Philosophy In Defense of 🍃 Nature

Breaking the Intellectual Silence on 🧬 Eugenics

In 2021, several scientific organizations boldly declared the GMO debate over, citing the apparent fading of anti-GMO activism. But does silence indicate acceptance?

The American Council on Science and Health, Alliance for Science, and Genetic Literacy Project, among others, proclaimed:

The GMO debate is over

While the GMO debate has been percolating for nearly three decades, our scientific data indicate it's now over. The anti-GMO movement used to be a cultural juggernaut. But as time goes on, the activist groups that once held so much sway seem increasingly irrelevant.
Though we still hear some moaning and groaning it primarily comes from a small group. Most people simply aren't concerned about GMOs.
(2021) The Anti-GMO Movement Is On Its Way Out The anti-GMO movement used to be a cultural juggernaut. But as time goes on, the activist groups that once held so much sway seem increasingly irrelevant. Source: American Council on Science and Health
(2021) The GMO debate is over Though we still hear some moaning and groaning it primarily comes from a small group. Most people simply aren't concerned about GMOs. Source: Alliance for Science
(2021) 5 reasons why the GMO debate is over While the GMO debate has been percolating for nearly three decades, data indicate it's now over. Source: Genetic Literacy Project

GMODebate.org was founded in 2022 to facilitate an intellectual defense of nature through philosophy.

Upon noticing the claims by science organizations in 2021 that the GMO debate was over, the author discovered that many nature and animal protectors were in fact silent on GMO and animal eugenics.

A philosophical investigation revealed that their silence likely does not stem from indifference but from a fundamental intellectual impossibility that we explore in our article The Silence of 🥗 Vegans.

Investigation of Scientism

The GMODebate.org project is part of a broader philosophical investigation of scientism, the philosophical root of 🧬 eugenics.

The GMODebate.org project delves into the philosophical underpinnings of scientism, the emancipation-of-science from philosophy movement, the anti-science narrative and modern forms of scientific inquisition.

Charles Darwin or Daniel Dennett?

GMODebate.org contains an eBook of a popular online philosophy discussion titled On the Absurd Hegemony of Science in which renowned philosophy professor Daniel C. Dennett (known for his best seller Darwin's Dangerous Idea) participated in defense of scientism.

For those interested in the views of Daniel C. Dennett, chapter Dennett's Defense of His Rejection of 🧠⃤ Qualia contains over 400 posts debating Dennett's rejection of the philosophical concept Qualia.

A book without an end… One of the most popular philosophy discussions in recent history.
Book (2025) On the absurd hegemony of science Source: 🦋 GMODebate.org | Download as PDF and ePub

The Anti-Science Narrative

Our investigation of eugenics traces it to scientism and reveals that it is an escape attempt: a retreat from the fundamental uncertainty of nature into an illusory certain empirical realm.

The certainty required by science to emancipate itself from philosophy is illusory and due to this, science feels itself literally threatened by sheer doubt, as evidenced by an article by Alliance for Science that sought to heap GMO opponents with Russian trolls for causing doubt about science:

🇷🇺 Russian trolls, aided by anti-GMO groups such as the 🍒 Center for Food Safety and Organic Consumers Association, have been strikingly successful in sowing doubt about science in the general population.
(2018) Anti-GMO activism sows doubt about science Source: Alliance for Science | PDF backup

Philosophy professor Justin B. Biddle who studied the anti-science narrative, concluded the following:

The anti-science or war on science narrative has become popular among science journalists. While there is no question that some opponents of GMO are biased or ignorant of the relevant facts, the blanket tendency to characterize critics as anti-science or engaged in a war on science is both misguided and dangerous.
(2018) “Anti-science zealotry”? Values, Epistemic Risk, and the GMO Debate Source: PhilPapers | justinbiddle.com (Georgia Institute of Technology)

Science attempts to create a situation of war against science in which opponents can be challenged and combatted on ideological rather than philosophical grounds.

Our investigation of the application of the anti-science narrative in 🇵🇭 Philippines reveals that the label is weaponized alongside calls for literal prosecution.

🇵🇭 Philippines GMO Golden Rice and the Anti-Science Inquisition This investigative report exposes how local voices in Philippines were silenced, global attention for a 2024 Supreme Court GMO ban deflected to , and the anti-science narrative weaponized against GMO opponents.

In 2021, the international science establishment called for anti-science to be combated as a security threat on par with terrorism and nuclear proliferation:

Antiscience has emerged as a dominant and highly lethal force, and one that threatens global security, as much as do terrorism and nuclear proliferation. We must mount a counteroffensive and build new infrastructure to combat antiscience, just as we have for these other more widely recognized and established threats.
(2021) The Antiscience Movement Is Escalating, Going Global and Killing Thousands Source: Scientific American

These calls for prosecution are supported by prominent academics, for example Harvard University professor David Ropeik, who declared:

These are real deaths... It is absolutely fair to charge that opposition to this particular application of genetically modified food has contributed to the deaths of and injuries to millions of people. The opponents of Golden Rice who have caused this harm should be held accountable.
The Human Toll of Anti-GMO Hysteria: 1.4 Million Life Years Lost Since 2002 Source: The Breakthrough Institute

The calls for prosecution have significant consequences for GMO opponents such as for example the people in Philippines who have been vilified as child killers for decades.

