> that looked further out than you did. Very much so. You were presenting how there would be no danger to the ecosystem if these three sub-species were success

> that looked further out than you did. Very much so. You were presenting how there would be no danger to the ecosystem if these three sub-species were successfully destroyed. I never got as far because I wondered about the similarities of population regrowth after destruction with insecticide and destruction with modified organisms. > Before you bring up the recent boeing failures I don't need to. Building nuclear facilities is (usually) a very rigorous field with the highest quality of engineering, but sometimes factors of design considerations interact in ways that create new conditions that were impossible to predict. And since you mentioned aeroplanes: if you look at NTSB reports, you often find the cause of crashes is a long chain of trivial events, every single one of them meticulously checklisted and tested with fallback modes to avert disaster. It's not the components, but the intractability of the web of interaction. > Why do you think that evolution and resistance are novel failure modes Because evolution and resistance are novel failure modes in the context of genetically designed natural enemies. Previous statistical models might not hold even though the situations modeled appears exactly similar. > why do you think they'd have been missed in the analysis? Genetic modification is a statistical process, much like an AI network where something goes in and the output is measured for fitness and fed back. Random artifacts are to be expected and accounted for, but cannot be known to exist before the fact. As such their model might be complete, but it might not be sound. As you implied, rigor is important, and faced with potentially irreversible consequences, skepticism is not an unnatural or irrational response.