Sometimes the level of ignorance in these posts is just staggering.
Selective breeding is not genetic modification as done in a lab using gene splicing techniques. In cross species gene splicing, the parent species cannot interbreed in many cases. In many others, where the parent species are capable of interbreeding, the offspring produced are sterile.
In the plant breeding that produces F1 hybrids that are not sterile, the offspring that are not sterile usually will not reproduce their own characteristics, nor those of their parents.
Assuming that a GMO with genes spliced into say a plant species from a mamalian species, or from a wholly unrelated plant species is a safe because it doesn't kill one of a very limited number of animal species is equally ignorant.
Leaving aside the possibility of a GMO "contaminating" the genes of other variants of the same species and thereby creating a "Monsantoized" version of beans or corn preventing the farmer from legally saving his own seed without paying a royalty to Monsanto for their genes which against his will contaminated his crop, you still have the problem of that cross contamination of another species which can perhaps overwhelm and wipe out a given species. Anyone who eats wild rice knows that domesticated wild rice is like eating gravel that has little to no flavor compared to real wild rice. That's just one species capable of being destroyed to our great loss.
Synthetic analogs of medications can be and very often are considerably more dangerous than their "organic" counterparts. Synthetic analogs are rarely tested across a broad enough sample of individuals of ANY species they are tested on to show how dangerous they can be to specific individuals and as a result you see some being completely withdrawn from commerce and some being severely restricted in their potential application. This is a common occurrence.
That we do stupid things in the pursuit of commerce does not mean it's a good idea to do more of it, or to treat it casually. It's all well and good to run your mouth about how this or that has been done before, but when you or your loved one is the victim of say a cox-2 inhibitor induced heart attack and is killed or incapacitated as a result, the fun goes out of it.
Not sure if you were referring to me as "running my mouth", but the point I am trying to make is that as a whole, modern farming practices and modern medicine allows most of us to live longer, healthier lives. I realize there are negative drawbacks to both, but as a whole we are better for them. Would anybody really want to go back to some of the horrific diseases that modern medicine has largely done away with? Polio, measles, typhoid fever, small pox, malaria, diphtheria, tetanus just to name a few. Not to mention medicine for blood pressure, cholesterol, depression and countless others. And, hand in hand with modern medicine saving hundreds of thousands of lives and extending millions more, we now need to feed all these people.
