Neil deGrasse Tyson vs. the Anti-GMO Crowd, Round 2
Last week, we (and many others) posted a viral video (embedded below), in which Cosmos star Neil deGrasse Tyson is shown sounding off about genetically modified organisms. Tyson tells GMO critics to “chill out” because, as he explains, humans have been changing the genetics of the organisms that we consume for food (through artificial selection) for millennia.
Apparently Tyson received a lot of negative response to this video—though it also drew much applause—because now he has taken to Facebook with a quite long and often witty post explaining his views on the subject in a more “nuanced” way. The post is still pretty pro-GMO, in the end. But it certainly has many more shades of gray. As Tyson notes, the original video was very short, just over two minutes, and
had I given a full talk on this subject, or if GMOs were the subject of a sit-down interview, then I would have raised many nuanced points, regarding labeling, patenting, agribusiness, monopolies, etc. I’ve noticed that almost all objections to my comments center on these other issues.