The argument from design

I received a response to a recent post in the form of an (actually quite friendly) email that posed a question I've been asked before, and that I thought might deserve a post of its own.  Here is an excerpt of the email:

Many atheist/skeptics base their disbelief on a lack of evidence for a deity.  If God exists, there should be evidence in the world around us.  A universe created by an omnipotent power should be different than one that was created by random processes.  If you're being honest, you have to admit that the universe we live in seems pretty fine-tuned for life, isn't it?  Scientists have identified dozens of fundamental numbers whose values are just right for the existence of matter, space, planets, stars, and life.  If any of those numbers were any different, life couldn't exist.  Doesn't it look very much like some intelligence set the values of the dials just right so as to produce a universe that we could live in?

This argument has been widely trumpeted by Christians who are not biblical literalists -- who may, in fact, accept such empirically supported models as the Big Bang and organic evolution, and who buy that the Earth is not six thousand years old, as the biblical chronology would have you believe, but six-some-odd billion years old.  But despite these non-fundamentalists' buying the whole scientific process (which is all to the good), they still can't quite let go of the idea that a higher power must be behind the whole thing.  And the "fine-tuning of the universe" is one of their main arguments.

It's called the strong anthropic principle.  The universe is such a hospitable place, they say, that god has to have set it up just for us.  But there's just one flaw in the whole thing; the central contention, that the universe is hospitable... just isn't true.

I mean, it all sounds very nice, doesn't it?  God created the universe with us in mind, and this produced awesome places like Maui and the Florida Keys.  The problem is, even here on our home planet, things aren't all that... friendly.  Much of the Earth's land surface has a climate or topography that makes it pretty unsuitable for human life.  (Being that it's midwinter in upstate New York, I'd throw my own home town into that category.)  Even some of the more congenial places, places that are warm enough and have enough water and fertile soil to keep us alive, are prone to natural disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanoes, and mudslides.  And if you leave the Earth, things only get worse; most of the universe is damn near a vacuum, and what's not is filled with black holes, quasars, asteroid belts, supernovae, neutron stars, and Wolf-Rayet gamma ray bursters -- the last-mentioned being capable of emitting an outburst of radiation so powerful that it could blast an entire solar system into oblivion.

Yes, well, what about the fact that all of the fundamental constants are set just right to produce matter?  This was the subject of Sir Martin Rees' book Just Six Numbers, in which he describes what the universe would be like if fundamental constants such as the curvature of space, the fine-structure constant, Planck's constant, the speed of light, and so on, were different -- and all of these alterations produce a universe that would be inhospitable to the formation of stars and planets, much less life.  And because we can't at the moment see any other reason why the constants are what they are -- i.e., there is no fundamental principle from which they can be derived, they seem arbitrary -- Rees and others argue that this is evidence of fine tuning.

I see two problems with this.  The first is that it is an argument from ignorance; because we have not yet come up with a unified theory that shows why the speed of light is three hundred million meters per second, and not (for example) 25 miles per hour, doesn't mean that we won't eventually do so.  You can't prove anything from a lack of knowledge.

Second, it seems to me that the strong anthropic principle is a backwards argument; it's taking what did happen, and arguing that there's a reason that it must have happened that way, that if it weren't designed, it wouldn't have happened that way.  It's as if I were dealt a straight flush in poker (an exceedingly unlikely occurrence) and I argued that because it's unlikely, someone must have rigged the deck.

All we know, honestly, is that it did happen, for the very good reason that if it hadn't happened that way, we wouldn't be here to talk about it.  This is called the weak anthropic principle -- even if the fundamental physical constants are arbitrary, there's no design implied, because in a universe with different physical constants, we wouldn't exist to discuss the matter.  The only place such arguments are possible are universes where life can occur.  Physicist Bob Park summarizes this viewpoint with the Yogi Berra-like statement, "If things were different, then things would not be like things are."  Put that way, it's hard to see how it's an argument for a deity, much less an omnipotent one with our best interests in mind.

