However in the exact same vane that "Nature doesn't care"... We as Humans should and DO care.

We are not Nature, and thus these existential defining issues should at least give us some pause to debate and evaluate the moral quandaries and responsibilities that this level of engineering power wields.

We are very much Nature. Possibly something independent of our own minds exist; we can never really know. Anything worth preserving, caring for, or caring about, is a product of the human mind. The meteor careening into the earth does not feel a moral quandary, but we do, and as such I agree that given our limited knowledge we should care. But we should also pay heed to how ignorant we are: we cannot possibly know how our present actions will play out in the future, the best we can do is try to be compassionate and take care of what we can. The rest is out of our control and hence our sphere of responsibility.

I'm not saying we aren't a product of Nature... I'm saying that the defining trait of man that sets us outside of our natural surroundings is our capability to use intellect, empathy, and morality to guide our decisions.

This is not a tool that "Nature" has in its toolbox. Nature has, natural selection. The random smatterings of dice throws that takes place trillions of times per day over the course of billions of years. The equivalent of throwing paint against the wall for a millennia to eventually recreate a Picasso.

This is not how humans work. Our efforts are efficient (at least more so than Nature's efforts), and when honed and optimized can be made into machines of frighteningly impressive efficiency.

There is certainly a difference between the creative and destructive processes of Man vs Nature.

How can you possibly even say "We are not Nature"?

Of course we are Nature. We came to being the exact same way every other current living species did, thru natural selection. So then how can we be living, as you say, somehow outside this "Nature" you speak of?

Hell, I know I may be in a small minority who says, by definition, nothing that we do is "wrong" because we are simply doing what our brains, which are 100% a product of this Nature, are telling us to do.

Post-modernism is quick to tell us there are no absolute rights and wrongs...that only culture makes it so. So why then can some say that its immoral to create and study these creatures that our nature-created brains have led us to create?

In part this is arguing over a definition of nature. You're going for the obvious "We are part of nature because nature created us and we work within the system." while they're going for the idea of it being more strictly influenced by evolutionary change which we have the ability to 'escape' (escape in the sense that we can go farther than an animal can due to being able to design larger systems without having each step useful). The definition of "we are of Nature" is essentially "we are of Physics". This is true, but its not really useful.

On your morality lines: Morality is a personal concept in people, but it is influenced by society and the people they interact with. There doesn't have to be some objective right/wrong, and so people can say that the scientists were being immoral (according to the person's own moral ideas). The scientists may very well believe they were being moral, or perhaps they didn't think about it (people do that!)

> that our nature-created brains have led us to create? Well, as stated before, morality isn't the same between humans. There's no objective authority that decides X is right or Y is wrong, simply social/cultural influences throughout the world.

You could view morality as a way that you think the world/people should behave to maximize some value you hold. Perhaps you value sentient life, and so you hold self-sacrifice to save a dozen people to be a moral good as it continues more sentient life.

> Well, as stated before, morality isn't the same between humans. There's no objective authority that decides X is right or Y is wrong, simply social/cultural influences throughout the world.

Worth remembering that it's also not the case that every person has different morality, and everyone's moral values are uniformly distributed across the space of possible values.

No, the moral values of humans are all very strongly correlated, both within and across societies. We spend a lot of time bikeshedding the details, but we essentially have a shared sense of what's right and wrong.

(I hypothesize it's because we all have the same brain architecture - the basic moral sense is encoded in firmware, and through culture we adapt it to fit the environments and societies we live in.)

I would question your point, "that moral values [...] are very strongly correlated [...] across societies". My favourite example is the Aztecs society. Moral values were completly different.

Sparta is another example. The Nazi regime in Germany too. Slavery in the US. I could keep going for another hour.

Moral values are highly dependent on you environmental influences.

Nevertheless you are totaly correct, that the majority of people in a single society shares similair views on moral rules.

I believe the point is that “the interest of humans is not the same as the interest of nature.” We are part of nature, but not referentially equal.

“Nature” may not care what happens to the human species, but we do!

Exactly. Well said.

You know that's a bullshit excuse because you wouldn't accept it from someone who knowingly caused you serious problems.

This is really an argument about the definition of natural isn’t it. We’re from nature but personally I believe humans are something different. We’re the only animal with choice - that we know of at least, and if you believe in free will, which some people don’t of course.

It's not a matter of what we believe, but it's a matter of facts.

Humans comes from nature, and the building blocks of a human are the same as everything else in the universe (as far as we know).

