In which a Maori beekeeper explains that he doesn't want any unnatural GM modified rats to offend the spirits, while laboriously smoking bees out of their hive to take their honey...

@kravietz did you ever think that the spirits can be ok with some stuff and not with other stuff?

@xj9 It's not really about spirits, but about a selective definition of "natural"

@kravietz

"natural" and "unnatural" are usually proxies for "familiar/understood" and "unfamiliar/not understood". there is also "artificial" vs "natural" which is usually delineated by a thing's origin being human or not.

you are stuck on some semantics that are not important to the question at hand. all of these distinctions are arbitrary. the real issue is one of familiarity. we don't know how gene drives will behave in the wild. we know some very specific and powerful bits of information. we know how to make a gene drive, but we lack the wisdom to predict how it will behave in a large ecosystem.

we are very powerful beings, but we are young and shortsighted. if we aren't careful, we could easily make this planet very difficult to live on. we certainly *should* do and experiment with "unnatural" things, but scope and context need to be taken into account. we have no backup or test planet to work with and no real knowledge of existing in a truly hostile environment for extended periods of time.

@xj9

Everybody is eating these today even though the radiation-induced mutations were completely random in their effects and might have modified much more genes than just those intended.

Now, when we came up with a very precise surgical techniques like CRISPR that are safer than anything known before a bunch of undereducated activists or scientific crooks like Seralini are fighting them as "unnatural"...