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Taleb on GMOs: An Advocate Hiding in an Intellectual's Clothes
On a wide range of contentious issues, academics and researchers publish work that pretends to offer objective evidence, but which on closer inspection turns out to be advocacy masquerading behind intellectualisms, scientific methodology, footnotes and citations, and erudite language. A recent example is a paper by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and colleagues arguing that genetically modified foods pose such a risk to life on Earth that agricultural biotechnology should be banned under a strict application of the Precautionary Principle.
The noted Nassim Nicholas Taleb and colleagues published some thoughts late last year about why the Precautionary Principle should be applied to agricultural biotechnology, more commonly known as genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. Their argument appears thoughtful and erudite, but more closely examined, it reveals itself to be anti-GMO advocacy masquerading as intellectual argument, based on fears of the technology that have no basis in fact and which deny basic evolutionary biology.
The Precautionary Principle (with application to the Genetic Modification of Organisms) suggests that GMOs pose a “ruin” problem, “in which a system is at risk of total failure.” Taleb and colleagues believe that the risks from GMOs, even if small, can mount up and spread because our agricultural and natural systems are globally connected. So even though each risk may be “small and reasonable,” they “accumulate inevitably to certain irreversible harm.” Taleb et.al. say these potential threats pose the “risk of global harm.” Not just local harm, which we can live with, but global.
They argue that these characteristics warrant a strong Precautionary Principle approach, essentially a ban on GMOs, at least while much more research is done.
We believe that the PP should be evoked only in extreme situations: when the potential harm is systemic (rather than localized) and the consequences can involve total irreversible ruin, such as the extinction of human beings or all life on the planet.
Their description of the potential harm from GMOs varies; “irreversible and widespread damage,” “total ruin,” an “ecocide" causing “an irreversible termination of life at some scale, which could be planetwide.” Elsewhere, their language backs off the key element of irreversibility, saying the PP should be used in cases of potential "catastrophic harm for society as a whole,” or “potential global harm,” which is bad, but significantly less than the permanent “ruin” with which they begin.
But you get the picture. GMOs could cause such major damage that they should be banned, at least until we know more. Intellectually, that makes perfect sense. (Of course it also makes sense for other globally interconnected systems where small risks can spiral into major catastrophes, like the global financial system, or international air travel and the risk of the global spread of pandemic fatal disease. One wonders, why target GMOs?)
But when a reader looks for evidence that GMOs potentially portend “total irreversible ruin,” such as the “extinction of human beings or all life on the planet” or “an irreversible termination of life at some scale, which could be planetwide,” the evidence that actually shows up for such hyperbolic claims is merely evidence of advocacy masquerading as objective argument.
Beyond their speculative warning that some catastrophic harm could arise that we just don’t know about — an intellectually thin claim that unknown risks are always out there, a catchall which is true of just about anything — there isn’t much. They do cite a few studies suggesting that GMOs might do harm, but nothing that portends the cataclysms of their dire warnings. And among the research studies they cite are papers by the widely discredited anti-GMO advocate Gilles-Éric Séralini, including one paper that has been withdrawn from the journal that published it because of shoddy data.
That's the clearest evidence that this paper is advocacy masked in erudite intellectualism. But there's much more:
1. The authors warn ominously, as do opponents of GMOs, that “foods derived from GMOs are not tested in humans before they are marketed.” This is just silly. Beyond drugs for human consumption, which undergo extensive animal tests before humans are exposed to them, we don’t test any potentially toxic substances in humans. So by this standard we’d have to ban most of what is in commerce. Suspiciously, the authors fail to note that GM foods do undergo in vivo toxicological testing on animals, in vitro testing on cells, and extensive environmental testing in field trials. Nor do they note that the scientific consensus that nearly two decades of such research has found no evidence of harm to humans is more solid than the consensus on climate change.
2. The authors argue that
“Human experience over generations has chosen the biological organisms that are relatively safe for consumption,” and “while there are claims that all organisms include transgenic materials, those genetic transfers that are currently present were subject to selection over long times and survived.”
This suggestion — that we have slowly tested our foods and come up with a safe diet that evolved naturally over long times, and that GMOs are sudden and therefore fraught with unique peril — is common among GMO opponents who speculate about dire harms from agricultural biotechnology, but it is just ignorant of basic facts. Many of the foods we eat are species that were created in just the last few decades by blasting the entire genomes of their parent plants with radiological or chemical mutagens.
