Has Taleb jumped the shark?

Financial gurus Mark Spitznagel and Nassim Taleb, neither of whom boasts any expertise in or understanding of the history or techniques of genetic modification, nevertheless posit the possibility of it causing “complex chains of unpredictable changes in the ecosystem” that could lead to worldwide catastrophe.They deserve the same level of credibility as the apocalyptics who regularly—and inaccurately—predict the end of the world. Maybe less.
According to Spitznagel and Taleb: 

we are told that a modified tomato is not different from a naturally occurring tomato. That is wrong: The statistical mechanism by which a tomato was built by nature is bottom-up, by tinkering in small steps (as with the restaurant business, distinct from contagion-prone banks). In nature, errors stay confined and, critically, isolated.

Leaving aside the obscure allusion to restaurants and banks, a “modified tomato” is, indeed, different from what they call a “naturally occurring one,” but not in the ways they think.
Spitznagel and Taleb obviously fail to understand the pedigree of “naturally occurring tomatoes.” Genetic modification by means of selection and hybridization has been with us at least for many centuries, and the techniques employed along the way, including the most recent ones, are part of a seamless continuum.