Recent studies have shown that "choice" is made before we are even conscious of it (so byebye free will?), and no studies have shown that we are the only living creature able to make "choices".

"Humans are special", "Humans are different", "Humans are smarter" is the perfect example of arrogance and ignorance of humans.

It is a matter of definitions, and it's a matter of avoiding a fallacy. Just because "we come from nature", doesn't mean we're bound to whatever patterns of behavior we observe in animals, and it especially doesn't mean the "nature" tells us what we should or shouldn't do. The world of non-human living things is a very bad place to look for lessons in morality.

"Humans are different" isn't arrogance, it's observable reality. And we need some words to separate the categories of "things done / caused by humans" vs "things done / caused by everything else" - hence the common meaning of "natural" and "nature".

> the building blocks of a human are the same as everything else in the universe (as far as we know).

Building blocks of everything in the universe are the same, but there's still meaningful difference between things.

Humans _are_ special, humans _are_ smarter. While yes we do share common ancestors with chimpanzees and other apes, there is something incredibly different between us and the chimpanzee. I just got off of an airplane thinking how insane it is humans can build these tools.

We humans wield great power over other life. With great power comes great responsibility, and just as much as we should humbly recognize our origins and common ancestors with other life, we should also recognize the immense responsibilities over other life that we have.

By that definition how is anything ever unnatural? Everything comes from the Big Bang so everything is natural?

Yet you are able to learn, reason and communicate. That potential is why we're not hunters and gatherers still.

Caring isn't fundamentally good or right. It just happens to be a feeling that humans have. We probably have it because it gives our species some advantage over other species. It might be that a more "right" way of behaving is aggressive eugenics to create better life for future humans or even a future species. Animals often do this by killing the runt of their litter or hen-pecking each other to death.

As a human I feel that having morality is very important, but moving all that stuff aside for a second, the only thing in the end that really matters is whether we will cause our own extinction.

Nature took a very long time to get us to where we are, it seems to me that playing with the biological building blocks at this level, relative to nature’s approach, has a very high risk of causing something catastrophic some time in the future.

The IT professional in me would advise to continue no further until a reproducible backup/restore procedure was in place. I’m not sure how exactly that translates to biological systems though.

Also I am currently available for hire :)

I don't give it credit, like it's trying to gain balance, but functioning ecosystems do maintain a balance. Most of our climate problems have come from humans disrupting this.

If you take any functioning healthy ecosystem on earth, one generally less tampered with by humans, you'll find from a microscopic, right up to a macroscopic level, the life in those ecosystems have adapted to function together.

If you want to see some good examples of this, check out some terrarium channels on youtube, there's some really cool, perfectly balanced ones people have had going for years.

The reason why we have so many ecological problems around the world is that humans have been constantly disrupting this. We introduce invasive species that dominate the landscape, cause extinctions and extirpations of native species and change the fundamental balance of the ecosystem.

You're right, life does push through, but personally, I prefer the native songbirds and shrubs that are local to my area than a landscape full of Japanese knotweed and starlings.

And so do most things, that first example likely has at least a dozen species of songbirds, a bunch of shrubs and herbacious plants. That second example has two species, maybe some rats or crows if your lucky.

The thing is, ecosystems don't stand alone, they're all connected and the collapse of one leads to the collapse of the neighbouring ones and so forth.

If you actually look through the published literature.on various ecosystems around the world, we have a very shallow level of knowledge. We don't understand fully the complex connections between everything and the research that does keep coming out keeps showing how much we've vastly underestimated how much our actions have impacted things.

Even things like the ecosystems in our own body's. The microscopic organisms that have been found to even play a part in things such as our decision making and moods.

The human body itself functions as an ecosystem, all our body systems, our cells, our organs, all function independently and cohesively to make everything that is you.

The earth itself functions the same way. The ecosystems, and all life, including humans, are the cells and organs that make up all life on Earth.

Altering life at a fundamental genetic level goes even further than how we alter ecosystems.

Humans really don't understand the potential consequences to changes we make to the genetic code. We have a vague idea, but we really are.delving mostly blind into this. If we barely understand how life works on a macroscopic level, what makes us think we're ready to change it at an even lower level?

You’re missing survivorship bias - nature didn’t just create these balanced ecosystems, it creates anything that goes, and things that don’t work out just die. Humans ruining earth for themselves is just as natural, just that we might die as result. But life won’t - it’s much more resilient than just one species. Or several.

Following this line of logic you can justify anything. If I kill your entire family, that’s natural. Would you be ok with that?

