In the book “Blank Slate: The Contemporary Denial of Human Nature” Steven Pinker writes that the widespread fear of all artificial and genetically modified foods is patently irrational if the reason is health. This can make food more expensive and therefore less affordable for the poor. Where do these misguided fears come from? In part, they are born from the school of journalism dedicated to proclaiming the ¨carcinogen of the day,¨ reporting without analysis any study that shows increased cancer in rats fed magadoses of chemicals.

One of the reasons people fear GMOs and food additives comes from what has been called “intuitive biology”, that is, the belief that there is an invisible essence in living beings that gives them their shape and powers.

Ernst Mayr, a renowned evolutionary scientist, showed that biologists who rejected the theory of natural selection believed that a species was a pure type defined by an essence. They could not adapt their minds to the concept that species are populations of variable individuals and that one can merge into another in the course of evolutionary time.

To Mayr, the fear of genetically modified foods doesn’t seem so strange: it is simply the typical human intuition that every living thing has an essence. Natural foods are thought to possess the pure essence of the plant or animal and contain the rejuvenating powers of the bucolic environment in which they developed. Genetically modified foods, or foods containing artificial additives, are seen as deliberately laced with a contaminating substance, tainted by its origins in a caustic laboratory or factory.

[Editor’s Note: This article has been translated from Portuguese and edited for clarity.]

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