3. The authors make claims from the anti-GMO playbook that GMOs lead to increased use of pesticides. In many applications, just the opposite is true. Indeed the whole idea of giving a plant the ability to fight off pests is to reduce the need for pesticides to do that job. It’s one of the reasons farmers love the technology. A recent meta analysis (published after the Taleb paper) of 147 studies on pesticide application pre- and post-GMO crop adoption found that agricultural biotechnology reduced pesticide use 37 percent.
And besides being wrong, what does the argument about pesticide use have to do with the author’s argument for a PP to avert potential “catastrophic harm for society as a whole”? Nothing. It’s just anti-GMO advocacy.
4. There is a lengthy section debunking claims that GMOs can help provide food security, specifically targeting the one promising application, Golden Rice. That is logically inconsistent with what Taleb et.al argue early in their paper, that even if there are benefits from GMOs, they shouldn’t preclude a PP when there is the chance for irreversible catastrophic harm. If that is the case, then why go out of their way to debunk potential benefits of Golden Rice... if not simply to strengthen their anti-GMO case?
5. There is criticism of testing of GM rice on Chinese subjects who were not fully informed about what they’d be eating. Which was horrible, but has nothing to do with the PP argument and everything to do with opposition to agricultural biotechnology.
6. There is criticism of agribusiness and its profit motive. And of course there is specific attention paid to Monsanto...
A rational consumer should say: We do not wish to pay — or have our descendants pay — for errors made by executives of Monsanto, who are financially incentivized to focus on quarterly profits rather than long-term global impacts.
... which is also irrelevant to the basic argument the paper claims to make, and straight out of the anti-GMO playbook.
There are many other flaws in the piece. Taleb argues that only a probabilist like himself has the expertise to make the probabilistic argument that systemic risks build toward a likelihood of one. Knowledge of biology, he argues, is unnecessary. Maybe for the math part, but not if you are then going to suggest biological processes leading to ruin. You need to have something of a clue about such things, and Taleb et.al. demonstrate in several ways they don’t. At one point they say the global risk of GMOs is different from natural catastrophes that can’t spread because they are bounded by oceans or mountains, etc. To make this point they say:
Among the largest propagation events we commonly observe are forest fires, but even these are bounded in their impacts compared to a global scale.
A reasonably well-informed high school science student would know how ignorant that is. Mt. Pinatubo, a small volcanic eruption in the Philippines, lowered global average temperatures 0.5°c for two years. So it is fair to ask how much credence to give an argument speculating about potential global biological risk, if the authors don’t seem to have a grasp on basic science in this area. Great math built on flimsy foundations, tainted with all sorts of advocacy language, is not reliable as intellectually honest.
And there is this argumentative language (for which Taleb is well-known):
That proponents (of GMOs) dismiss the very existence of risk, attests to their poor understanding or blind extrinsically motivated advocacy.
This one is intriguing. Change the words slightly and it reads, “That opponents exaggerate the potential risk attests to their poor understanding or blind extrinsically motivated advocacy.” Pick up a mirror, Taleb et.al.
We need honest conversation about agricultural biotechnology, both about the facts regarding its health and environmental risks and benefits, and also about how this technology fits or conflicts with our values about large-scale monoculture farming and big companies having too much influence and about the harm that some modern technologies certainly do to the natural world. Sadly, the essay by Taleb et.al. poses as objective argument, but is clearly advocacy trying to hide in a rationalist’s clothing. It doesn’t hide very well, and in its deceit only further polarizes discussion of an important risk issue we do have to analyze carefully, objectively, and honestly.
An earlier version of this essay was posted on Medium. It prompted Taleb and supporters to raise personal questions about my motivations, but to date, no response on the merits of the criticism.
Image from Wikipedia
An ancient piece of chewing gum offers surprising insights into the human genome
All this from a wad of gum?
An artist's depiction of Lola.
- Researchers recently uncovered a piece of chewed-on birch pitch in an archaeological dig in Denmark.
- Conducting a genetic analysis of the material left in the birch pitch offered a plethora of insights into the individual who last chewed it.
- The gum-chewer has been dubbed Lola. She lived 5,700 years ago; and she had dark skin, dark hair, and blue eyes.
