Yes, it is a self-evidence observation that as a whole, we understand the software systems we've built more than the entirety of all biological systems. Obvious

Yes, it is a self-evidence observation that as a whole, we understand the software systems we've built more than the entirety of all biological systems. Obviously nobody is disputing that. The original claim was that to against this research or cautious about this research "because we don't always predict what biological systems will do" is on the same order of magnitude analogous to claiming we should be against or cautious about people implementing machine learning algorithms because "we can't always predict what software will do, especially AI!". I believe that this comparison is 100% valid and useful for explaining why the original reasoning is flawed to those in computer science who are pretty uninformed on biology. The actual "chances of something going wrong" might not be the same - it might be a 10^-25 chance that you made a mistake in your implemented SVM that, err, causes a catastrophic error that has serious consequences for humanity, possibly because "the internet is all connected, man" (if this sounds ludicrous to you, that is how the other side sounds to me on these cases of biology!) and a 10^-24 chance that this research results in some organism that, err, causes a catastrophic error that has serious consequences for humanity (it is equally difficult for me to envision this), but the point is that both are cases where we can be so confident that some absurd catastrophe will occur because we have studied . If you have specific predictions about how on Earth this research could result in catastrophe, make them and we can discuss how possible they are. If not, it really is anti-scientific fear-mongering: you aren't making any positive claim about a legitimate possible issue, you are simply saying "I have this gut feeling that like something could go wrong with that and it could like spread and be bad", even though we have excellent reasons to assume this is not the case and no reason to assume it is, and that everyone with any field knowledge strongly disagrees with your personal assessment, and the situation really is analogous to the person worrying about the SVM. Edit: And to further explain why this is "anti-science" - it is because you are not making any testable claims, you are simply saying "We don't know everything that can go wrong, there could be something you haven't thought of!" and using that impossible to disprove hypothesis to shut down research and development, e.g. the process of science itself.