Anyhow, that's my response to the Argument from Design.  Like I said, the person who wrote to me was really quite friendly about the whole thing, which (although we disagree about some fundamental ideas) is certainly an improvement from the spittle-flecked responses I sometimes get that suggest Satan is, as we speak, sharpening up his torture equipment with me in mind.  So, for that, I'll just say, "Thanks for writing."  Civilized discussion is, as always, the goal around here.

Wanted: Mars colonists. Must be willing to travel.

Interested in exploring strange new worlds?  Eager to go where no one has gone before?

Mars One, a non-profit group based in the Netherlands, wants to establish a permanent colony on Mars by the year 2023 -- and is looking for astronauts.

They're serious about this.  Astronaut selection will begin this year, they say, and requires no previous experience.  They are looking for candidates that have "a deep sense of purpose, willingness to build and maintain healthy relationships, the capacity for self-reflection and ability to trust.  They must be resilient, adaptable, curious, creative and resourceful."  Six teams of four will eventually be selected and trained, and the first launch, scheduled for 2023, will take one of those teams -- "decided democratically" -- to the Red Planet.

The remaining teams will go on subsequent flights at two-year intervals, with the twenty-four astronauts ultimately being the founders of a permanent Mars colony.

Supplies will be sent on unmanned craft ahead of time, and (if all goes well) the materials will be there for use once the colonists arrive.

The training sounds rigorous, and will include "simulated missions, practice in a restricted mobility environment, and lessons in electronics, equipment repair, basic and critical medical care."  But after all, they'd better be ready for a year-long flight in cramped quarters, not to mention being prepared for dealing with all of the ills and accidents that human beings are subject to.  If one of them gets the flu, it's not like they'll be all that close to a pharmacy.

The whole thing sounds pretty thrilling, but there's one significant downside -- it's a one-way trip.  One launched, there's no coming back.  As you see Earth recede in the spaceship's windows, you'd better wave goodbye -- because you'll never stand on Terran soil again.  For that reason alone, I wouldn't sign up -- even if I were young enough, which I'm not.  (There's no explicit maximum age for volunteers, but practically speaking, I'd be 63 by the time the first launch took place, which seems a bit geriatric to begin a career in space exploration.)  The fact is, I'm a little too fond of my home planet to commit to leaving it forever.

There's also the inevitable problem of there being no knowledge of how living on Mars would affect human physiology.  Mars' gravity is about 38% of Earth's, for example.  I can see how this might make some problems better (e.g. lower back pain), but you have to wonder how to get around issues like the muscle atrophy and bone decalcification that plagued the men and women on the International Space Station. 

Another problem is the lower sunlight intensity.  Neuroscientists are only beginning to understand the effects that sunlight exposure have on neurotransmitter levels, circadian rhythms, and the immune system, and Mars would have at best 50% less sunlight, because of its greater distance from the Sun.  It's to be hoped that the colonists would have access to such things as broad-spectrum artificial light, which could ameliorate any problems, but it's something to consider.

There's also the problem of resources.  You may have heard about the Biosphere 2 Project, in which volunteer scientists were shut into a self-contained ecosystem in the Arizona desert.  Ecologists and physical chemists had worked for years to come up with an optimum balance, because the idea was that nothing but sunlight was supposed to come from outside -- the plants were to act as air purifiers and food producers, every drop of water was recycled, all electricity was produced by solar cells, and so on.  The 12,700 square meter facility had separate biomes (a rain forest, a miniature ocean, a coral reef, a savannah grassland), and was so big it generated its own weather (condensed moisture on the glass ceiling at night fell as "rain").  But even with all of that planning, the project had to be modified during its two-year (1991-1993) run -- oxygen levels fell, probably because of uptake by soil microbes, resulting in the necessity to artificially inject oxygen into the air; rapidly-reproducing pest species such as cockroaches, ants, and morning glory vines exploded in population; some of the "biomes" (especially the grassland) didn't do well.  Clearly, there were unaccounted-for variables.  And while the Biosphere 2 volunteers could just ask for help if things went too wrong, our Mars colonists won't have that option -- they will be entirely on their own to produce what they need, and deal with any problems that occur, in a far more hostile environment.

