Controversial DNA Startup Wants To Let Customers Create Creatures

The future is going to be fricking AWESOME! Here's to hoping I can design my pet Compsognathus I've always wanted.

Let those who wish to tinker with DNA tinker and those that dont want to abstain from it. We should be allowed to tinker with our own DNA too. Besides its no ones business what you do with your genes and DNA.

I think this pretty well wraps up the concerns all in one go...

I never realized how many people actually feared progression. This is forward people, you cannot honestly say you did not see this eventually coming to fruition as a plausible reality.

For those whom may claim it is against the will of whatever god you may believe in I present you with the following argument:

If god did not want us to create then why are we here, and why would god have given us the tools necessary to get the job done?

I for one welcome this new idea of creating species, lets make the world ours and how we want it to be. Maybe I want a creature that eats pollution and expels clean air.

It's merely because people instantly think of how any new technology can be used for the most malicious of intentions instead of looking at the beyond amazing possibilities it brings.

a reply to: TzarChasm

nature does it in increments. we will do it in leaps and bounds. where nature will arm a frog with toxic flesh, we will arm ourselves with super strength, enhanced vision, limitless stamina, the capacity to breathe underwater. the temptation to rid ourselves of vulnerability will be too much to resist. the temptation to engineer an unbreakable defense comes frighteningly close to the compulsion to build an unstoppable offense. my whole point is that while this project could bring out the best in our species, i fear it will only stimulate the worst.

You are correct, nature does do it in increments, but nature also does it in leaps and bounds. I don't see human beings as separate from nature, especially human activity. There is the distinction we hold that what we create is artificial because you won't find it in nature, but I find that position to be absurd. If beavers build a dam we do not refer to the dam as being artificial or separate from nature. The dam is part of the ecosystem, whether it benefits or hinders. Everything we create is the same. Our cities are a part of the ecosystem, whether they are beneficial or not. Like beavers and their dams, the tech that we create is not artificial, it is natural because we exist in nature. Sentience is nature.

Nature only moves in increments until a species reaches sentience. The move towards taking control over our evolution is evolution, and natural selection will still play a role.

Some humans will augment themselves, some humans will not. Once that happens our species will become divergent and later historians will remember it as the schism of homo sapiens. When one group splits into many groups. The group that does not choose to tamper with genetics will most likely die-out from not being able to compete with the new species.

I do not see it as the worst in us. Why choose between camouflage or poisonous stingers when you can have both? And our evolution will not be incremental because, at some point in the evolution of a species, growth becomes exponential. Thank sentience.

I do not see that as unnatural, and I hope I was able to communicate my ideas clearly.

on a side note, do you think it is possible to engineer viruses that behave like power ups? take a pill and contract the ability to see 5 miles with ease? or take a shot and come down with a case of accelerated healing factor?

Yes, actually. I was reading somewhere that viruses may have played a role in our evolution, and that the viruses we come into contact with have directly influenced our DNA. If that were true, then using viruses to augment ourselves would make sense.