{"id":21435,"date":"2016-07-17T13:36:09","date_gmt":"2016-07-17T18:36:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=21435"},"modified":"2016-07-17T13:36:09","modified_gmt":"2016-07-17T18:36:09","slug":"toxic-wheat-gmos-and-the-precautionary-principle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=21435","title":{"rendered":"Toxic Wheat, GMOs and the Precautionary Principle"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Toxic Wheat, GMOs and the Precautionary Principle<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n
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\nBen Shahn\u00a0Daughter of Virgil Thaxton, farmer, near Mechanicsburg, Ohio\u00a0<\/b>1938<\/center>Recently, I posted a two-tear old article on facebook.com\/TheAutomaticEarth that was shared so many times it seems to make sense to use it for an Automatic Earth article as well. The article asks how toxic the wheat we eat is \u2013 or Americans, more specifically-, and why that is.<\/p>\n

But first I would like to touch on a closely connected issue, which is Nassim Nicholas Taleb\u2019s \u2018war\u2019 on GMOs. Taleb, of Black Swans fame, has been at it for a while, but he\u2019s stepped up his efforts off late.<\/p>\n

In 2014, with co-authors Rupert Read, Raphael Douady, Joseph Norman and Yaneer Bar-Yam, he published\u00a0The Precautionary Principle (with Application to the Genetic Modification of Organisms)<\/a>, an attempt to look at GMOs through a \u2018solidly scientific\u2019 prism of probability and complex systems. From the abstract:<\/p>\n

The precautionary principle (PP) states that if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing severe harm to the public domain (affecting general health or the environment globally), the action should not be taken in the absence of scientific near-certainty about its safety. Under these conditions, the burden of proof about absence of harm falls on those proposing an action, not those opposing it. PP is intended to deal with uncertainty and risk in cases where the absence of evidence and the incompleteness of scientific knowledge carries profound implications and in the presence of risks of \u201cblack swans\u201d, unforeseen and unforeseable events of extreme consequence.<\/i><\/p>\n

<\/i>[..] We believe that the PP should be evoked only in extreme situations: when the potential harm is systemic (rather than localized) and the consequences can involve total irreversible ruin, such as the extinction of human beings or all life on the planet.\u00a0<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Toxic Wheat, GMOs and the Precautionary Principle Ben Shahn\u00a0Daughter of Virgil Thaxton, farmer, near Mechanicsburg, Ohio\u00a01938Recently, I posted a two-tear old article on facebook.com\/TheAutomaticEarth that was shared so many times it seems to make sense to use it for an Automatic Earth article as well. The article asks how toxic the wheat we eat is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[12141,319,372,14189,4131,2089,13924,4470,705,14190,5177,14191,875],"class_list":["post-21435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-bayer","tag-food","tag-gmo","tag-harvest","tag-monsanto","tag-proof","tag-raul-ilargi-meijer","tag-roundup","tag-science","tag-taleb","tag-the-automatic-earth","tag-toxic","tag-wheat"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21435"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21436,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21435\/revisions\/21436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}