Last, I worry about the psychological effects.  Humans are social primates; we are happiest in free-flowing large groups.  What would it be like to spend two years, and never see anyone but the same three people, every day?  What happens when frictions occur?  You've got nowhere to go; the first colony's living quarters would almost certainly be smaller than Biosphere 2 was.  And outside the walls, all you have is the endless, lifeless Martian deserts.  The idea makes me shudder a little.

But anyway, if you're interested in volunteering, click the link at the beginning of this post, and check it out.  And while I won't be there with you in line, I do think it's a fascinating opportunity.  The idea that humans may, for the first time, leave this little blue and green planet where we were born, and establish an outpost elsewhere in space -- well, for someone who was raised on Star Trek, it just seems like the first step toward greater things.  And who knows, maybe there will turn out to be life on Mars?

Quantum downloadable medicines!

Okay, now I've seen it all.

This morning I stumbled across the single most idiotic thing I've ever run into.  Don't even try to tell me that there are stupider beliefs out there, because I flatly refuse to believe it.  Any human being on this planet who believed anything more ridiculous than this has got to have been taken care of by Darwinian natural selection centuries ago.

The name of the website should put you on notice immediately; it's "QuantumMAN: The World's First Downloadable Medicine."  Yes, this is exactly what it sounds like; you enter your credit card information, pay a fee (most of them seemed to be between US$25 and $100), and click "download."  The "medicine" downloads through your computer -- directly into you.  Voilà!  You're cured!

How could this possibly work, you might ask?  Well, of course, it doesn't, but how do they say it works?  I watched some of their informational videos, and here's a transcript of the explanation:

ZAG, a private humanitarian medical research group, develops biodata programs using its quantum computer.  The programs are accessible via a "Portal," a means of quantum teleportation.  This Portal can then be unlocked by a user through the use of a Portal Access Key (PAK), a number string developed to open the Portal for a desired product.  PAKs can be accessed via a personal computer, mobile device, or tablet.  Once opened, the biodata programs can be transferred to your brain's neural network (also a quantum computer).  These programs then rapidly and repeatedly deliver physiological directives to the user's body to impart their health benefits.

Yes, you got that right: for a hundred bucks, you can access completely useless quack cures right in the comfort of your own home.

Of course, you may not see improvement right away, because sometimes the placebo effect doesn't work, so you might need repeated doses of "biodata" to fix whatever ails you.  You are cautioned that "each PAK is good for one dose only" and that you might need to "upload 5-8 doses every ten days as needed."  You can also "upload multiple doses simultaneously."  So, we're talking potentially thousands of dollars here to effect a "cure."

My vote for the funniest part of the whole site is at the very bottom of the "Catalog" page, where we are told, "Beware of imposters!  Only Portal Access Keys (PAKs) uploaded directly from this site... are genuine and effective."  Because heaven knows you wouldn't want to upload nothing from a bunch of quacks who were trying to rip you off, right?

So, what are they claiming to be able to cure?  Well, the easiest answer is, "everything."  There are "cures" for autoimmune diseases, insomnia, chronic pain, constipation, and obesity; there are "vaccines" for malaria, the common cold, and the flu; there is one that "reverses meth addiction," giving "lifetime immunity in just nine months;" there are sex drive boosters; there is even a "quantum massage."  In this last one, we upload the "Portal" prior to getting a conventional massage, and then the following happens, which you have to read verbatim to get the full effect:

ZAG, the private humanitarian medical research group that employs QuantumMAN™, has now elevated massage into the quantum realm. It has developed QMassage™ (Quantum Massage) that transfers data that provides the incredible health and healing benefits described above. You simply purchase QMassage™ and receive a number of its "Portal Access Keys™ (PAKs™). Accessing these PAKs™ via your personal computer, smartphone or tablet allows your body to quantumly receive (upload) QMassage™'s master programs. Derived from quantum physics, QMassage™ literally turbo boosts a therapist's massage into the quantum realm providing results not achievable by conventional massage alone. Or used as a standalone product, QMassage™ literally massages your entire body inside and out within its multiple realms.

