Gene Drives Touching Tipping Points

Tipping points and tipping elements, phase transitions and similar critical phenomena are widely discussed in scientific as well as socio-economic contexts as components to understand unforeseen far reaching changes and critical transitions from one stage into another in complex systems caused by small perturbations or gradual changes. For the risk assessment of self-propagating artificial genetic elements in self-sustaining population wild populationsof animals or plants, it is crucial to understand, where tipping elements could become relevant, how they could be anticipated and to what extent surprises and unexpected effects might occur.

Tipping points are an issue studied in a wide scope of scientific disciplines. According to Lenton (2013) the term tip point “was first introduced in sociology in the 1950s to describe the percentage of nonwhite residents in a US city neighbourhood that would trigger a white flight” (p. 2 with reference to Grodzins 1957). There exists a long scientific tradition of research regarding tipping points in physics (Domb and Green 1972 ff) and a tradition in ecosystems theory and application as well: The concept of tipping points helped to understand severe transitions in system structures (Scheffer et al. 2001; de Yong et al. 2008). Actually tipping points are intensively discussed as a component of ‘systemic risks’ regarding climate change (Lenton et al. 2008; Lenton 2011a, b, 2012) and turmoil in financial markets (Sornette 2003). By signing the Paris Agreement (United Nations Climate Change 2018) an attempt to avoid catastrophic disruptions by touching tipping points in the climate system¹ even found its way into international regulation. It was claimed that limiting the raise of the global average temperature to 2 °C (or better to 1.5 °C) would keep climate change within the normal range of climate variation (cf. Nordhaus 1975; Rijsberman and Swart 1990; Randalls 2010; Lenton 2011b²).

Tipping points may be rare,³ but when they are touched they often lead to catastrophic consequences.⁴ Lack of knowledge, surprises, rare extreme events with severe consequences (called ‘black swans’ Taleb 2007) combine the debate about tipping points with the debate about precaution and the precautionary principle.

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