For some reason, when you take a process that has traditionally been done with a baseball bat and start doing it with a knife, suddenly everyone comes out of the woodwork to talk about how your knife is too dull and it should either be done with a scalpel or not at all.
Just to tap the brakes for anyone wanting to take your analogy too far: a lot of objections about GMO in general are about the accelerated rate at which the changes can be made, relative to traditional methods (such as breeding). The worry is that we might be introducing altered genomes at a rate faster than we can observe and understand the downstream impacts.
So in those arguments (which are the majority, in GMO debates I've encountered), it's not about the knife being too dull, but being too sharp.
> the accelerated rate at which the changes can be made, relative to traditional methods
Citation needed there. I know the claim is common, but GMO is inserting one known mutation. How many mutations are there from parent to children is not something I can find a citation for, but since most mutations do nothing (or kill the child) there must be a lot of mutations involved in traditional breeding not one which means that GMO is much decelerated vs traditional breeding.
I suppose there's a distinction to be made between quantity and quality of changes, too. Certainly regular sex mixes things up a lot every time, but only within the bounds of the established gene pool (roughly).
Compare this to, say, the famous example of adding firefly genes to tobacco plants, to make them bioluminescent. That's a small change in terms of number of genes, but very "sudden" in terms of how far it is away from the norm — it would have taken a very long time for that to have happened as a result of natural (or even breeding-style) permutations of existing genes. So it's a "big" change in that sense, even if "small" in the other.
As far as citations go, I think the Wikipedia page on GMO foods is decent? [1]
For instance, the "Gene flow" section describes the risk of various unexpected consequences of GMO crops affecting their surroundings: "There are concerns that the spread of genes from modified organisms to unmodified relatives could produce species of weeds resistant to herbicides[303] that could contaminate nearby non-genetically modified crops, or could disrupt the ecosystem,[304][305] "
Of course in general, GMO crops are seen as safe (with lots of of "more long term research is needed" caveats), but the page has various links to concerns and ongoing research along the lines we're been discussing.
You’ll get a lot of answers to this question, I’ll try to give one that’s distinct from the others:
Practical observation of the two techniques reveals very different outcomes and behaviours. Selective breeding takes time and has intermediate stages that help you see if you’re on the right track. Direct modification: if you get it wrong you’re back to the drawing board.
Worse, legally they’re two very different animals that are treated very differently. If you want big bucks, you want to go the GMO route. The combination of the risky nature with the potential profits makes an ideal environment for malpractice, whether it’s cherry-picking data, deliberately making seeds that aren’t long-term viable or strategies such as long-term pesticides which have a detrimental effect of neighbouring farms.
So in theory, I don’t have a moral objection to GMO. In practice, I can see why the EU banned it.
> Selective breeding takes time and has intermediate stages that help you see if you’re on the right track.
Only if selective breeding needs more than one mutation, otherwise you are just waiting/searching for the desired mutation in a random sample.
> Direct modification: if you get it wrong you’re back to the drawing board.
Either way you are back the the drawing board. Just that with selective breeding you have no idea how much longer you will wait to get the desired mutation.
> how is GMO different from normal breeding where we hane no clue what mutations happen
The answer is in your question. We have no clue.
What we do not know about how living organisms recreate themselves is much more, and more important (IMO) than what we do know.
We know that DNA plays an important role. We also know that DNA is not the whole story.
We know very little about how DNA plays it role. We terribly confused with analogies to coding systems we know about, but it is clearly much more than a code.
The part of reproduction that does not involve DNA is almost a complete mystery.
In normal breeding we do not have to be concerned about what we do not know, when we start changing DNA it becomes very important
We are creating novel self replicating organisms, there is a lot that might go wrong. A very small chance of complete catastrophic results
Yes the science should have been better done but the worst case of GMO is the same as everything else.