I apologize for the length of this post, this topic is of some interest to me. About a year ago a family member very important to me became enamoured with Jefferey Smith and others in the anti-GMO camp. He began somewhat mildly, cutting certain foods out of his diet that were targeted as containing specific GM additives and other relative small steps. However, he quickly became more obsessed and more convinced that this is part of a greater evil. A year later he has stockpiled four tons of guarranteed GMO-free wheat, corn, beans, etc. because (paraphrased), Monsanto is going to make consumption of organic food illegal in the near future. He has tied this to NWO population control, etc. At first he started giving me literature to read under the pretense of my reviewing it for him to judge its scientific validity. This proved not to be the case when I returned an enormous stack of primary literature along with several detailed explanations of why (at least the material he gave me) was complete nonsense. I realized when he continued making the same arguments to others that his goal was not to question the material he advocated but instead trying to ‘convert’ me to his viewpoint. Today the entire issue is off of the table for family discussions, at least when I am around.
I want to make it clear that I am not necessarily pro GM crops. The truth is that when I started looking into the material I was given I suspected that it would be like most complex issues, good points on both sides with the truth laying somewhere left or right of the middle. So when I started reading the first two chapters of Marie-Monique Robin’s The World According to Monsanto I was extremely disappointed to find that pretty much every single claim she made was incorrect. The cited references simply did not say what she claimed, the strongest claims made were unreferenced, and much of her background material was simply scientifically innacurate. I sincerely believed that at some point I would find something valid, but that just did not happen. I started realizing this was all very familiar (ever have a discussion with someone on a science topic only to discover that every single thing they are saying is not only wrong but seemingly based on a make-believe assumption about how science works? Anyone at EvC ever have that experience?).
For those of us who have been involved in arguing against pseudoscientific claims for some time, it does not take too much time to realize that the valid points you were hoping would be presented are simply not going to happen. Instead you are presented with a long series of false claims, quote-mines, opinions of people with no background in any scientific discipline, etc. Like young Earth creationism, the anti-GMO literature appears to be a large amount of misinformation that if you follow the links all seems to circle around back to the original claimants. A friend of mine has dubbed this The Hovindian Lie Cycle where a nonsense claim originates with an individual, is repeated for decades, then occassionaly repeated by the originator who cites his copycats as if the claim now carries the weight of general consensus (I hope that made sense!).
Now finally to get to the point and topic. In The World According to Monsanto, Robin spends a great deal of time attempting to demonstrate that transgenic agriculture is wholly different from traditional agriculture. That is, she attempts to counter the claim that this technology is really just another step, essentially creating the character instead of waiting for the trait to appear through mutation. She does this by dedicating most of a chapter to how the Glyphosate (active ingredient in Roundup) resistance genes could never come about naturally, could never evolve. These genes are so alien that they must be created in a lab then forced into the genome of these crops (and yes, like Jefferey Smith she describes this process using terminology that sounds like a sexual assault). But then in another section when listing the environmental harm GM crops can cause she discusses ‘superweeds’ that have become glyphosate resistant! I don’t know if it is simply that she doesn’t see the contradiction because her knowledge of natural selection and evolution is so poor, or that she knows better but also knows her target audience will not get it. A third possibility that is also likely is that (like many of the people I speak to on the subject) she has a very mixed-up idea of what genes are and how they spread and that she therefore believes that Roundup Ready crops are somehow directly causing the weeds around them to acquire the trait (and yes, I understand lateral gene transfer does occur, but it is not in the way many anti-GMO people seem to think it does).
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