"Taleb focuses on the possibility of unforeseen, high-impact events, which are known to readers of his books as “black swan” events. He argues that a harmful black swan on a global scale would potentially be so catastrophic that we cannot allow any possibility of such an occurrence. He assures us that more traditional methods of plant breeding have already proven not to present risk of catastrophic harm, by virtue of their having been tested over millennia in nature. However, he asserts that GMOs haven’t been proven safe in the same way, and that we should therefore hold off on their cultivation until we can rule out the possibility of global catastrophe. Even lacking evidence to suggest that GMOs will cause global catastrophe, we need to be careful because the nature of black swan events is such that we often don’t see evidence until it is too late."