I have seen diatribes on this very site against scientists and how they publish lies so that they can whore after government grants. That is to what I refer. Anyone can look up the relevant data underlying scientific discoveries. The vast majority is public and in English. No one has to take anything by faith in science.
Versus scientists, who only ask you to prove them wrong.
I expect those who question scientific advancement (like the GMO and anti-vaccine folks) to look up the relevant studies, have them explained by someone with technical expertise, like I often try and do here. I don't know any scientists who feel themselves worthy of worship. I do know quite a few who feel themselves worthy of being listened to when discussing their fields of expertise, because odds are they know more about it than you.
If you had that level of technical expertise, and found someone with almost none screaming at the top of their lungs how wrong you are and how all your work is lies, you'd be a bit put out I think. I've certainly seen experts here get that way when their expertise was questioned by folks clearly not in the know.
For the record, I, for one, value your explanations.
Apropos to this thread, I also admit that I have some nagging questions about GMO foods (including old-school hybridizing and the like). I wouldn't go as far as to call it opposition, but I do have doubts.
You may be surprised to find that my doubts are based on something near and dear to your heart: evolution. It seems self-evident to me that the human body, as a result of hundreds of millions of years of evolution, has become very good at sorting out, digesting, and metabolizing compounds in foods that it recognizes; but I wonder if it does as well with "new" foods that it hasn't encountered before.
Take wheat, for example. There's little doubt that "modern" wheat has far more gluten than primitive wheat. There's also little doubt that even for people who are not gluten-intolerant, gluten's not the easiest stuff in the world to digest. The glutenin is easy enough to deal with, but the proline and glutamine in the gliadan are more of a challenge.
It is my understanding that for those who are gluten-intolerant, insufficiency or absence of the enzymes necessary to break down glutamine and proline in gliadin result in an inflammatory immune response. But it seems to me that this is more of a matter of degree: The human body in general has a hard time with glutamine and proline, but some have a harder time of it than others.
There are some folks (including my doctor) who speculate that one of the main reasons why people lose weight on low-carb diets has to do with their taking in little or no gluten. These people believe that although most people aren't "intolerant" of gluten, it still makes them fat. So my doctor urges me to minimize my gluten intake -- a difficult thing for someone who loves to bake and eat bread -- because he believes it to be the primary reason why it's so hard for me to lose weight.
Which gets me back to my premise, for lack of a better word: Perhaps the human mind may be capable of genetically modifying food, whether by gene-splicing or more primitive methods, much more quickly than our bodies are capable of adapting to the changes
in some cases. Not all nor even most, but some. Maybe the odd protein missing here or being present there actually makes a difference to the body biochemically.
Or maybe not. Or maybe it does, but it actually results in a product that's better and easier for the body to utilize.
Whatever the case, I don't lose sleep about it. There's probably almost nothing that we eat that's in the same form as it was a thousand years ago, and little that's in the same form as it was a hundred years ago; so if you define GMO as being different than Mother Nature's version, then almost everything we eat has been genetically modified. Somehow we managed to survive and to even extend our life spans.
The problem is that with gene-splicing, we're able to bring about changes much more rapidly, so the possibility of creating something that's really, really bad for us and putting it out to market before we realize it is much higher. So for that reason, I favor caution. Not outlawing, just caution.
So if you want me to believe a blanket statement that GMO foods are perfectly safe, then I respect your opinion and superior knowledge and believe that you're most likely right 99 percent of the time: but I also reserve the right to have my doubts about the 1 percent of the time when maybe we're exceeding the body's evolutionarily-driven ability to recognize and metabolize something.
I don't think that makes me antipathetic toward scientists, and I hope that you don't, either. After all, I'm giving you the 99 percent.
Rich