The point made by the NYT article isn't really important to what I'm saying above, it's an interesting comparison, but I feel like everyone just wants to attack that while ignoring the main points I made above. And I certainly don't want to get dragged in to some argument about the pros and cons of the ways different authors choose to write about the topic.

But I do think it should be obvious that the false dilemma in that quote is so bad that I shouldn't have to try and dismantle it. To me what the author is saying is "GMOs haven't created any noticeable improvement over the kinds of plant breeding we've been doing for thousands of years, so if we're going to give up on GMOs we should give up trying to improve crops at all." Why are those the only choices? If I try something new and it's not any better than what I was doing, why isn't "just do what's worked forever" not a valid choice?

I honestly have no problem with genetic engineering, I think it's a great technology that has lots of useful applications. My whole point above is that people are arguing about the pros and cons of GMOs the wrong way. And now you've got me defending a fairly banal observation that some random scientist/blogger relied on a common logical fallacy in a blog post?

Either you can see what I'm talking about, or our viewpoints are so far apart that nothing I say is going to matter. Especially since it's not even on the topic I was trying to discuss.