I think if you accept at all that there is suffering and there is beauty, then you shouldn’t hide behind “everything’s natural” and instead try and have a backbone and stick up for something more.

That's the point: naturalism can justify anything, and that makes it a poor guiding principle. As do many other things.

There are many natural things that are good. Clean air, unique little ecosystems like GP describes, endless variety -- and we should strive to respect and preserve those, but not because they are natural. Poor animals teeming with parasites, population "balance" maintained through periodic overpopulation and starvation (How do people think it happens? Forest fairies tell the deer how many babies to have?), predators feasting on the organs of their prey while the prey is still alive. All these things are natural but not good and we should not seek to replicate them.

> population "balance" maintained through periodic overpopulation and starvation (How do people think it happens? Forest fairies tell the deer how many babies to have?)

Thinking about this, I just realized a simple thing: balance in animal population via starvation might not be as grim as we expect (i.e. it happens completely because the weakest/least fit individuals cannot compete for food and literally starve).

The sexual reproductive system is apparently one of the things that stops working earliest when you're affected by disease or malnutrition. This means that malnourished deers will just start having fewer/no babies while they're being famished.

Still grim, because lots of animals would starve, and still very uncomfortable for the deers which, even if they might survive to "old age", will fail to breed due to starvation... but still better than the alternative in which every baby deer gets born in the world as usual, only to then starve to death while they're still very young.

It's still very grim if you recognize that animals - particularly advanced animals like deer - feel and suffer. Also makes you wonder if the fragility of reproductive system wrt. malnutrition isn't an evolutionary adaptation that smooths out the population crash a little bit after hitting the carrying capacity of a niche.

(Also: many (most?) living things have things that eat them, which is another population maintenance mechanism, and no less grim.)

Even more grim: a world where we lose touch with death and suffering and start treating them as grim and unnecessary.

Humanity should strive for that world instead of accepting this world.

Without it we’re not human, people raised without it would have a value system alien to you and likely disgust you.

We can certainly avoid the worst of it - but entirely is more dangerous than none.

Why should I be "ok" with natural? Screw natural. Nature does a lot of terrible things. People dying in hurricanes or at the hands of murderers isn't OK because its "natural" - its just not OK. We have the intelligence to influence our environment (and that intelligence is also a result of nature). Trying to categorize natural vs unnatural (whatever that means) is a fools errand and not a productive one in my view, since my ethics aren't based on "it's ok because the volcano was natural"

The problem with this line of thinking is that it might be a little short-sighted. Since we are intelligent, we should be careful. With great powers come great responsibility. If someone doesn't like hurricanes, they can move where there is none. When Earth will be 99% inhabitable (because of air pollution, soil degradation, lack of water), is the solution just to say "oh well", let's go to Mars?

(I assume you meant uninhabitable)

For the individual the answer is almost certainly yes. If we have the ability to survive elsewhere than earth and we have brought earth to the point that it is 99% uninhabitable then going someone else is probably the best choice.

One could easily argue that our ability to consider our environment and make changes to our behavior accordingly is unnatural. Avoiding the above scenario is something we should be using our unnatural gifts to avoid.

Arguments based on how natural something is is highly subjective and not really worthwhile imo. Replace natural with what we're actually trying to discuss: As a species we want a stable environment that requires the least effort to survive in. Individuals have additional traits they want from the environment but that's all subjective. Things that most people consider natural are usually things that have a large data set to demonstrate their stability.

>For the individual the answer is almost certainly yes

That type of thinking will ruin the second planet just as much.

Hence the root cause of all human-caused problems: what is locally, short-term beneficial for an individual is often long-term detrimental to the group, and long-term success of an individual depends on long-term success of the group.

I.e. we're too competitive, not cooperative enough, and can hardly coordinate at scale. Our best coordination mechanism we've ever came up with is the market economy, which is essentially taking the survival instinct of individuals and building a distributed coercion system with it. Sure, it works, but wouldn't it be nicer if we could just talk our way into working together on shared goals, instead of using money and threats of starvation?

Well, from nature’s perspective, yes it is OK. Nature won’t put you in jail. However, do it on a wide scale (you start murdering billions to prove a point) then yes Nature cares and the survival of the species is thrown into jeopardy. As a person, no it’s not OK - acts that do more harm than good are agreed to (by choice) by most as illegal.