Five thousand and seven hundred years ago, "Lola" — a blue-eyed woman with dark skin and hair — was chewing on a piece of pitch derived from heating birch bark. Then, this women spit her chewing gum out into the mud on an island in Denmark that we call Syltholm today, where it was unearthed by archaeologists thousands of years later. A genetic analysis of the chewing gum has provided us with a wealth of information on this nearly six-thousand-year-old Violet Beauregarde.
This represents the first time that the human genome has been extracted from material such as this. "It is amazing to have gotten a complete ancient human genome from anything other than bone," said lead researcher Hannes Schroeder in a statement.
"What is more," he added, "we also retrieved DNA from oral microbes and several important human pathogens, which makes this a very valuable source of ancient DNA, especially for time periods where we have no human remains."
In the pitch, researchers identified the DNA of the Epstein-Barr virus, which infects about 90 percent of adults. They also found DNA belonging to hazelnuts and mallards, which were likely the most recent meal that Lola had eaten before spitting out her chewing gum.
Insights into ancient peoples
The birch pitch was found on the island of Lolland (the inspiration for Lola's name) at a site called Syltholm. "Syltholm is completely unique," said Theis Jensen, who worked on the study for his PhD. "Almost everything is sealed in mud, which means that the preservation of organic remains is absolutely phenomenal.
"It is the biggest Stone Age site in Denmark and the archaeological finds suggest that the people who occupied the site were heavily exploiting wild resources well into the Neolithic, which is the period when farming and domesticated animals were first introduced into southern Scandinavia."
Since Lola's genome doesn't show any of the markers associated with the agricultural populations that had begun to appear in this region around her time, she provides evidence for a growing idea that hunter-gatherers persisted alongside agricultural communities in northern Europe longer than previously thought.
Her genome supports additional theories on northern European peoples. For example, her dark skin bolsters the idea that northern populations only recently acquired their light-skinned adaptation to the low sunlight in the winter months. She was also lactose intolerant, which researchers believe was the norm for most humans prior to the agricultural revolution. Most mammals lose their tolerance for lactose once they've weaned off of their mother's milk, but once humans began keeping cows, goats, and other dairy animals, their tolerance for lactose persisted into adulthood. As a descendent of hunter-gatherers, Lola wouldn't have needed this adaptation.
A hardworking piece of gum

A photo of the birch pitch used as chewing gum.
Theis Jensen
These findings are encouraging for researchers focusing on ancient peoples from this part of the world. Before this study, ancient genomes were really only ever recovered from human remains, but now, scientists have another tool in their kit. Birch pitch is commonly found in archaeological sites, often with tooth imprints.
Ancient peoples used and chewed on birch pitch for a variety of reasons. It was commonly heated up to make it pliable, enabling it to be molded as an adhesive or hafting agent before it settled. Chewing the pitch may have kept it pliable as it cooled down. It also contains a natural antiseptic, and so chewing birch pitch may have been a folk medicine for dental issues. And, considering that we chew gum today for no other reason than to pass the time, it may be that ancient peoples chewed pitch for fun.
Whatever their reasons, chewed and discarded pieces of birch pitch offer us the mind-boggling option of learning what someone several thousands of years ago ate for lunch, or what the color of their hair was, their health, where their ancestors came from, and more. It's an unlikely treasure trove of information to be found in a mere piece of gum.
How to reduce gun violence without taking people’s guns
Hospitals often deal with the aftermath of gun violence, but they can play a key role in preventing it.
- Approximately 41,000 people are killed each year due to gun violence. That's more lives lost to guns than to car accidents. So why do we devote more attention (and money) to car safety than we do gun safety?
As Northwell Health CEO Michael Dowling points out, the deaths are not the whole story. The physical, emotional, and psychological trauma reverberates through communities and the public at-large. "This is not just not about guns," says Dowling," this is a serious public health issue and we've got to look at it that way. - Hospitals often deal with the aftermath of gun violence, but they can play a key role in preventing it. Medical staff are trained to assess health risk factors. Dowling argues that a similar approach is needed for guns. "We have to be much more holistic in our approach."
Interested in getting involved? On December 15th, Northwell Health is hosting a hybrid virtual / in-person Gun - Violence Prevention Forum, where participants can engage around the shared goal of raising their collective voices and catalyzing action to enact needed systems change. Learn more and register for the public forum here: https://preventgunviolence.com/
Why the U.S. is trapped in "endless war"
Instead of just Afghanistan, the U.S. military ought to withdraw from the entire Middle East and much of the rest of the world.