Yes!  That's what I want!  Quantum massages that I can quantumly upload into the quantum realm of my quantum neural network!  All my subatomic particles are just quivering with anticipation!  Quantum quantum quantum!

There's no way to tell from the site if anyone has actually fallen for this; I didn't even see anything like a hit tracker.  And websites, of course, are much cheaper and easier to maintain than actual real-world businesses, especially given that (other than the cost of registering the domain name) this company has zero overhead.  No product, either, of course, which also lowers operating expenses.  Now, there's a business model for you: set up a website that does absolutely nothing, let it run, and let the placebo effect and human gullibility start the cash flow.

This whole thing left me simultaneously laughing out of sheer astonishment, and crying for the future of humanity that there could be anyone so catastrophically dumb that they think this could possibly work.  And as I said at the beginning: if ever find anything you think is a more ridiculous idea than this, please don't tell me about it.  For one thing, I'm not sure I'd believe you.  And second, if it turned out that you were right, I would thereby revoke my membership in the human race, and look for a ride on the next UFO off the planet.

"Crisis actors:" the conspiracy theorists reach a new low

Whenever I think the conspiracy theorists of the world have reached an all-time low, and can go no lower, they surprise me by getting out the shovels.

Of course, it's hard to beat the "9/11 is an inside job" thing.  Believe me, I'm no apologist for much of what our government does, but the idea that government operatives would bomb the World Trade Center, costing over a thousand lives, in order to provide false pretenses for entering a war against Iraq, is absurd and reprehensible.  And of course, you have the ongoing chemtrails foolishness, blaming the government (acting through HAARP, or some chemical additive to jet fuel, or both) for Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy -- as if nature by itself isn't good enough at cooking up disastrous storms.

But now we have a new nadir.  The contention:  the Sandy Hook massacre never happened.  No children were killed.  The grieving parents and horrified first-responders were actors.  The whole thing was set up by the government...

... to give momentum for overturning the Second Amendment.

Don't believe me?  Go here if you can stand to, where you can watch a video explaining the whole thing (I got through about five minutes of it before nausea forced me to shut it off).  Otherwise, perhaps a photograph will suffice:

The whole thing is thoroughly debunked in this link at Snopes; but that won't stop the conspiracy nuts, of course.  These are the same people who think that Theodore Roosevelt's son, Kermit Roosevelt, was an actor who played the part of Adolf Hitler during World War II (in this mythical version of world history, no Jews were killed in concentration camps), and was spirited away by American CIA agents after the war was over, and spent the rest of his life as... Walt Disney.

Again, if you don't believe me... [link]

So it's not like any amount of evidence is going to convince these people.  They have long since abandoned any respect for actual evidence, logic, and rationality for their own warped view of humanity.

You know, despite my poking fun at irrational beliefs, I really do try to be tolerant.  I do the best I can to understand people whose views differ from my own, and not just to be an arrogant asshole.  I really, honestly believe that everyone has a right to his/her own opinions, as long as those opinions don't include forcing me to believe differently than I do.

I might make an exception in the case of these folks, however.  It is my considered stance that these folks are badly in need of a punch in the jaw.  If they really think that anyone, anyone has the right to demean what the parents, friends, and community of the victims of the Sandy Hook killings went through (and are still going through), in order to promote their own ridiculous, counterfactual worldview -- well, all I can say is that they're wrong.  And somehow they should be forced to take down that website, and after that, vanish into the obscurity that they so richly deserve.

