How odd.

That seems so strange. "Normal" foods are often repeatedly sprayed by pesticides. Most of the bioengineered foods are made to repel or at least not attract pests, so they tend to be much less sprayed on. Yet the consumers have decided they are "unnatural".

As if we fear we'll ingest the "altered" genes and somehow become "unnatural" ourselves. Which is ridiculous. Genes are not passed on by ingesting animals or plants. You are not what you eat to that extent.

Asimov wrote about a "Frankenstein complex" which might grow up to resist the use of robots. I think we're seeing something similar---a feeling that if the plant or animal is not as God made it, it must be bad.

I think that's something we need to get past. A prejudice that should have no place with us.

Partly it's our knowledge of the fragileness of the ecological web, of how there can be many unexpected results of introducing a new animal into an ecology...just ask the rabbit in Australia.

Yet, new animals are introduced all the time by evolution and mutation. We'll be the ones calling the shots. We've been breeding animals and changing them (do you think the dog was always so docile? Or the cow?) for millenia. It's a little late now to worry about the ethics of it.

Some would decry us playing God. I think we've been playing God for quite a long time, and there's a lot of good we can do.

We have already developed "Golden" rice, full of many more vitamins than normal rice, which could solve much of the world's malnutrition problems.

We have developed trout that can grow to maturity in half the time.

What else can we develop?

Consider:

In the South, a new strain of kudzu overtaking the normal type...which grows at a much slower pace, which is the curse of kudzu in the South.

Wasps and bees that are either stingerless, or at least do not sting human beings. Mosquitoes that are actually repelled by human scent, as are flies.

Field mice that feed exclusively on termites.

Rats that can only have one child in their entire life.

Imagine grass that grows to a certain height---an inch or two---and then stops of its own volition.

Breeds of dogs that virtually stay puppies all their lives. Many people love dogs, but some people love puppies. There is a trick in nature called neotony, where the child-form becomes the only form. I'm sure they could do it to some dogs...

Other dogs, to decrease the amount of wild dogs, would only be able to have one or two litters, and much smaller litters.

Cats would be changed so their excrement is not quite so offensive in smell.

Imagine a night after we have "tampered" with nature. Sitting on a lawn you'll never have to cut, butterflies would fly above in the night air---but glowing, like fireflies, only with many different colors. Neon butterflies to light the night sky and make a sweet summer evening more beautiful...

The songs of birds might be made even more expressive. A robin might sing Mozart, a whipporwhil would trill Chopin.

No mosquito will bite you, no bee will sting you. Snakes would be non-poisonous to humans, but would eat pests.

Some plants, totally undreamt by us now, would take pollution and flourocarbon emissions and breathe them in---and breathe out pure oxygen in its wake.

We have the capacity to make an Eden again. To literally make a lion lay down with a lamb.

I think it would be criminal to turn our back, in a misplaced feeling of ecological stand-offishness, from such a future.