That the calls for prosecution of anti-science are controversial is evidenced by the following notion by Sarojeni V Rengam, executive director of Pesticide Action Network (PAN) Asia and the Pacific, who called GMO Golden Rice a trojan horse of the GMO industry:

Golden Rice is really a Trojan horse; a public relations stunt pulled by the agribusiness corporations to garner acceptance of genetically engineered (GE) crops and food.

This makes the situation highly interesting for philosophy: what exactly does it mean to label people anti-science? According to philosophy professor Justin B. Biddle: the blanket tendency to characterize critics of GMO as anti-science or engaged in a war on science is both misguided and dangerous.

Investigation of Eugenics

The founder of GMODebate.org is a long time defender of free will since 2006 through the Dutch critical blog Zielenknijper.com that investigated eugenics within a human context.

The Dutch blog was founded in cooperation with Dutch philosophy professor Wim J. van der Steen who was an intellectual opponent of psychiatry and the idea that the mind originates in the brain.

The blog contains an investigation of political corruption surrounding the legislation of euthanasia in psychiatry. In 2010 Dutch psychiatrists enforced the right to euthanize their patients by releasing their patients to commit suicide on the streets, which looked like a political extortion tactic.

Political Extortion and Euthanasia in Psychiatry In 2010 Dutch psychiatrists enforced the right to euthanize their patients by releasing their patients to commit suicide on the streets, which looked like a political extortion tactic. Source: Zielenknijper.com

Our article about eugenics reveals that medical psychiatry and eugenics were founded simultaneously and were based on the same core philosophical ideas. The article reveals that the mechanism perspective of mind logically results in eugenic ideologies.

🧬 Eugenics on 🍃 Nature An exploration of the philosophical roots and history of eugenics.

French philosopher Michel Foucault:

[Medical] psychiatry was a bridge between the clinical gaze and the evolutionary narrative—a bridge built from bricks of mechanism, waiting for Darwin's cement of purpose.

Facilitating The GMO Debate

Philosophical Inquiry: A Global Survey

On June 27, 2024, the founder of GMODebate.org started a global philosophical inquiry into the vision on eugenics and GMO among those working in nature conservation and animal protection organizations worldwide.

For the purpose, an advanced AI communication system was developed that transformed the philosophical inquiry process much as the keyboard revolutionized writing. The system translated intent into conversational coherent language with a quality that impressed even a writer in Paris, 🇫🇷 France.

Au fait, votre français est excellent. Vous vivez en France ? (Your French is excellent. Are you from France?)

The project yielded profound conversations with people at tens of thousands of nature protection organizations globally and it was discovered that many organizations were in fact silent on GMO and animal eugenics, while in the same time expressing profound enthusiasm and interest in the philosophical inquiry.

Click the link below for an example of the conversation process:

An example of the conversation process:

(2024) A conversation with DJ White, co-founder of Greenpeace USA.

🦋 GMODebate.org: Your focus on large existential threats to conscious life on earth is deeply compelling. How do you see the role of philosophy in addressing these threats? Could a renewed emphasis on philosophical inquiry in marine conservation help to refocus efforts away from techno-futures which will never exist and towards the profound realities of consciousness and abstract communication?
DJ White: I think philosophy will mainly be important in causing a relatively small number of humans to become hyper-effective and selfless, and to a large degree ego-free, to do what may be possible to make bad situations less bad. This is the core rationale for effectivism. To a small degree, one might get several percent of humans excited about such ideas, but only a very few would be able to act as aware agents of change. This is a departure from the activist notion of starting movements… which can work, but only for some classes of problem, and often will be counterproductive.
🦋 GMODebate.org Your experience with marine philosopher John C. Lilly and your own pioneering work in dolphin intelligence research is fascinating. It's remarkable to think that your lab was the first to show self-awareness in a nonhuman by human testing standards. This kind of groundbreaking work, combining philosophy and empirical research, is exactly what we believe is needed to address the complex challenges facing our oceans today.
Philosopher John C. Lilly
DJ White: There may not be much time left for such stuff now. In particular, and this may be jarring to you, I don’t think that philosophical and research breakthroughs will be sufficient to halt the destruction, nor will any sort of enlightenment of humanity in general. Rather, individuals may be able to try steering events by any methods they can conceive. The notion that high-Karma intellectuals will construct a paradigm which the world then spontaneously follows is one more class of delusion at this point, in terms of being relevant to the current ecological predicament. This view is dissonant to most.
🦋 GMODebate.org Your mention of effectivism as distinct from activism is particularly intriguing. It seems to align with our belief at 🦋 GMODebate.org that we need to combine advanced leadership theory with state-of-the-art philosophy on morality to forge new paths for protecting nature and animals. I'm especially interested in how your effectivism course pushes away from anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism as dogma. This approach resonates deeply with our mission.
DJ White: It'll be beyond the scope of this quick reply to put meat on the bones of the effectivism concept. Briefly, it is built around an ethic of life which is composed of basic statements along the lines of life is better than the lack of life, a complex ecosystem with large life is better than a simple one with single-celled life and so on, and letting this frame good and bad in ecological terms. It is explicitly deep-time and treats the future as real but undetermined except probabilistically. It is framed entirely without reference to humans in particular, except to the extent that humans are one species. The exceptionalism part is demonstrated in the earlier R101 course in which it's demonstrated that humans are delusional, that human intelligence is not really a superpower, that technology will likely not be sustained in the present sense because it isn’t sustainable, and so on. Basically the first course is an unlearning of tropes and nonsense narratives the human world is organized around.
More insights from DJ White's philosophy on ocean conservation are available in the following podcast:
🎙️ DJ White: Ocean Effectivism Source: The Great Simplification

