I’ve been a distracted mess lately, with all this PT stuff as well as a week of administrative malarkey, but I did notice a a provocative comment that I feel compelled to respond to.

Upon accepting the risk of dispensing an unpopular remark: One day, we shall have to set nature in order using genetical engineering.

No creature should devour any other.

Wow. That makes no sense. We humans are obligate heterotrophs — we must obtain certain vital molecules by consuming other organisms. For example, we cannot synthesize valine, isoleucine, leucine, methionine, phenylalanine, tryptophan, threonine, histidine, or lysine, so we have to consume other organisms that contain those substances, or we die. I guess we can define “creature” to escape the problem, which is the vegetarian solution. We don’t eat meat from animals by making the decision that plants don’t count. It’s very convenient to say that killing carrots or yeast or lettuce is ethically OK, but if you think about it all deeply, even a carrot is a product of processes that kill insects with pesticides. Do insects count? What about protists? The lines are all arbitrary and we each draw our own lines.

Is our solution to genetically modify humans so they can synthesize every molecule we need? Or are we going to build factories to create all these essential substances as supplements?

But deeper still, the planetary biome is built on dependencies contingent on death and consumption, in every food web that exists. For example, sea otters eat sea urchins; sea urchins eat kelp; when sea otters are eliminated, the kelp forests die. How do we genetically engineer “devouring” out of the system without necessarily deleting entire ecologies? The only way any of this can happen is by magic.

Nature is already in order, reordering it to your preferences is silly.