This is the same argument that came up last time and it's still just as incorrect. There is in fact a meaningful difference between direct genetic modification, agricultural breeding, and evolutionary action, and that difference is timescale. It is a difference in kind as well as degree because removing timescale removes lots of processes that naturally act to prevent counterproductive mutations. That is literally how evolution works, so I am surprised that people don't seem to grasp that taking out the "survival of the fittest" part of the system actually meaningfully changes the results you may get from the system.
To me, saying that being concerned about GMOs is dumb because of evolution is approximately equivalent to saying that being concerned about climate change is dumb because winters are still cold.
I am not necessarily saying that we should be regulating GMOs, but I think it's bizarre and unfortunate that it seems like it's considered crazy or dangerous to be skeptical.
I completely disagree and find this position to wholly ignore the exponential growth in human knowledge and understanding during this time frame as well as being generally incorrect about evolution. Your mistake is in assuming that a long time-scale equals safety or healthy. Just because humans have done something for thousands of years does not make it safe or good for you; evolution does not reward true belief. Only with our existing knowledge can we even look back at long-term genetic changes with any real context or understanding of what it even was/did.
Furthermore, it is a misnomer to talk about "survival of the fittest" as opposed to differential reproduction. We don't eat the corn we have today because it is the "fittest" corn, but because we chose to cultivate it above alternatives. There were no real selective pressures on that corn, it was almost entirely human-driven. What "natural processes" would have counteracted the bad mutations you have in mind that don't include human decision making? After all, if we need long-time scales in order to know whether something is safe or not, how would Indigenous people know what was safe or not? I assume you're not suggesting something like a particular mutation of corn killed whole scores of Indigenous people so they selectively stopped eating that variant. Because that would require a huge number of unwarranted assumptions.
First, the mutation would have to be significant enough to kill or severely harm humans (an extremely low probability). Second, the mutation would have to be severe enough to cause those effects quickly and visibly. Third, the Indigenous people would have to be able to recognize those effects as having been caused by the corn. Fourth, they would have had to know exactly which corn was causing those effects. Fifth, they would have to successfully prevent further dissemination of the 'bad' corn genetic line. And so on and so forth. The point is, humans have not been under selective pressure for thousands of years. We didn't die because of the food we ate, we died because we ran out of food, or we got sick or injured. Any bad modifications that corn developed along the way would have been insignificant relative to the common causes of death.
It's not like we can accidentally turn on an "everyone gets cancer from eating this" gene. And even if we could, being able to pinpoint its cause back to a particular change in a particular food item's genetic structure (whether "natural" or not) would be extremely difficult if not impossible. And how exactly are we supposed to assess or resolve this kind of fears when you're pointing to timescales of thousands, no, tens of thousands of years. There's no evidence that could possibly satisfy that kind of demand. Maybe vaccinations will make us sterile over a thousand years because genetics can never be fully understood, okay sure whatever, but does that mean we still shouldn't use them?
But more importantly, you've failed to respond to my more pressing point:
Unless there's a baseline "version" of a food's genetic code that we all agree is the starting point, there's no way to even say something is "unmodified". You can't just arbitrarily pick a point in a food's genetic development and say everything before this was "natural" and everything after was "unnatural".
The genetic code of corn doesn't build up to "safe and healthy" and then stay there. It's just as likely to have a bad mutation today as it was a hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago. By your logic, every single time there is a genetic change to corn we should have eaten it for thousands of years before considering that change "safe". But it's not like the we went from small corn to big corn in one day and then spent ten thousand years eating it without anymore genetic changes. It was constantly in a state of change the whole time, whether we knew about it or not.
The corn you eat today is not like the corn that existed 100 years ago. The corn that existed two hundred years ago is not like the corn that existed 500 year ago, which is not like the corn that existed 1000 years ago, or 2,000 years ago. We've eaten "corn" for thousands of years, but it's been different genetically for every generation. Should the Indigenous peoples have refused to eat it when it began to change appearance? Should the immigrant farmers of the Great Plains sworn it off because it wasn't genetically identical to the corn eaten by Indians?
The whole point of knowledge and science is so that we can take out the whole "survival of the fittest" part of life. We don't have to needlessly rely on death to maybe point us in the right direction because we can discover the answer with our minds. What good is knowledge if it burns at the altar of fear?
