"Feed me, Seymour"

It's tough not to agree with your statement. As I look at it, genetic manipulation on the micro level is just another benefit (perhaps) to being a more complex organism; expressing another survival technique.

Technically speaking, this is likely the most efficient way toward more complexity of evolution in our living time-scale. We just can't know yet. But the very same naivete that drives our need to explore and expand is tightly coupled with fear; questionable returns, highly speculative unpredictable outcomes, including potentially irrevocable damage to the planet or our species.

But to be clear, as it was mentioned about natural genetic speciation that process has continued from our agricultural learnings; a very inefficient system with mostly predictable results. It's inefficient and predictable because that's what has worked best so far; the organism itself "knows' no better. We're just exploiting it's natural tendencies to grow and reproduce.

The last I read up on it we'd only accomplished deciphering 0.01% the correlations of human genes, their expression, dependence upon other genes, both generative and perturbative expression dependence, and generally speaking, the processes for the organism to develop as intended. And we've done more or less so with other species.

But there still remains huge gulfs of understanding how these systems work. As in any industry, the folks with money like to do unusual things with their idle thought cycles; find ways to be more efficient to make more money faster, in a seeming black hole analogy and "scorched earth" approach that may or may not be natural selection's ultimate choice of winners of the survival game; they've only increased their odds and the game runs long to draw a best purse.

In the mean time we can manually cross-breed to our hearts content, clone tissues, wash, rinse repeat. Again, predictable outcomes. But "the old fashioned way" of modification, with only a fairly rare exceptions, is in no way comparable to scientifically genetic modification. We're slicing in portions of genetic code from species to species, in areas and groups of areas that are only marginally understood and innocuously described as "areas of interest." Which essentially means an area in a genome that's been have found to react a predictable manner; knowledge with extremely. narrow parameters.

This is the process of science, evolution. Just because it's new and scary doesn't mean that it is; only that it has the potential to be so. But also to be of astounding grace and capacity. We'll have to wait and see.

Having said that, one way or the other I'll likely never live long enough to witness these outcomes. But in the mean time, I've still have the old style body so I believe it's most beneficial to provide it with nourishment that is recognizable.

Wheat, corn, soy, beets, carots, etc. have shown great production values, making huge sums of money on, literally, a well granted, well presented proposal, but more likely to be providing to be a false economy in producing foods that are body doesn't recognizable from it's native environment. There are still plenty of examples of "new world" species, many largely genetically untouched, that our bodies don't recognize, can't digest, and manifests as adverse reactions above the mean; immunological problems, syndromes and disease that are entirely new and as of yet unexplainable. That is, except the glaring experimental variable of genetic modification in ways that appear to be incompatible within an environment loosely describe as "native."

For the moment "native" describes species evolved, adapted specifically to earth, or so we believe. You could argue that splicing a frog gene into a corn gene as "native." It's proportedly native to this planet. But they are also native to their specific environment. What is the difference of a specific environment on Europa comparable with a compatible environment on Earth Technically such a modification might be still considered "native." But to what? And if life originated from elsewhere what are the consequences to splicing it's genes with ours as opposed to from frog to corn? What will be the health consequences to our biosystem?

Our bodys are still working on a time-scale of millennia. So please forgive me the appearance of being a luddite if I choose not to eat a green-bean that just last year was provided a cell structure using copyrighted life's computer code without my knowledge.

If yo do, do you then become agribusiness' intellectual property?

Should then consumer protection labeling laws list scan-able nutritional code so that you can determine that it doesn't containt you'd be eating StrawberryCGgk1639rry665bbkoa that you've resulted positive as an allergen?