Artificial or natural?

People, have always liked to categorize things. Good and bad, moral and immoral, artificial and natural.

You may think that artificial and natural have a more clear distinction then something as subjective as morality and you may be right. However the beginning of the industrial revolution seems to have initiated the time when people first stepped way past their limitations. Mass production was invented and instantaneously one person could do the work of fifty.

One person doing the work of fifty, with the aid of a machine, or is it a machineperson doing the work of fifty people. We have cyborgized ourselves, adding to our ability’s. The question is, has this made us artificial? Or are we ourselves still natural but the technologies we use artificial, even if those technologies are placed within us?

(http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/artificial-heart-abiocor-hand.jpg)

This is clearly debatable, surly though changing the very essence of what makes up an organism, its genes, is not debatable. You create a hybrid and this hybrid can only be called artificial or at the very least ‘man-made.’

However the insertion of new genes to produce wanted traits in an animal or crop is not a new idea. For century’s farmers have chosen the strongest, fittest, fattest of their live stock to breed in order for the next generation to be stronger, fitter, fatter. A form of controlled evolution if you will.

Even farms themselves haven’t always been around, the fact that farms are there at all has changed the landscape and habitat of the area, it has changed behaviors of animals, even pushed some animals to the brink of extinction and yet we have been almost re-programmed to consider this natural. Could extinction ever be considered natural?

As the modern world progresses we have gotten more and more ambitious with our ‘projects,’ now there is even talk of pharms where you could literally farm pharmaceuticals. Now even tobacco, the hailed bad guy of the crops could be responsible for saving about 10 million people from contracting HIV in Africa. Ironic, insane, irresponsible, incredible, ingenious. Are among the many things I could say about this project.