Neil deGrasse Tyson Tells GMO Critics to "Chill Out"

[mike_c]

79. please explain why phylogenetic distance has any relevance to the moral issue....

This one really puzzles me, and I suspect it arises directly out of misunderstanding and biological illiteracy. I've discussed this a lot up thread, but it keeps coming back. Recall that the anti-GMO movement began with accusations of scientists "playing God," whatever that means.

The genes of bacteria and tomatoes are nothing more than genetic records of past solutions to phenotypic challenges. They are an information storage medium (granted, some genes do more than simply store information, but those are not the genes we're talking about here). They are NOT unique properties of bacteria or tomatoes because information is universal. The means of expressing resistance to selective pressures are just as relevant within the context of a tomato cell as they are in a bacterial cell. There is nothing sacred about genes, and in fact there are relatively few genetic barriers to recombining genomes across wide phylogenetic gulfs.

Instead, the barriers are reproductive, and they evolved for completely different reasons that are not relevant in this discussion (the essence is that lateral gene transfer is common among unicellular asexual organisms, but multicellularity and sexual reproduction severely limit opportunities for it, which is a bit off topic in this discussion, I think). Even so, lateral information transfer via genes is common and widespread in many groups of organisms across phylogenetic distances far greater than genera (including domains).

There is no material difference between genetic recombination via hybridization and recombination via other forms of genetic engineering-- in either case, the objective is information transfer from the genome of one organism to that of another, in order to achieve desirable characteristics. That is one reason that most biologists dismiss the notion that GMOs are the result of "scientists playing God." They understand that genes are not unique properties of specific organisms, but rather that they represent bits of stored information that can retain their relevancy in other biological contexts.