Most organizations admitted never to have given thought to the subject GMO and a common argument given was lack of time. Their willingness to admit this and to engage in a short email conversation on the subject however, revealed a paradox.

For example, in the case of Stop Ecocide International it was discovered that the organization had even cooperated with genetic enginering students from Wageningen University in the Netherlands but had never addressed the topic GMO, which some employees openly communicated to find strange.

Jojo Mehta, the co-founder and CEO of Stop Ecocide International, later officially attributed it to lack of time while in the same time expressing enthusiasm for the inquiry.

While the inquiry you are carrying out promises to be of great interest, I'm afraid I may have to disappoint you as far as our involvement is concerned.
... there are two reasons why SEI cannot engage directly with the GMO debate: firstly, it would be a distraction from, and could place at risk, our core diplomatic goal; secondly even if we wanted to, we do not have the person-hours available to dedicate to a specific issue like this.

The conversation with Stop Ecocide International resulted in an article about the GMO based eradication of the 🦟 mosquito species, in an attempt to provide an example case for why it is important to address the subject.

Ecocide and The Mosquito Eradication Case BBC asks: Should the mosquito species be wiped out from Earth?

Silent on GMO

The philosophical inquiry revealed that most organizations were in fact silent on GMO and animal eugenics, while in the same time expressing profound enthusiasm for the philosophical inquiry and a willingness to contribute.

The trillion dollar interest behind eugenics and GMO logically creates a situation that hinders intellectual resistance and activism against GMO. People who care for their career are financially pressured to keep silent.

The pressure to keep silent on GMO is even more severe than common financial pressure within intellectual environments. For example, WikiLeaks revealed U.S. diplomatic cables that showed plans for military-style trade wars to enforce GMO. The cables showed that US diplomats were working directly for GM companies such as Monsanto and Bayer and that they actively pursued economic coercion strategies to enforce GMO.

The plans revealed that opponents of GMO were to be systematically punished with economic retaliation.

Moving to retaliation will make clear that opposing GMO has real costs and could help strengthen pro-biotech voices.
(2012) US to Start Trade Wars with Nations Opposed to GMO Source: 🇱🇰 Sri Lanka's 2021 anti-GMO-hysteria and Economic Collapse

The motivations to oppose GMO from within the agriculture industry are evidently linked to financial interests in general, and ethics developing in that scope are mostly aligned with consumer demands (anthropocentric interests), which in practice results in scare mongering propaganda for GMO.

The marketing from the 🍒 biological food industry often does not involve a defense on behalf of Nature itself and can in practice enforce the core argument of GMO proponents: food security. The GMO industry with a trillion dollar budget can easily out compete and win on the long term when the arguments are reduced to an empirical domain.

Despite this hostile environment for intellectual opposition against GMO, our article The Silence of 🥗 Vegans reveals that the real reason for the silence on GMO with vegans and animal rights defenders is likely a fundamental intellectual inability.

Whether it's chimera animals (Inf'OGM: Bioethics: chimeric animals producing human organs) or iPS cells facilitating mass eugenics (Inf'OGM: Bioethics: What is behind iPS cells?), vegans say nothing! Only three anti-animal experimentation associations (and myself) have written op-eds and engaged in significant activism in the Senate.
Olivier Leduc of OGMDangers.org
The Silence of 🥗 Vegans An exploration of the reason why many animal rights advocates are silent about eugenics and GMO.

Who will actually protect nature against eugenics?

Conclusion

The science organizations were right in 2021 that anti-GMO activism is fading away and that most people, even 🐿️ animal protectors and 🥗 vegans, are silent on GMO.

This implies that Nature needs an intellectual defense.

The 🦋 GMODebate.org project investigates the philosophical roots of scientism, and through that, questions anthropocentrism (the validity scope of GMO) more generally.

Investigations

[ More 🧐 investigations]