I'm more likely to not share your opinion of the "natural balance". If there was a natural balance once, it was lost since a man created a tool using his intelect to kill another thing (for example, creating an axe), or the industrial revolution.
etc...
Tools are a part of our evolution, the phenomenon of life still adapts, and "balance" applies : using tools made us phisically and psychologically evolve throught time (losing hairs, teeth, bigger skull, changing customs, being sendentary etc...), it's part of the "balance" slowly and continuously adjusting. We couldn't survive with our bare hands when we had to change of life environment, so we adapted with what we had (hands/thumbs etc...).
I agree with your Industrial revolution point tho, it accelerated the "un-balancing" effect, but I'm one of those people who like to think we're supposed to learn from our past mistakes. We know industrialization and mass production pollute the world and we'll suffer the consequences sooner or later, we already see some effects.
Sure, we're humanbeings and we're "clever" and civilized and all that (not that much tho), we're so great we could fuck the whole eco-system up in one minute. And being conscious of this fact doesn't give us the right to be cynical and keep acting like capricious children, it gives us responsabilities regarding our impact on the rest of the eco-system if we want longevity for our specie.
Sure, industrial revolution made life easier for a lot of people and we made major discoveries or technological advances during that era. But those are now "earned" knowledge, we won't lose everything if we decide to take a different direction. We're actually at the point we have enough knowledge and techniques to cut with the industrial era, keep the good parts that emerged from it, and create something else, cleaner and less destructive for the eco-system we live in, restore some balance instead of continuing to fuck things up.
Cloning and GMO are not like a simple axe we used to hunt animals, it's modifying the very essence of what makes us live, it's "science without conscience", it's fucking with the laws of nature. The "funny" part is that we could actually biologically grow vegetables and cereals as fast as GM ones, and we could do it with 10x less water consumption. And cloning "meat animals" to produce more for alimentary questions would be silly when we know how much "meat industry" pollutes, plus we already know we'll have to consume less meat in the next decades. I'm not being paranoïd, I'm being realistic regarding what we're doing, the impact of our actions, and the knowledge we have about different ways to answer our needs... but we somehow keep going in the wrong direction, because money rules, and dominant lobbies influence the political scene to impose their will.
Just look at Monsanto and other big food lobbies working to legally forbid people to sow their own seeds from their own culture for their future crops, like we've done for thousand of years, and now trying to force farmers to buy their modified seeds. I'm not saying they're evil people that want to destroy or rule the world, they're
just people, they value their own profit over the long term consequences, or probably have no clue about them. It's not a question to observe only under a scientifical/biological p.o.v, but through political, ethical and philosophical p.o.v. as well.
By the way, what do you mean by "recently discovered"?
You might feel like we know a big deal about it, but 100% of what we know might as well represent 10% of the depth of the subject, not even considering we might be wrong on some aspect. It's a discovery from the last century, and 100 years, in the absolute, is approximatively nothing.
Wouldn't that technically be impossible? The animal would not be able to breed with what is essentially itself, for the same reason that a bull cannot breed with its brother or a cow cannot breed with its sister.
Farmers already take precautions to make sure that their animals are not born with defects through inbreeding. They don't have any problems despite only typically using 2-3 of the "best" bulls per ~100 cows per generation. These are often bought from different farmers in farmers markets. I don't see why they would stop taking these precautions, or why it would be harder to do so when dealing with clones.
I wasn't saying clones of one animal would reproduce between themselves, that's indeed impossible. But following generations change the picture :
If multiple clones of one (1) animal give birth to a second generation, despite the fact they won't be from the same mother, they'll still be from the same genetic code and all the problem that ensues, exponentially growing every new generation. That's the total opposite of the necessary biodiversty, it's almost zoonazism.
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Edit : Just to be clear, I'm not against cloning for medical and scientifical research, it's actually pretty cool. I'm against cloning for industrial and "efficiency of production" reasons
Last edited by deprav; Jul 2, 2013 at 05:35 AM.