I have to side with pax Viate here, scientists don’t know what they’re doing at all. Look to begin with with the first cloned humans. Whether the story was true or not, we look at the first cloned sheep. It is suffering & aging faster than it should, all in all it’s been shown that the process of cloning doesn’t seem to be stable. And yet scientists are trying to produce a human clone (or apparantly have) which will suffer greatly because the process is nowhere near perfected, it’s just a ‘race’.
Also take a look at recent reports about GM crops. Mexico has found that many of it’s fields, I think the figure was 80%, near the US border had been infected by GM strains that were being tested on the other side of the border. Also in England weeds near GM trial fields have, without a doubt, been shown to have picked up the genetic material from the trials, the super weeds that you might call the “media manipulated” myth is not a myth at all, it’s really happening. It’s also easily demonstrated that nearby fields of similar crops have been cross pollinated by accident (as you already said) and then have the cheek to call it theft. They’ve opened the flood gates without even thinking of the consequences.
The truth is we don’t need those crops at the moment the EU has a masssive stockpile of rotting food and pays farmers to keep land fallow (and also pays farmers to keep sea fallow cause they’re so fing stupid ).
It is also a widely reported truth that terminator crops, which become infertile after the initial germination, are a threat to 3rd world countries who at the moment rely heavily on charitable donations of excess seed produced from 1st world farms. If there is no spare seed, because it is all of the terminator variety, they will have to buy their seed from the GM companies, which they cannot afford to do.
But it is true when we make large scale modifications with the express purpose of making it much better than its predeccesors. Also the modification would be introduced whole scale with the older breed being in a minority almost immediatly. That, I think, was Pax’s point. If selection pressure is such that the new gene is much more powerful it will wipe out the old gene rapidly. That’s why there are no old versions of humans, cats, dogs, etc. around. It’s only the particularly hardy or those species which haven’t had their ‘niche’ threatened that we still see today. And good businessman will want a GM crop that is fantastic when it has a diouble pairing of the gene, but shit when it has a cross breed, otherwise their work could be ripped off by cross breeding, a farmer would just sow his field 50/50 and then next year his crops (assuming they were non-terminator, as if they were Pax Vitae’s point would be doubly relevant) would, on average be roughly 75% strong and continue upwards due to selection processes, so he’d only have to buy half of what the GM seed seller wanted him to for all the benefit. We could even imagine a patient farmer buying only a few seeds and within acouple of years having enough to plant all his fields.
The point is that “Mother Nature” or genetic mutation as the rest of us know it, is a gradual process where large scale changes with rampant effects tend not to happen very rapidly allowing impact to be measured as well as have to rest of the ecosystem adjust to small changes as they happen. A rapid change means that unforseen circumstances can occur and the balance of nature can be rapidly altered to devastating effect. It is comparable to adding a new species to an unadapted ecosystem, like rabbits to Australia, or those Japenese algae (or some water plant) to American waterways. The damage done to the unadapted ecosystems was massive.