>should we really be messing with systems so much more complex than we currently understand? The first stage in understanding complexity is invariably "messing

>should we really be messing with systems so much more complex than we currently understand? The first stage in understanding complexity is invariably "messing" with it. If people always chose to stay away from things they didn't understand completely and were potentially deadly, we'd have never had fire, sailing ships, chemistry etc. Take the total number of people in history who died in house fires and shipwrecks: it's much, much higher than in the case of GM. (And, to be completely fair, we should actually consider those numbers as proportions of the total world population at the time.)