Herd MentalitySince we’ve seen herd mentality used today as an excuse against independent critical thought, I figured I’d bring up a real example of the dangers of herd mentality.
Most people in North America and Europe think GMOs are bad because of herd mentality. They have no idea that we’ve been using, and are still using, chemical mutagenesis on our agricultural crops with 0 regulations. Wikipedia has a wonderful article on the topic of mutation breeding:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_breeding
Basically society says that I’m allowed to induce hundreds of thousands of mutations in, let say, a tomato, with no regulatory problems. I can induce these ~100,000 random mutations, of which I have no idea what changed I’m inducing, grow the tomatoes and sell them at my local farmer’s market. I can sell them as ‘All natural, organic, [insert continuous string of meaningless marketing words here]’ with no problems, according to society. If I induce 1 targeted change, where I know exactly what I’m targeting, I’ve created a GMO crop and have to go through regulatory hell to sell it to the public.
The anti-GMO movement is a running joke among Plant Biochemists and Molecular biologists because society makes us jump through completely meaningless hoops to try and save it from starvation. Herd mentality is killing millions of people a year in this case.