>...favoring individuals with desirable naturally occurring variations in characteristics... >...cobbling together genes of totally unrelated species... Both o

>...favoring individuals with desirable naturally occurring variations in characteristics... >...cobbling together genes of totally unrelated species... Both of these statements describe genetic engineering. But you're right, there is a big difference between them: one is basically just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks and the other is a scientific process backed by hundreds of years of research. The reason why people assign a lower risk to selective breeding is that the amount of physiological change present in one or a few generations is small. You don't worry that the rice you eat had a trascription error and may be genetically altered because it is invisible to you. But when you look at genetic engineering you see the big changes in a short amount of time and you feel it is more unsafe even though those alterations are being performed by some of the most intelligent minds of our generation. You talk of scientists "cobbling together genes of totally unrelated species" as if they were nice modular pieces that you can rearrange in any order. Just the mechanism by which genes are edited is a choreographed sequence of tools that make the steady hands of the worlds best surgeon look bad. I am not nessesarily 100% pro-GMO though, I just dislike the FUD that people use to demonize it as something radically different that what humans have been doing for millenia. The only thing different is that now we have a clue what we are doing. Will some people abuse it to benefit themselves? Yes, of course, but that is independent of the methods by which they screw people over.