- There is a relationship between establishing foreign military bases and the incidence of war.
- Unless the U.S. completely withdraws from the Middle East, we will continue fighting there.
- Oftentimes, wars — such as the war on terrorism — fail to achieve our geopolitical objectives.
Nearly a decade ago, around the height of U.S. involvement in the war in Afghanistan, I witnessed the arrival of amputees and other badly wounded military personnel arriving at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. A trauma center comparable to elite U.S. hospitals, Landstuhl is the main U.S. military hospital in Europe and has received thousands of casualties from Afghanistan, Iraq, and other war zones over the last 20 years of continuous U.S. warfare.
Curiously, as the U.S. military withdraws from Afghanistan and has only a few thousand troops in Iraq and Syria, the Pentagon now is spending $1 billion building a new military hospital in Germany to replace Landstuhl. After my visit to Landstuhl, I asked former Washington Post Pulitzer Prize-winning military reporter Walter Pincus what we should make of spending $1 billion to replace this world-class medical facility.
Without missing a beat Pincus said, "It implies we're going to keep fighting."
More military bases mean more war
Beyond the new hospital in Germany, there are many signs that despite the Afghanistan withdrawal, the U.S. military is going to keep fighting. Above all, dozens of U.S. military bases will remain in nearly every country in the Greater Middle East. These bases have played key roles in launching U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and at least 19 other countries since 2001. An examination of two decades of war and the longer history of U.S. wars since independence suggests that unless U.S. leaders shut down more of this military infrastructure, the country will continue to fight "endless wars" far beyond Afghanistan, resulting in more amputees and other wounded and dead arriving in Germany.
Since World War II, the United States has maintained thousands of bases in foreign lands — a larger collection of foreign bases than any country, people, or empire in world history. Today the military controls around 750 military bases in some 80 countries and colonies outside the 50 states and Washington, DC. The rest of the world's militaries combined likely control fewer than 250 foreign bases; China has just five, plus bases in Tibet.
An unprecedented collection of U.S. bases began to dot the Middle East shortly after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. These bases as well as installations in Germany and other parts of Europe and as far away as Thailand and Japan have enabled permanent war since 2001, and a longer series of wars and invasions since the 1980s. In Qatar and Bahrain, the Air Force and Navy have built large regional headquarters. In Kuwait, the Army has had a major presence since the 1991 Gulf War, totaling around eleven base sites now. There are 13 base sites in Turkey, six in Oman, three in the United Arab Emirates, two in both Jordan and Djibouti, as well as a presence in Egypt. The military maintains acknowledged and secretive installations in both Saudi Arabia and Israel, numbering eleven and eight respectively. In Iraq, the military still operates from around six installations. Four more are in Syria. In Afghanistan, after the official withdrawal, 650 troops will remain between the U.S. embassy and Kabul International Airport; U.S. special forces, military contractors, and the CIA almost certainly will continue to operate in the country.
Other U.S. bases are nearby in Greece (eight sites), Somalia (five), Cyprus, Tunisia, Georgia, Kosovo, and on the Indian Ocean island Diego Garcia. The Navy has at least one aircraft carrier — a floating base — on an effectively permanent basis in the Persian/Arabian Gulf. Despite this massive infrastructure, the Biden administration recently has explored creating new military facilities in Central Asian countries to enable continued attacks on the Taliban and other militants in Afghanistan.
Military and other government leaders have long portrayed U.S. bases in the Middle East and other parts of the globe as defensive in nature, as deterrents, as forces of stability and peace. One need only look at the role U.S. bases abroad have played in launching the last 20 years of offensive wars to question such claims. The history of U.S. wars since 1776 likewise reveals that when bases are occupying foreign lands, they are not likely to be defensive in nature. Bases abroad are generally offensive in nature. They are designed to threaten, to deploy military force, and to wage offensive wars. Research funded by the U.S. Army indicates that since the 1950s, a U.S. military presence abroad has been correlated with U.S. forces initiating military conflicts. In other words, there appears to be a relationship between establishing bases outside the United States and the incidence of wars.
