Geno-luddites on the rise

There is a very nice, though short discussion on the cut-and-paste of a bacterial genome onto its cousin at Edge's Reality Club. This comment by Nassim N. Taleb called my attention:

If I understand this well, to the creationists, this should be an insult to God; but, further, to the evolutionist, this is certainly an insult to evolution. And to the risk manager/probabilist, like myself & my peers, this is an insult to human Prudence, the beginning of the mother-of-all exposure to Black Swans.

And if I understood correctly his position, we shouldn't do anything that exposes us so much to Black Swans. I agree that some aspects of this research (and all the news coverage that followed)  downplays the role of evolution. But as reminded by PZ Myers in the same discussion, there is a much larger number and variety of naturally-occurring threats to us. (HT @aerocleber).

PS: The title comes from this post, brought to my attention by @phylogenomics.