I agree that a lot of common worries about GMOs are just plain silly. The kind of people who worry about GMOs because "we don't understand what we're changing" are also the kind of people who are more likely to buy 100% natural Tibetan herbal tea even though the same concerns apply (rare exotic plants are more likely to contain rare chemicals whose side-effects are not well studied and understood).
Still, there are some reasonable concerns about GMOs -
their use may reduce biodiversity if one "optimal" crop is used everywhere (but the same applies to conventional breeding and optimization of crops);
"terminator" seeds (plants that don't regrow and must be rebought) and copyrighting of some plants might suck, but I don't know enough about economics to tell how much if at all (though I could fall back on either "yay science" or "boo corporations" and come up with a post-hoc justification)
Making plants more resistant to insecticides so the farmers can spray even stronger insecticides doesn't seem that great, but again I don't know enough to tell the good from the bad.
Terminator tech is effectively banned, and while I'm highly vulnerable to anti-corporate/capitalist rhetoric especially in the case of Monsanto, and so may be overcompensating, I think this is generally a bad thing. This is both because it makes biosafety more difficult, and because it reduces the ability of the big biotech companies to capture the benefits of GM research. This is good in the short term (though in a few cases it disproportionately benefits the largest landowners) but ultimately means that research is underfunded and mostly focused on relat...
I was raised to believe that genetically-modified foods are unhealthy to eat and bad for the environment, and given a variety of reasons for this, some of which I now recognize as blatantly false (e.g., human genetic code is isomorphic to fundamental physical law), and a few of which still seem sort of plausible.
Because of this history, I need to anchor my credence heavily downward from my sense of plausibility.
The major reasons I see to believe that GMOs are safe are:
The major reason I see to believe that GMOs are dangerous is:
So: green goo, yes or no?