A linguistic analysis of the Antichrist

Despite the fact that I scour the internet daily for weird news, sometimes I miss good ones.   I try not to fret about these oversights, however -- because one characteristic of woo-woos is that they never, ever let a claim die.  So if I miss a crazy, outlandish story, no worries; it'll be back.

Again and again and again.

One such bizarre claim, that I missed on its first go-round but which is recently repeating its circuit of ultra-religious right wingers (I've seen it posted on Facebook twice in the last week), is a story that contends that Jesus actually revealed the name of the Antichrist in the bible.  Never mind that wackos who are way too fond of the Book of Revelation have tried before to pin that title on various world leaders; Mikhail Gorbachev, Pope Benedict XVI, the Emperor Nero, and Ronald Reagan, for example, all had their supporters as being Satan's Right-hand Man.  (As for Reagan, his candidacy came about when someone noticed that his first, middle, and last names all had six letters -- 666, get it?  But my vote goes for Pope Benedict, who looks just like Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars.  I mean, can't you just picture him throwing lightning from his fingertips, and vaporizing protesters who support marriage equality, all the while cackling maniacally?)

But they're not the ones that the End Times crowd are after these days.  The whole thing apparently started with a 2009 YouTube video that claimed that the biblical passage "I beheld Satan as lightning fall from the heavens" (Luke 10:18) was actually encoding the real name of the Antichrist.  Here's the excerpt that's been making the rounds recently:

When I started doing a little research, I found the Greek word for 'lightning' is 'astrape,' and the Hebrew equivalent is 'baraq.'  I thought that was fascinating...  And I wondered what the word 'heights’ is, and I looked it up in the dictionary, and it’s 'bamah...'  If spoken by a Jewish rabbi today, influenced by the poetry of Isaiah, he would say these words in Hebrew … 'I saw Satan as Baraq Ubamah.'

 Righty-o.  Obama is the Antichrist.  Not that we have any kind of political agenda here, of course.

The only problem is, don't use a linguistic argument when there are lots of linguists around who are smarter than you are.  An expert in Hebrew and Aramaic, Rabbi Dan Ehrenkrantz, weighed in on the contention in an article in Salon, and he said that there are several problems with it.  First, Ehrenkrantz says, the Hebrew root "bamah" doesn't mean "heights" as in "heavens," it means "heights" as in "hills."  Sticking a "u-" prefix on the word is consistent with Hebrew morphology, but doing that alters stops to continuants -- in this case, changing the /b/ to a /v/.  So, it would be "uvamah," not "ubamah."  And even so, the "u-" doesn't mean "from," it means "and."  So "baraq uvamah" means "lightning and hills."

The actual phrase "from the heavens," Ehrenkrantz says, should be "min ha-shamayim."  So the passage "lightning from the heavens" would be "baraq min ha-shamayim."  Which doesn't sound like much of anything except Hebrew.

Couple that with the fact that Obama's first name, Barack, does come from an Aramaic root, but it isn't "baraq," it's "barak," which means "blessing."  It's a cognate to the more common name Baruch.  So, if you're really trying to pull some apocalyptic linguistic analysis on the president's name, you would probably be more justified in concluding that Obama was sent to Earth by god as a blessing, and is undoubtedly going to kick some satanic ass while he's here.

Because the problem with twiddling around with language is that two can always play that game.  Linguistic coincidences and peculiarities in word root structure abound.  So let's have some fun, okay?  Let's start with the Hebrew word "rosh," which means "head, chief, or leader."  ("Rosh Hashanah" means "head of the year.")  And we all know the Latin word "limbo," the ablative form of "limbus," meaning "the edge, or outer circle, of hell."  So:  "the chieftain of the outer reaches of hell" would be "Rosh Limbo."

Hey, maybe this stuff works, after all.

