The day we started selectively breeding cultivars they became GMO's.
To be fair, though, even this process brought previously-unheard-of health consequences to the people involved:
quote:
"Dawn of Agriculture Took a Toll on Health"from Science Daily:
When populations around the globe started turning to agriculture around 10,000 years ago, regardless of their locations and type of crops, a similar trend occurred: The height and health of the people declined.
quote:
Jared Diamond in "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race" (1987):
Another example of paleopathology at work is the study of Indian skeletons from burial mounds in the Illinois and Ohio river valleys. At Dickson Mounds, located near the confluence of the Spoon and Illinois rivers, archaeologists have excavated some 800 skeletons that paint a picture of the health changes that occurred when a hunter-gatherer culture gave way to intensive maize farming around A. D. 1150. Studies by George Armelagos and his colleagues then at the University of Massachusetts show these early farmers paid a price for their new-found livelihood. Compared to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly 50 per cent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a theefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. "Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was bout twenty-six years," says Armelagos, "but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive."
We don't see our current stock of crops as disastrous because we are only looking at their affect on present populations. But the present populations are the ones that survived; the ones that evolved to accommodate and be less affected by the new, genetically-altered, foods. It's an unfair comparison.
To make the analogy between GMOs and the domestication of plants a proper one we have to look at the effect of early agriculture on the health of the people who lived (if lucky) through it.
When we make
that comparison we see that early GMOs had unpredictable and horrible consequences on human health. So the analogy isn't very comforting for people concerned about GMOs and their role in health problems.
There is one thing going for GMO in this analogy, though: the early GMOs seem to have provided an overall benefit.
What ultimately pushed early agriculture forward despite its side-effects was the fact that the benefits (whether real or perceived) outweighed the problems: people, probably as societies and not individually, were better off overall than they were before.
So GMOs, even though they may cause unforeseen health problems just like early domestication, might still be better in the long run if they possess some other benefit that outweighs potential risks. But those risks equal people's lives, so it's not a simple question.
And the knee-jerk analogy doesn't offer any answers.
Jon
Love your enemies!
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