this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2025
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I Didn’t Have Eggs
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People making changes to recipes and then complaining it didn’t turn out.
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Yes, selective breeding is basically humans inducing evolutionary pressure by allowing or disallowing certain individuals to breed.
Domestication can occur naturally (as we believe happened with cats), and more generally there's no reason organisms can't develop traits that humans like except that there would need to be an existing evolutionary pressure to promote it. It's not so much that the traits are harmful as there's just no need for them (apart from everything we've bred to be sterile or completely dependant on humans)
Given enough time evolution turned water-breathing fish into giraffes; there's no reason bioluminescence would be impossible to select for, it would just take an incredibly long time.
We can speed up the process. But giving a shotgun to a monkey doesnt make the monkey a engineer, now does it?
Who's giving shotguns to monkeys? The Ancient Romans didn't have CAD programs, they were still engineers. It took longer to build things, and some of them fell down, but just because their techniques were more primative doesn't stop them being engineers.
Well, when you find evidence of the the romans building aquaducts by throwing mud randomly. You let me know.
Piling rocks in the shape of bridges, then copying the designs of the bridges that survived the best with minor iterations. Some iterations made worse bridges; these weren't copied, but the rest survived and led to better bridges.
The romans didnt randomly piled rocks and built bridges. They put in a lot of engineer forthought before even beginning construction. Certainly some were primed to fail because of miscalculations and misunderstandings (something that plagues even modern engineering).
I think we're getting carried away with analogies, the point is: any technique that deliberately modifies the genome of an organism to achieve a desired result is genetic engineering, and such an organism is a GMO