Artificial animals

[AngryAmish]

I was reading this article and got to thinking about artificial animals. Genetic manipulation is getting more and more advanced all the time. What is the morality of creating all new lifeforms? For example we are already creating new organisms in form of plants and microorganisms.

Would it permissible to cage a very smart animal?

Should we create new forms of life at all? Is it worth the risk of them getting free and crowding out already existing animals? Why would we care and would a "natural" animal be given preference over an "Artificial" animal - like some folks like native plants over invasive one?

[BrklynLiberal]

1. If some corporation could make $ on it they would not give a damn about

the morality of it... Youc an be sure of that. They will make up some sort of lie or half-truth to get around it.

[bryant69]

2. Should we shut of human exploration?

Should we stop science because it might go badly?

I don't know - but as others will point out, it's a sure bet that we are going to.

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

[Bridget Burke]

3. "Wired" also ran a story on Alexis Rockman....

He paints animals & nature. But not exactly existing animals.

www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.04/rockman.html

Check out his "Pet Store" ....



(Dibs on the peppermint-striped sabretooth.)

[Igel]

4. I'm fairly sure I've heard a few pertinent bits of trivia.

The first is that corn (i.e., maize) is native to nowhere. Teosinte, what corn started out as, is a radically different plant. Corn's unlikely to oust teosinte. But corn's certainly not a naturally occurring plant.

Gingko has an exceedingly narrow gene pool. All wild gingko descend from gingkos that were grown as ornamental plants, and selected for their looks. Whether this variety drove the wild strains into existence, or if the wild plants were exterminated and the domesticated variety then recolonized the countryside, I don't recall. What I read may not have said.

Cows aren't really native anywhere, anymore. The wild variety is extinct for a couple of hundred years, IIRC, and the domesticated variety has been bred to have properties quite different from the wild ones.

The same is probably true for horses (lets leave dogs and cats aside), if it was Przewalski's horse--that one's rather small and shaggy. Or the source for modern horses is extinct. Actually, Przewalski's horses are pretty much extinct in the wild, preserved in zoos, unless a new population's been found in the last few years.

Those are plausibly new life forms, produced by less radical artificial means. The difference between that and GMOs so far are (1) the speed of innovation, (2) the means of innovation (DNA/plasmid transfer), and (3) the variety of innovation (nearly any gene could be transferred). Intelligence would be a problem; but that we'll deal with when, and if, it occurs; it's not just one gene, it's a lot of genes; and it's not just the genes, it's the order and timing of their expression.