Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, mathematician, philosopher and occasional troller, has been tweeting a lot about how worried everyone should be about Genetically Modified Organisms or G.M.O.s. At first I found this surprising. Surely some super-plant funded by the Bill Gates foundation that solves world hunger is a good thing?
Taleb has now co-written an opinion piece in the New York Times, titled Another ‘Too Big To Fail’ System in G.M.O.s. Taleb draws parallels between how the financial system is structured and what a genetically modified ecosystem looks like:
by leading to monoculture — which is the same in finance, where all risks became systemic — G.M.O.s threaten more than they can potentially help. Ireland’s population was decimated by the effect of monoculture during the potato famine. Just consider that the same can happen at a planetary scale.
Think of the genetically homogenous Aztecs being defenseless against a common disease from Europe. Monoculture, i.e. the lack of variety, can increase systemic risk. If a gene sequence is so useful it ends up in all of the worlds rice for example, and 20 years later we find out it exposes the rice to some previously obscure disease, we’ll have a global rice shortage. And a lot of people depend on rice.
But it’s not just the monoculture that is worrying. It’s also the scale of the experiments. Nature itself does experiments with mutations on a local isolated scale. GMO experiments are genetic modifications that are introduced into a whole crop at once.
we are told that a modified tomato is not different from a naturally occurring tomato. That is wrong: The statistical mechanism by which a tomato was built by nature is bottom-up, by tinkering in small steps (as with the restaurant business, distinct from contagion-prone banks). In nature, errors stay confined and, critically, isolated.
Genetically modified organisms are starting to sound like a bad idea, if only from a risk management perspective.
Before the financial crash in Iceland I always used to think that the bankers knew what they were doing. That they knew how to manage the risks they were taking. It worries me slightly that until now my feeling towards the pro GMO camp has been the same. Surely they know what they’re doing? But nature is much more complicated than finance. How can they possibly know what they are doing? How could anyone?
I’m not an expert and I bring zero knowledge to the table when it comes to a discussion about GMOs. But I’m drifting towards the anti GMO camp. Maybe we should err on the side of caution when it comes to tinkering with our ecosystem.