Originally Posted by venturabananas

I fully appreciate the difference between breeding plants and selecting traits among progeny and creating GMOs, but philosophically, they are not that different. Both involve humans meddling with nature. You say "letting nature breed". That is not what has happened with heirlooms. They have been produced by humans breeding plants for certain traits. Those plants do not occur in nature and most likely could not persist without human assistance. There is nothing natural about it, unless you take the philosophical viewpoint that humans are part of nature and anything we do is natural (which you could defend, rationally).

Viruses and plasmids have "forced" genes at the cellular level for millions of years. Must be part of nature, right?