That there is Myth #1.
It would be interesting to see a follow up to that story. It is 5 years old now.
Slightly newer from Popular Science GMO Facts: 10 Common GMO Claims Debunked
A bit of a counter argument from a newer article: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/30/business/gmo-promise-falls-short.html
A rebuttal to Hakim’s claims from an even newer article:
*"Hakim’s thesis was that crops improved through biotechnology have failed to deliver what they had been alleged to promise: improved yields and reduced pesticide applications. But those who have followed this issue over the years recognized that there is nothing new in the claims; they are a straightforward recycling of similar statements that have been made for years by ideological opponents of modern breeding methods. The claims were without merit then, and they are without merit now.
"An early response came from Andrew Kniss, a University of Wyoming weed scientist. He showed precisely how and where the Times article cited incomplete and unrepresentative data to buttress untenable claims. Kniss used a full data set—supported by numerous papers in the scientific, peer-reviewed literature—to show that even though genetically modified crops were not designed to increase yields per se, but rather to manage and mitigate some of the most serious and widespread causes of crop loss (weeds and insect pests), biotech-improved seeds have been so successful in delivering their intended benefits that they have, in fact, increased yields, by an average of 37 percent globally.
Yale Professor and Neurobiologist Steven Novella followed with a thoughtful and wide-ranging critique. Novella notes that the article does not consider the impact of biotech seed in developing countries—where 17 of the 18 million farmers worldwide growing biotech-improved crops farm. By neglecting them the article addresses only a fraction of 1/18th of the relevant data. Novella concludes that the reporter started with a case he found persuasive, and then cited data selected to confirm his presuppositions, rather than testing his thesis to make sure he wasn’t missing something important. The same criticisms were echoed by Grist and Mother Jones."*
Hakim’s articles stem from a fervent anti-GMO stance and should be fact-checked with that in mind. One indication of his biases is his trying to link modern agricultural pesticides to sarin, “developed in Nazi Germany” (to quote his article). When you attempt to Godwinize the debate, you immediately lose credibility.
I’ve always thought of the right as being anti-science because of all the climate-change denial and creationism. I do have one good friend (who is politically left) who buys into the whole “gmo is bad” nonsense but most of the people I know who are anti-vax loons are on the religious right.
I wonder if there are any reliable statistics to show which side is more/less anti-science?
That’s funny, I’m a moderate but a green and in my experience it is both the Woo-Left and Religious Right that are most likely to be anti-vax and mostly the left that are anti-GMO.
I’m not sure that’s easy to quantify. And I think it depends on what you observe more. I have very few religious conservatives in my bubble, so I see mostly left woo.
As far as the statistics, for example there is no clear patterns, e.g. vaccination:
Vaccinations of children by state. “Crunchy” Colorado is lowest, IIRC poor/conservative Mississippi highest. But other states all over the place.
Non-medical exemptions are a little more telling: high in Oregon and Vermont. But I guess as a whole OR has a good infrastructure to vaccinate everyone else.
Measles cases. I think not a terribly useful map as even if CA was doing everything right, the high population inflates this.
Additionally, I’ve seen 9-11 truth and chemtrail stuff on both sides. Homeopathy too; conservative radio host Michael Savage is a homeopath and one of those ex-hippie types. Those on the left seem to be more into the mostly harmless woo of organic food.
California has been doing better on overall vaccination rates since the passage of SB277, which eliminated the “philosophical” exemption for getting ones’ children immunized (although “medical exemption” rates have soared). Liberal Marin County has been an epicenter of antivax sentiment which has helped fuel recent outbreaks of measles in the state. Nationwide, antivaxers draw fairly equally from the Left and Right in my experience. This article makes the case that the more politically partisan one is (to the left or right), the more likely it is that one believes vaccines are unsafe - but that resistance to mandatory vaccination is more common among conservatives than liberals.
Anti-GMOery is more common on the Left, where it’s gotten entangled in anti-corporate fear and loathing (but there are numerous biotech opponents among right-wingers, including the batshit sorts like Alex Jones and Mike Adams).
Overall, my perception is that in general, disdain for evidence-based science and medicine (and especially for experts*) is more common on the Right, a situation exacerbated by the number of right-wing politicians who are willing to take advantage of it for political purposes.
*who needs all those years of training and experience, when the average person can Google their way to expert status in an afternoon?
And what’s with people calling certain foods organic, huh? We all know that words have only a single definition, and “organic” means, to chemists, that it contains carbon; therefore all food is organic!
Seriously, there are very few reasons to oppose GMO agriculture today (a quarter-century ago the science was much less clear, and a lot of people haven’t caught up with new science). But this “all agriculture is GMO” is deliberately obfuscatory wordplay.
I’d think “if you’re against genetically modified mosquitos you’re a racist” would have more traction than food given mosquito-caused illnesses disproportionately affect non-whites…
People of african descent have more immunity to malaria. The drawback is that this is called sickle cell anemia. So it’s a wash as far as nature being racist.
But the mosquito the genetic modification targets, Aedes aegypti, is also a, if not the primary carrier of yellow fever, zika, dengue fever, and chikungunya, and these diseases are common in South American countries too.
I don’t see it as “deliberately obfuscatory”. Rather, it’s a way of reminding people of how much common edible crops have been genetically altered from their original forms, and the extent to which that’s been accomplished by uncontrolled gene transfers (through radiation and other means), as compared to the far more limited and precise change attainable through modern genetic modification techniques.