I get that, but it's not like the body isn't accustomed to a wide range of food inputs. We know what chemical structures are deeply harmful to the body and what are digestible; assuming GMO variants are not totally different from the original we can rely on heuristics to determine their toxicity, can't we?
It seems a little silly to outright dismiss GMO foods as long as they do not deviate too far from their parents
You are making a case that is worth making and valuable, however:
> We know what chemical structures are deeply harmful to the body and what are digestible
Implying that nutrition is by and large a solved problem instead of a hugely moving target that is upended every ten years for knowledge of a completely different direction is very incorrect and harms the rest of that you are saying by proximity. Nutrition is not solved. We know what things will kill you for sure (and generally how fast), but things that kill you very slowly or that might very subtly be good for you are hard to measure and therefore not well documented.
>We know what chemical structures are deeply harmful to the body and what are digestible
No we don't, we only really start looking at new kinds of toxins when they start affecting us.
GMO have one or many gene flipped, as a result many things are affected at once but genetic engineers/companies will look at optimising what interests them and ignoring the rest of the effect for the sake of cost cutting/simplification/shorter time to market. (These things have affected civil engineering companies too, which make your bridges dangerous but bridges are much simpler to reason compared to a multicellular organism like plants and bridges don't reproduce or evolve on their own. The seeds will not be picked by intercontinental birds and dropped somewhere where they start displacing local varieties or evolve into something dangerous (toxic?) for humans. While bridges have small life, genetic modification can survive for a very long time.
Some changes induced by GMO process will take long time test.
By that time it would have spread to billions of humans, thanks to modern industrial process and globalization.
Heck, we can't reliably alter genes in humans which makes them taller then how can you be sure of GMO crops?
Genetic engineers look at correlations in genes then they try to flip some of them randomly and if they observe positive change in the feature they are optimizing, they call it success if it doesn't produce immediate negative effects.
GMO variety also isn't sterile, so it might evolve into something dangerous. Why it shouldn't? The genetic history of the plant which stopped it from being toxic to humans, encoded in its genes has now been edited out by genetic engineers.
GMO come from flawed understanding of how genes work. Most GMO supporters claim that the nutations we are inducing through GMO process are also capable of happening in nature on its own.
Sure, but genes not just carry info of function but genetic history too that's how we remember how to fight viruses/backterias. A person who has been burned by keep their hand on flame will not try the same second time, same way a planet which has mutated in past in favour of something which made it resistant and survive in nature will select against the feature which made it survive.
GMO people think mutations happen at random, without any peeking at past mutations (genetic history) which is incorrect assumption.
> selective breeding takes a lot of time and for the species that we eat today we've had hundreds to thousands of years to observe if it harms us or not
Pardon my ignorance, but how is this different from GMO? Sure, it took a while to get to that particular cultivar with selective breeding, but at some point we got there and started to scale up the production. Where's the guarantee that the last few mutations before scaling up were not harmful on the very long term? It's not that they ran long experimental trials before marketing the tangelo...
It seems a little silly to outright dismiss GMO foods as long as they do not deviate too far from their parents