So I recently came across a Facebook post that linked to an interesting article. "Woooly mammoth cells brought back to life". The post was new though the article written in 2019. What surprised me was the number of comments that suggested people shouldn't be "messing with nature"
I first heard about the woolly mammoth DNA recovery from an episode of Expedition Unknown which aired in 2016 and postulated the idea of cloning the mammoth and bringing it back to life.
Which got me thinking, aren't humans part of nature? and if so, can we do something that is 'against nature'?
This becomes a very slippery slope line of thinking.
At what point did humans evolve 'beyond' nature?
We think that because we can make decisions, that we can foresee the potential consequences of our actions that we are somehow 'better' then those lesser animals. They can be 'forgiven' for killing their own species or making an entire species extinct, because "they don't know better"
Nature is not some 'magical' thing that keeps the world in balance. Take for example bunnies and foxes. When the fox population increases, the bunny population decreases. Eventually the foxes eat too many bunnies, their food source is depleted and the foxes die of starvation. Without a lot of foxes the bunnies can thrive once again and grow in large numbers..and the cycle continues.
The human race is not much different. We continue to over consume the resources of the world, we foolishly once believed that there was enough fish to sustain us until the end of time
At some point I suppose we 'evolved' to recognize the error of our ways? Throughout history we discriminated against those that were different, in gender, culture,religious beliefs, color of our skin. Human beings believed they were 'better' then other 'human beings'. We enslaved those that we we didn't believe were "as good" as us. Was that nature?
When you look into the past it is easy to condemn the actions of our ancestors. In their day the attitudes, sentiments and actions were considered "normal", except for a few that disagreed. Perhaps - the human race was less 'evolved'? Now we know better.
And this is the problem isn't it? - For if we were 'less evolved' - can our ancestors be blamed for our mistakes any more then the fox that kills the rabbit?. Sure today we can be blamed for the action, but what about our ancestors? It was those that fought against the racism and the prejudice that brought us (continues to bring us) into the light every day..and yet through all of this we still remain a part of nature.
We have not evolved past it, nature moves with us. We can no longer more ourselves 'better then nature' then we can consider ourselves 'better then another race or belief system'
Suppose the technology that brings back the Woolly mammoth can solve problems of world hunger, can erase at least some of the mistakes of our ancestors - is it worth it? What will future generations think of us when they look back at our actions at our cloning? - Will those performing such research be looked at heroes or villains? - only time will tell
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