Rabbits in space

A few days ago I made a statement that believing in the various end-of-the-world predictions was about as foolish as thinking that we're in danger of being attacked by Giant Space Bunnies.  So imagine my surprise when the following photograph came in from the Mars rover Curiosity:

I wasn't the only one who had that reaction; the woo-woo websites were lighting up like Christmas trees with posts speculating that extraterrestrial life had been found at last, and that we were looking at a Martian Space Bunny.  "Of course," one of the sites hinted darkly, "pretty quick the scientists will cook up a 'scientific explanation' of the whole thing and sweep it under the rug.  No way will they admit that they've discovered life on Mars."

Because, you know, scientists just loathe new, groundbreaking discoveries.  The whole purpose of the Mars rover was to confirm how boring and ordinary Mars is.  It'd really suck if they discovered anything interesting up there, something worth studying.  Scientists hate that.

But even so, I had to admit that the likelihood of it actually being a bunny was pretty small.  Whatever any possible Martian life might look like, it's unlikely to resemble our terrestrial forms.  So I figured, like our abovementioned conspiracy theorist, that the Space Bunny would be explained in short order, and wasn't going to turn out to be Bugs' distant cousin.

And sure enough.  As described in an article in the website of the National Paranormal Association (and despite their name, they're pretty careful to maintain a skeptical outlook on things), the scientists noticed some odd things about the Martian Bunny.  The first was that despite the fact that the air on Mars is extremely thin, and the wind was fairly calm that day, the Bunny was moving gradually across the ground.  In the time they observed it, it moved five or six meters, without leaving a mark on the ground.  "There's no evidence of a mark that it left in the soil as it moved," Jeff Johnson, a member of the camera team, stated.  "It was light enough and small enough to not leave any ‘footprints'."

Curious, however, the rover team posted a "bunny watch" to keep an eye on the object; and it was Johnson who finally came up with a consistent, plausible explanation.  He examined the spectrum of light reflected from the object's surface, and found that it matched exactly the spectrum of light reflected from the material that composed the rover's airbag, that was deployed as it descended toward the surface.  So it seems like what we have here is of decidedly terrestrial origin -- a vaguely bunny-shaped scrap of airbag material.

So, there you are.  The search continues.  But I'm very impressed at how this was solved -- using science, logic, and skepticism.  The caution that the Curiosity team showed, in not leaping to the conclusion that this object was what it looked like, is what separates science from woo-woo.  And it's why, given the choice, I trust the scientists.  They're generally pretty good at telling fact from fiction, and airbag cloth from a Martian Space Bunny.

Sense and nonsense about GMOs

Please allow me to start today's post with a brief genetics lesson.

There is a feature of the genetic code called universality.  Put simply, universality means that all organisms on Earth read DNA the same way.  DNA is made up of strings of nucleotides, and there are four kinds, represented by the letters A, C, G, and T.  The order of those four nucleotides spells out the genetic message, and allows DNA to act as a set of instructions for building proteins and guiding development.  And the language -- how the order is translated -- is identical, for every living thing.

Besides being a fairly powerful argument for common ancestry -- why would we all speak the same genetic language if we weren't all related? -- this has opened the door for genetic engineering.  Take a gene (a set of instructions from one organism) and insert it into another organism's DNA, and the recipient will read that gene the same way the donor did, and produce the same gene product.  It's how we now have human insulin produced from genetically modified bacteria; it's how scientists have created "golden rice," that stores vitamin A in its seeds; it's how goats were generated that express spider silk proteins in their milk.  It's also how, by transferring a gene for a fluorescent protein from jellyfish into the embryo of a cat, scientists created Glow Kitties:

The application to agriculture was obvious.  Once the technique was perfected, within short order we had bt corn and tomatoes (the crops produce a substance in the leaves that is toxic to caterpillars, reducing the amount of pesticides that need to be used); "RoundUp-Ready" soybeans, wheat, and barley (the crop plants are resistant to the herbicide RoundUp, allowing the use of that chemical on fields, reducing the labor from weeding and increasing crop yields); disease-resistant papayas, plums, cucumbers, potatoes, and squash; tomatoes with a significantly increased shelf life; and freeze-resistant strawberries.

