Last week British anti-GMO activist Mark Lynas took to the podium at a conference to apologize (or apologise) for having spent years “ripping up GMO’s.” Now he has decided that Genetically Modified Organisms are “an important technological option” and that critics have been anti-scientific.

Actually Lynas had explained before that he had been reprogrammed; his 2011 book The God Species announced his new enthusiasm for GMOs.  But this mea culpa on vimeo made for an irresistible internet nugget and it lit up the blogosphere.  It was forwarded to me by several people who I’m sure had never heard of Mark Lynas before.

Much of the online reaction to this story goes along with the basic premise in Lynas’s own statement, which is that there are two ways to think about GM crops, and he has switched from one to the other.

I agree that there are two ways to think…