What do you think the root cause of the fear of GMO's? Fear of science? Hatred of big business?
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It's the business practice of the companies creating the GMOs. People hate Monsanto due to their business practices, not the products. It's the bandwagon protesters that lost sight of that and just started hating the product for some absurd reason.
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A few factors, I'm sure, but I think ignorance is the biggest factor. Humans instinctively fear the unexpected and different. I understand the natural aversion to something modified, but I think that if people understood where we got the domesticated animals we call "natural" now, we'd realize that fear of modern genetic engineering is irrational. If you rejected all domesticated species, that would at least be logically consistent. But to reject anything fed by modified plants, yet continue to eat the animal that bears little resemblance to the ancestors it descended from due to our genetic tinkering makes no sense. It seems the objection to genetic modification is based entirely on how long it takes, which makes little sense. The only difference between turning a grass into corn over a few thousand years, and genetic engineering today, is that we can do it a lot faster. But the process and result is still the same. We select the traits we want, and force their expression by controlling the genes. Whether it takes 1000 years of careful selective breeding, or is done in a year in a lab, the result is the same. There is no real logic behind accepting one and rejecting the other.
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Fear of the unknown. People hear the big, scary words [i]genetically modified[/i] and think they're eating alien food. After seeing District 9, we all known that ingesting alien stuff is a big no-no.