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The University of Colorado Boulder has an article up about a paper [open, DOI: 10.1038/s41562-018-0520-3] [DX] published Monday in Nature Human Behavior which finds that U.S. adults:
who hold the most extreme views opposing genetically modified (GM) foods think they know most about GM food science, but actually know the least
The paper's key finding is that:
the more strongly people report being opposed to GM foods, the more knowledgeable they think they are on the topic, but the lower they score on an actual knowledge test.
Interestingly the authors found similar results applied to gene therapy, but were unable prove a similar conclusion when they tested against climate change denialism. This leads them to hypothesize that:
the climate change debate has become so politically polarized that people's attitudes depend more on which group they affiliate with than how much they know about the issue.
It might be instructive to run similar studies in a number of areas such as
Vaccinations
Nuclear Power
Homeopathy
...
Where would you like to see this study done next?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 15 2019, @07:07PM
That right there is the problem. Whether or not Joe Blow understands this stuff is of minimal impact on policy. Nobody is really taking those folks seriously. The problem is that the people who are making the decisions have a naive sense of what's going to happen as a result of these decisions.
Certain classes of genetic modification are unlikely to result in problems, but the motivation for the modification is rather short-sighted and often not well understood. We've already got genes that couldn't previously get into weeds getting into weeds because they were moved from one completely unrelated organism to another that can share genetic materials with weeds. This is a particular problem with pesticides that no longer work on the weeds they were supposed to affect.
OTOH, taking a gene from one variety of apple and putting it into another is unlikely to have significant negative impacts, so long as the nutritional value is monitored. This is something that could have been done previously with non-GM methods, but can now be done in a much more controlled and precise way.
At the end of the day, this research about the views is important, but it does serve as cover for the corporations that are behaving in an irresponsible way. We can't way until an entire region is covered in super-weeds to be more careful.