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Should the sale of genetically modified food be banned?
Perspective
All Votes
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Genetic engineering of food is unnatural. Thus, genetically modified foods should be banned.
Pros
Cons
From a religious
perspective
on ethics, manipulating DNA is playing with life itself. Humanity should not interfere with God's creation and the natural order of things.
Even if GMOs are harmless or have proven benefits, some people may find it hard to reconcile with the idea that eating something unnatural is acceptable.
Genetic modification of crops has resulted in the creation of many plants which would not have come into existence by conventional processes.
Plants naturally evolve. The introduction of genetically “modified” plants is nothing more than plants evolving in response to another environmental factor (man).
Biological entities on Earth are made up of the same building blocks, with DNA transcribed to RNA and RNA translated to proteins (
The Central Dogma
). It is the sequence and structure of proteins that impart most of biological function. GMOs rely on the same biochemistry, just use different gene sequences. There is nothing fundamentally different about it. Proteins added to organisms will be digested just like everything else of biological origin that we consume as food.
Anti-venom
is unnatural as about
100,000 people die
each year from snake bites, anti-venom is
capable of saving
many lives each year and should not be banned.
The natural world does not advocate for human survival in and of itself, in fact quite the opposite. We have adapted our environment to promote our survival. Much like building shelters, GMOs are just another example of this.
Many human practices are 'unnatural'. This is not, in and of itself, a reason for banning a practice.
Plant species, if left to their own devices, would develop traits to prevent predators from eating them, so that they can survive and reproduce. For example, they might develop thick outer shells, or a bitter unpleasant taste to prevent human consumption. These traits might be 'natural' but from human perspective they are undesirable.
Humans have engaged in genetic engineering of
both plants and animals for millennia
, through cross/selective breeding, grafting etc. Altering the genome directly is just the latest way of doing so, no less natural than all others before it.
There is no such thing as an unnatural process, if we can make something, anything in fact, it is because nature allows it to happen through natural laws. Any unnatural process is self-contradictory in nature because it happened under the laws of nature.
This is an appeal to nature fallacy. Something being natural doesn't make it good (or bad).
The definition poses a false dichotomy: the idea that older human techniques for modifying an organism are "natural" while more advanced techniques are fundamentally different because their novelty or sophistication is unsupported.
