Good debate.. I have seen bugs go after good plants... and trees. Nature is always right... bugs are clearly smarter and adapt better to environments than plants... I don't think many healthy strong plants have physical or chemical properties that can always block insects from adapting to them... insects do not have the wits to determine plants. They just eat whatever is close, and do not pick and choose (imho)
I think it's as you say, there's give and take, and some insects adapt more closely to hosts while others do not over hundreds of millions of years (or less!). I would say that although they don't have much intelligence, they have a lot of sensory cues that dictate their behavior strongly, leading to some surprisingly complex responses to plants for certain herbivores and even predators. What really helps is that high mutation and reproduction rate: a single really favorable mutation can multiply much faster than the lifespan of an annual or perennial plant. And even then, they may not inflict lethal damage, or provide indirect benefits, so the "herbivory tax" can be sustainable in a lot of cases.
and in Florida.. to battle mosquitos in nature... they now modified mosquito to not reproduce as much.. to reduce mosquito confronting humans... but the rest of nature that needs mosquito was not even considered as of importance by the team who did it..
It seems like he is stating that something about the first GMO soybeans selected for Soybean Aphid prominence as they already existed, but the first GMO soybeans of that year 1996 are (that I'm familiar with) Roundup Ready soybeans (GTS 40-3-2) which are glyphosate-resistant. He doesn't go into any detail as to how, so the claim is spurious to me. Not really sure how directly the impact of glyphosate exposure would have affected them since the typical mutations associated with exposure to a pesticide is resistance to that pesticide, often to the detriment of other physiological traits. When the resistance traits stop being as important for survival, like in situations where there is less exposure to the compound, it's reported in some research that the genes associated with those traits have a tendency to extinguish when the selection pressure is removed. Usually the type of mutation that confers resistance to pesticidal chemicals are things that severely change how the nervous system or certain cellular functions operate at a particular location and it may make them slower, or less reproductive, or perform less well in other situations. This research goes over how pesticide resistance develops broadly for more information: The evolutionary origins of pesticide resistance, 2019 www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6378405/
I would say that the dissolved solids in plants like nutrients and minerals do generally support plant growth and defense responses, but they are not the only factor as crucially insects, mites, bacteria, fungi and various other pest groups can bypass defenses and even elicit and exploit certain defenses so it would be inaccurate to say high brix makes plants totally immune. I also think that qualifying any food produced at high brix as "suitable for human consumption" and implying low brix food is not healthy or not the same is strange and not really supported by any research I'm aware of.
