Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think

by Peter H. Diamandis

Furthermore, the idea that GE crops are a Frankenfood sin against nature is, to be blunt, pretty ridiculous. It rests on the proposition that there’s something natural about agriculture. As idyllic as it seems, farming is just a 12,000-year-old way of optimizing lunch. In fact, as Matt Ridley explains: [A]lmost by definition, all crop plants are “genetically modified.” They are monstrous mutants capable of yielding unnaturally large, free-threshing seeds or heavy, sweet fruits and dependent on human intervention to survive. Carrots are orange thanks only to the selection of a mutant first discovered perhaps as late as the sixteenth century in Holland. Bananas are sterile and incapable of setting seed. Wheat has three whole diploid (double) genomes in each of its cells, descended from three different wild grasses, and simply cannot survive as a wild plant—you never encounter wild wheat. The lineage of agriculture is a lineage of humans rearranging plant DNA. For a very long time, crossbreeding was the preferred method, but then came Mendel and his peas. As we began to understand how genetics worked, scientists tried all kinds of wild techniques to induce mutations. We dipped seeds in carcinogens and bombarded them with radiation, occasionally inside of nuclear reactors. There are over 2,250 of these mutants around; most of them are certified “Organic.”