Let me just completely dismiss your "evolution is a good optimizer" - it's a decent optimizer, but some things are just impossible for it to achieve (as I said above, local vs global search). That's why humans are so dominant - e.g. we started using tools and eventually figured out that steel is harder than most other natural materials (and thus more useful as a weapon).
Otherwise, I think your point about fitness of crops is a good one - crops are fundamentally not easy to grow, if they were, we wouldn't be an agricultural society, we'd just be "picking and gathering" fruit, seeds, grain etc. that would naturally grow in forests, etc. but that's unrealistic, we have to put a lot of effort into sustaining crop production.
I oppose Roundup-ready and vitamin enhanced crops on other grounds; is Roundup residual really so safe? If it's so safe and GMO foods are so much cheaper and better, why the lack of transparency? It's not like we lack food in the West, so no need to enhance it with vitamins, and we should probably be finding ways to use less pesticides, not more and deadlier. (Different situation in the third world, I think GMOs can be genuinely helpful there, if risks can be minimized.)
But the one I actually had in mind is when crops are modified to express pesticides using genes that originate from bacteria (looks like Cowpea is an example [0]). Personally, I also see that as the kind of GMO with most potential (again, if risks are minimized), though you might be right that it's actually the minority of current use (why?), and the above arguments about crops being hard to grow still holds (unless genes can "jump" to a different species, though AFAIK that's only really possible in bacteria.)
Mind you, I'm not totally opposed to GMOs. I think they great when used in pharma (in controlled environment with controlled products).
> Let me just completely dismiss your "evolution is a good optimizer" - it's a decent optimizer,
Perhaps I put it badly. I wasn't saying natural selection is perfect - just that it is better than us. Obviously it isn't perfect because evolution makes mistakes - our blood vessels being in front our rod and cones is an example.
So why don't we just fix that?
It because it's utterly beyond us. It's inevitably controlled by 1000's if not millions of genes acting in concert, tuning when they switching on and off according to the body they find themselves in (small or large) over our lifetimes. It's an extraordinarily complex mechanism.
We have made very simple adjustments to that mechanism. They are invariably involve just one gene that has one clear effect. But playing with something as complex as how the eye is laid out is completely and utterly beyond us and our computers. Yet natural selection pulled it off.
It really is just a question of computational power available. Natural selection is currently doing some phenomenal number (as in many zero beyond trillions) of experiments on eyeball construction every year. We can't hope to match that, and until we can natural selection will always out compete us in the "lets design a super organism" game.
So, when we do beat natural selection, it's in environments we create so the design natural selection chose is no longer optimal. Nonetheless it's only a temporary advantage, as our losing the battle against antibiotic resistant bacteria demonstrates. The same thing will happen with round up ready and Cowpea - we didn't just get round up ready crops, we also set in motion the mechanism that will create round up ready weeds. We had an advantage when we created round up ready crops - we cheated by taking an existing example from nature. Natural selection doesn't have that advantage, but over the long term it won't matter - it will just invent it again. Unlike us, it can do that. It really can create new super organisms. Right now we can't do better than copying what natural selection has done in other organisms.
Let me just completely dismiss your "evolution is a good optimizer" - it's a decent optimizer, but some things are just impossible for it to achieve (as I said above, local vs global search). That's why humans are so dominant - e.g. we started using tools and eventually figured out that steel is harder than most other natural materials (and thus more useful as a weapon).
Otherwise, I think your point about fitness of crops is a good one - crops are fundamentally not easy to grow, if they were, we wouldn't be an agricultural society, we'd just be "picking and gathering" fruit, seeds, grain etc. that would naturally grow in forests, etc. but that's unrealistic, we have to put a lot of effort into sustaining crop production.
I oppose Roundup-ready and vitamin enhanced crops on other grounds; is Roundup residual really so safe? If it's so safe and GMO foods are so much cheaper and better, why the lack of transparency? It's not like we lack food in the West, so no need to enhance it with vitamins, and we should probably be finding ways to use less pesticides, not more and deadlier. (Different situation in the third world, I think GMOs can be genuinely helpful there, if risks can be minimized.)
But the one I actually had in mind is when crops are modified to express pesticides using genes that originate from bacteria (looks like Cowpea is an example [0]). Personally, I also see that as the kind of GMO with most potential (again, if risks are minimized), though you might be right that it's actually the minority of current use (why?), and the above arguments about crops being hard to grow still holds (unless genes can "jump" to a different species, though AFAIK that's only really possible in bacteria.)
Mind you, I'm not totally opposed to GMOs. I think they great when used in pharma (in controlled environment with controlled products).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowpea#Pests_and_diseases