, to never make mistakes with contamination even though we know humans are PRONE to making mistakes (and it may be theoretical mistakes, practical mistakes, any kind of mistakes). The very fact that you have to trust all of these people and not your own gut, your own tastebuds, etc.
I saw Bob Geldof making a similar statement to you: "if we can make this gm food and give it to poor people, then why not do it?"..... and it all sounds so simple and easy. Usually when a person talks in a simple and easy way like that, they can either be rebuked in a simple and easy way or else they're right. However with GM it takes a huge amount of explaining and understanding as to why this would actually be a terrible, terrible thing.... and how as even GM-proponents accept there will always have to be major testing and overseeing of any GM project..... and dammit, it's so hard to explain and to remember it, it's all complicated and NON-INTUITIVE. That's the worst part... if it looks good people tend to assume it's okay. Just like how our bodies are not adapted for the purpose of consuming this GM food, our brains are not adapted to fully assess whether we should eat it or not, and without years of education and understanding and TRUST, people won't have a clue.
I know people who've eaten meat after it being recalled because they wanted to be brave and they were going by their own "assessment". I'm sorry to say but this internal instinct or "feeling" you have about "let's eat the food, it looks, smells and tastes good" is useless in many of these situations and becoming more obsolete by the day.
This is the problem with processed foods as well: we can't trust our instincts because the food has been modified in such an unnatural way. It's ****ed up.
Are you saying that as we change our food, it will somehow become less able to feed us? Doesn't that contradict the very purpose of GM? Doesn't it contradict the fact of what happened to corn? Why with no previous historical basis would you believe that at some point our food will suddenly become inedible? Makes no sense to me.
Oh it'll be "edible" alright, it'll be TOO edible, like bread. Over time its integrity and how well it fits our human biology though is going to dramatically decline as it departs from the food we are co-evolved to eat.