Then the alarmists began to chime in.  GMOs (genetically-modified organisms) were dangerous, they said; GMO crops generated food that was unsafe for human consumption.  A (hoax) story began to circulate that a "scientific experiment" had been done, feeding chickens exclusively GMO corn, and "26 out of 33 of them died, and the survivors were stunted and unhealthy."  Critics claimed that companies like Monsanto, that had spearheaded GMO research, were lying to consumers about product safety.  This led to a widespread banning of GMOs in the EU, most of Africa, and elsewhere, and a powerful grassroots movement is demanding that world governments outlaw GMOs and genetic transfer research entirely.

Now, despite the fact that there is no possible way that all GMOs could have the same (negative) health effect -- by what possible mechanism could rice that makes vitamin A and a virus-resistant cucumber generate similar side effects? -- people lumped together all GMOs in their minds.  The whole thing isn't "natural."  And since natural, of course, equals good, GMOs equal bad.

No one was more virulent in fostering this viewpoint than Mark Lynas, who was one of the first people to rail against GMOs as toxic and dangerous.  But now -- miracle of miracles -- Mark Lynas has issued a public retraction of his original stance at the Oxford Farming Conference.  Why?

Science, that's why.

Here's a brief excerpt from his 5,000-word statement (but you should definitely read the whole thing):

I want to start with some apologies. For the record, here and upfront, I apologise for having spent several years ripping up GM crops. I am also sorry that I helped to start the anti-GM movement back in the mid 1990s, and that I thereby assisted in demonising an important technological option which can be used to benefit the environment.

As an environmentalist, and someone who believes that everyone in this world has a right to a healthy and nutritious diet of their choosing, I could not have chosen a more counter-productive path. I now regret it completely.

So I guess you’ll be wondering—what happened between 1995 and now that made me not only change my mind but come here and admit it? Well, the answer is fairly simple: I discovered science, and in the process I hope I became a better environmentalist.

He then goes on to describe how putting all GMOs in the same category is illogical; as each transferred gene does something different, it's impossible for them all to have the same effects, and therefore the safety of each new crop has to be weighed independently, just as we do with everything else.  Furthermore, the vast majority of them, as evaluated by careful, peer-reviewed science, are safe and beneficial, but that hasn't stopped alarmists from swaying governmental policy:

Thus desperately-needed agricultural innovation is being strangled by a suffocating avalanche of regulations which are not based on any rational scientific assessment of risk. The risk today is not that anyone will be harmed by GM food, but that millions will be harmed by not having enough food, because a vocal minority of people in rich countries want their meals to be what they consider natural...

So I challenge all of you today to question your beliefs in this area and to see whether they stand up to rational examination. Always ask for evidence, as the campaigning group Sense About Science advises, and make sure you go beyond the self-referential reports of campaigning NGOs.

All in all, it's a remarkable turnaround.  Finally, we have someone talking what is just plain common sense -- not trumpeting childish scare-tactics like labeling GMOs "Frankenfoods."  And his position is backed up by mountains of evidence-based science, not just urban legends and the naturalistic fallacy.

Of course, Lynas is pretty likely to be labeled as a shill.  I'll bet that before the words were even out of his mouth, someone had shouted, "How much did Monsanto pay you to say all that?"  As we've seen over and over in Skeptophilia, you just can't convince some people, not with volumes of carefully-researched data and the most flawless argument.  But the fact that someone like Lynas changed his mind -- and was willing to issue a public apology and a statement to that effect -- gives me hope.  Because, as he says, if we don't get smart about how we do it, and use the technology and resources we have, feeding all seven billion humans is going to be an increasingly impossible task to accomplish.