Science. It’s on the forefront of just about every conversation we have in this country. Whether it’s the economy, health care, space exploration, or a whole myriad of politically-charged topics from abortion to climate change, science is at the heart of just about every issue. Genetically modified (GMO) foods are a particularly hot button topic among those of us who sit on the left hand side of the fence, and there is definitely a divide within us as to just how much of a shit we should give when it comes to foods that have had their genes played-around with.
Me? I’m of the opinion that at the end of the day, the kinds of genetic modifications being done are not very much different from what Gregor Mendel did with his pea plants, and our own resident biologist, Jordan Logue, wrote a piece for us that backed that idea up. Now, one of the country’s eminent scientists has some advice for my fellow liberals who are perhaps seeing the name “Monsanto” and losing control of their faculties…calm the hell down. And I really hope progressives listen.
Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson has cemented himself in recent years as the country’s foremost scientist. He is our modern day Carl Sagan, which makes total sense when you know of the deep, personal connection Tyson had with Sagan. Liberals really do love Tyson because he has spoken out so loudly against things like creationism in science classes, and he advocates every day for more money being spent on space exploration. While Dr. Tyson has never really come out and said which side of the aisle he tends to lean, it’s hard to imagine you’d find him on the side of the political spectrum that denies climate change.
So when he said in a recent interview that it’s time for people to relax a little bit about GMO foods, I think it’s safe to say we on the left should listen. This doesn’t mean not fighting to get foods labeled; of course in a free country we all deserve to know what exactly we’re putting in our bodies. But in the interview, Tyson was asked in French about genetically modified foods and he agreed with my assessment and the assessment Jordan’s — that we’ve been ingesting genetically modified foods for thousands of years, and to run around like Chicken Little over it now is a bit of an extreme reaction.
Tyson was emphatic as he told the audience, “Practically every food you buy in a store for consumption by humans is genetically modified,” and that “wild, seedless watermelons” and even cows came about via genetic modification. It’s very easy to see a company like Monsanto, who very clearly has the government in its back pocket, from President Obama on down the line, and then apply that skepticism about their business model to the science they are funding, but that is folly, if you ask me, and apparently if you ask Neil DeGrasse Tyson as well.
During his takedown of GMO truthers, Tyson had a bit of advice for discerning whether or not a food you’re about to ingest is something to worry about. “You list all the fruit, and all the vegetables,” Tyson intoned, “Ask yourself, is there a wild counterpart to this? If there is, it’s not as large, it’s not as sweet, it’s not as juicy, and it has way more seeds in it.” Then in simple, no-muss-no-muss terms he went for the knockout punch. “We have systematically genetically modified all the foods, the vegetables and animals that we have eaten ever since we cultivated them. It’s called artificial selection.”
Of course the GMO haters are going to wag their fingers and say that Tyson is an astrophysicist and not a biologist. Fair point, I guess, until you stop for about five seconds and realize that in order to be the level of astrophysicist that Dr. Tyson is, you have to take a few biology courses, and in fact, there are many points at which biology and astrophysics intersect, because while there are many fields of scientific study, it’s not every single one is a wholly separate and mutually exclusive subset of study from all the others. Science itself is an interwoven series of fields, and if you’re at the highest level in one, you’ve most certainly been educated in quite a bit of them all.
So here’s the thing, my fellow liberals. It’s time for us to separate the fact from the hysteria. No one likes the idea of a faceless corporation stuffing us full of chemicals and craziness. But when the preeminent scientific scholar in your country tells you that you’ve gone over the bend in some of your fanaticism, it’s time to dial it back a notch. I don’t want my kids poisoned by Monsanto any more than the rest of you do. But the simple fact is there is no scientific consensus that eating GMO foods poses a major threat to human existence. Yes, some countries in Europe have banned them, okay. But how much of that is about the companies’ business practices, and how much of it is a concern for the safety of genetically modified foods?
If we’re going to be the group that actually listens to what scientists have to say — you know like with climate change — then we can’t afford to simply turn a blind eye to the fact that the science overwhelmingly supports GMO foods being safe to consume. As Dr. Tyson pointed out, for thousands of years we have eaten foods that in no way resemble their natural counterparts, and sill our average life expectancy has climbed higher and higher.
All I’m saying, and if I can speak for Dr. Tyson for just a moment, what I think he is saying, is to just listen to what the science says. Engage your critical thinking skills. Think about all stuff we eat and interact with on a daily basis that was changed at the molecular level somehow. I’m not a scientist, and I’m frankly ashamed of my high school science grades, but I do understand the basic concepts of what it takes to reach scientific consensus on something — and the unavoidable facts are that it is literally impossible to eat anything that hasn’t been altered somehow, some way, somewhere along the line. So it’s absolutely our right to know what we’re eating, but we should also take what we see on the label with a grain of salt, which is one of the very few things that we actually don’t need to genetically modify, since we’re still using the same salt on our tables that was here when the dinosaurs roamed the Earth…and I’m sure none of you are going to start only ingesting salt because of that fact, right?
Right.
The post If Dr. Tyson Says To Relax About GMOs, Liberals Can Stand To Listen appeared first on The Political Garbage Chute.