Military force: the main tool of U.S. foreign policy

U.S. history shows that bases beyond U.S. borders have made war and the deployment of military force too easy and too tempting for politicians, government officials, and other elites with the power to shape government decisions. Bases abroad have provided what is by design an easily deployable form of offensive military power. With this offensive power readily available, elites often have been tempted to advocate for its use to advance their own economic and political interests and the interests of fellow business leaders, politicians, and entrepreneurs.
As anthropologist Catherine Lutz and others have said, bases and troops abroad long have been the main tool in the U.S. foreign policy toolbox. They have been the hammers that have left little room for diplomacy and other foreign policy tools. And when hammers dominate one's toolbox, Lutz says, everything starts looking like a nail. The hammers become all too tempting, especially when mostly male policymakers perceive them, consciously or unconsciously, as visible demonstrations of their masculinity and strength.
Notably, the historical record shows that U.S. wars often have led U.S. leaders to establish new bases abroad. The establishment of more bases abroad, in turn, has often led to more wars, which has often led to more bases, in a repeating pattern over time. Put another way, bases frequently beget wars, which can beget more bases, which can beget more wars, and so on.
By this, I do not just mean that the construction of bases abroad has enabled more war. I mean that the construction of bases abroad actually has made aggressive, offensive war more likely. Since the revolution that won independence from Britain, the construction and maintenance of extraterritorial bases has increased the likelihood that these bases would be used to wage wars of aggression. Riffing off the famous line from the baseball movie Field of Dreams, one might say, "If we build them, wars will come." Except the reference is to bases rather than baseball: if we build bases abroad, wars likely will come. To be clear, bases abroad are not the sole cause of U.S. wars. Bases beyond U.S. borders are, however, a particularly important cause, along with forces related to imperialism, capitalism, racism, patriarchy, nationalism, and religious chauvinism.
Still, the "if" in "If we build them, wars will come" is an important reminder of the choices involved in both the history and the future of the United States' relationship to war. There was nothing inevitable about past U.S. wars. At times, U.S. leaders have avoided wars, often because of pressure from social movements and other protest. Today, there are choices to be made about the country's future.
Does war even achieve our geopolitical objectives?
The past 20 years of war have resulted in the deaths of 15,000 U.S. troops and hundreds of thousands wounded. Two decades of fighting have meant 3 to 4 million or more dead, on all sides, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, and Syria, alone. Tens of millions have been injured. At least 38 million have been displaced. For U.S. taxpayers, the costs of the war on terror will exceed $7 trillion. Imagine what these trillions could have done to protect against pandemics, to provide universal healthcare, to end homelessness and hunger, to rebuild public schools, and to erase college debt. Meanwhile, the war on terror has been a failure on its own terms: responding to al Qaeda's attacks with war has created more organizations, such as the Islamic State, willing to use terror as a political tool.
Despite the catastrophe of the last 20 years of war, many government officials and other elites appear content to perpetuate the status quo. Many are undeterred by the pattern of moving from one catastrophic war to the next: from Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya to Syria to Yemen to…
With U.S. troops currently or recently engaged in combat in 13 or more countries, interventionist military and civilian officials are already planning for the next major war. A growing number of politicians, pundits, and think-tank analysts are talking openly about the inevitability of a future war with China. Such talk runs the risk of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy and should terrify us all: a war between two nuclear armed powers and the two wealthiest nations on earth could dwarf the horrific death and destruction of the last two decades.
Why is the U.S. military everywhere?
While a new $1 billion military hospital rises in Germany, we should ask where else we could have built that hospital and how else we could have spent $1 billion. We should ask why there are any U.S. bases in Germany today, 30 years after the end of the Cold War and more than 75 years after the end of World War II. We should ask why U.S. troops are not withdrawing from the entire Middle East rather than Afghanistan alone.
Beyond asking questions, U.S. citizens and leaders can demand the country give up on offensive foreign bases and our long pattern of war. It may sound radical — though it should not — but we can demand a foreign policy built not around fighting but around diplomacy, international cooperation, violence reduction, and principles at the heart of the best traditions in U.S. history: democracy, equity, and justice.
David Vine is Professor of Anthropology at American University in Washington, DC. David is the author of a trilogy of books about war and peace including, The United States of War: A Global History of America's Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State, which is out in paperback September 7. David is also the author of Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World and Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military on Diego Garcia.
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