Comparing to aborting a human-monkey fetus, the question of is there more good than harm is new. In a scientific setting where few cases are performed and a lot of Nature’s rules are revealed to us, I think that is mostly good. Genetic editing expanded to a large scale can also, I think, be done in a good way (by editing genes to increase intelligence or removing genes to reduce disease). It can also be done in a harmful way - say, raising an army of clones or some nightmare scenario where the rich and wealthy raise super intelligent human children that rules and obsoletes the rest of humanity.

I argue though that those nightmare situations will happen anyway and that human society has always had huge swings in well-being and suffering, with the average standard of living growing.

I think trying to contain the research is useful only up to some point - tracking the research and labeling successes and failures (science) and opening these studies and results to all of humanity is I think ultimately helpful. Keeping some competitive advantage over competing nations or corporations is also helpful. The more we learn, the more we can identify and prevent misuse.

Last thing to point out is humanity, and nature, share in common that we grow by making a ton of mistakes. Whereas Nature learns by not dying entirely, humanity adds a method by learning by thinking - this seems to be faster.

If we apply sentience to Nature, perhaps we were allowed to live in the hopes that we’d help Nature survive the next astroid attack.

It is natural.

That doesn't make it okay.

> If you take any functioning healthy ecosystem on earth, one generally less tampered with by humans, you'll find from a microscopic, right up to a macroscopic level, the life in those ecosystems have adapted to function together.

You're still taking essentially a static view of a dynamic system, because you're looking at too small a timescales. What we see as "natural balance" is essentially a freeze-frame of nature. The equilibria we see aren't stable - they're just very slow to changing. Everything is evolving and in a constant war with each other at every level - from microscopic to macroscopic. Nature itself doesn't care about the environment as we see it today[0].

The problem with humans boils down to what makes us truly special: intelligence and socializing enabled us to evolve a meta-organism of society at rates many orders of magnitude faster than biological evolution. Language and writing lets us propagate knowledge and technologies between generations, and intelligence lets us problem-solve and simulate in mind space - pruning the solution space quickly and in an efficient way, over evolution's directed RNG.

Point being, no other organism can respond with the speed at which we evolve our societies and technologies. That's why we disrupt the ecosystems and the climate. We're too fast for nature.

--

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event is a good example. An evolutionary leap, leading to most life dying off, only for new and more complex forms to eventually take its place. But as it is with life, whatever comes after a mass die-off isn't the same thing that was there before.

Also most of the issue with environmental disruption is the same issue as say, when an asteroid slams into the planet: sure, life survived in some form, but a lot of the dominant species didn't.

Human industralization is that sort of a problem - rather then a slow multi-generational change in equilibria, we're looking at rapid change which simply wipes species out (because if you can't have a generational change, you can't have any evolutionary adaptation).

The domestication of dogs for example is something humans definitely did to the native biosphere - dogs don't exist today without us. But it took at least 20,000 years to do. Not 300.

If you take most systems, they're at war with eachother. And that war includes viruses, which do a lot of altering at the fundamental genetic level. You could call it balance - I'd call it stalemate. And of course we don't understand the consequences- thats the point of the research. Ideally its done in a controlled, ethical way. And questions are raised. But the point of the research is to understand the connections and the consequences, and the only way we do that is by experimenting which involves making low level changes and observing the results. And as we understand these consequences, were able to apply our new knowledge to practical purposes like treating disease. Not understanding is the reason that research matters - the point is to find out.

> I don't give it credit, like it's trying to gain balance, but functioning ecosystems do maintain a balance. Most of our climate problems have come from humans disrupting this.

We didn't come out of a void. We are a natural evolution too, with the only difference being that we reached this stage before other animals. Since we are disrupting our ecosystem, we are living proof that either:

- this ecosystem we are in is not function according to your definition - or functioning ecosystems do not maintain balance

> The reason why we have so many ecological problems around the world is that humans have been constantly disrupting this. We introduce invasive species that dominate the landscape, cause extinctions and extirpations of native species and change the fundamental balance of the ecosystem.

Ecosystems are constantly being disrupted and have been long before humans evolved. Wind can carry the seeds of one plant into another ecosystem where it suddenly dominates because it has no "natural predators". Birds can fly over an ecosystem, defecate and drop an entirely foreign species into another ecosystem.

Cyanobacteria are even attributed as the reason for one of the first mass extinctions [0]. Is that a sign of a functioning ecosystem?

> Altering life at a fundamental genetic level goes even further than how we alter ecosystems.

Viruses and bacteria actively mess around with the DNA of other organisms in order to render them susceptible or make them carriers. Nature has been messing with itself long before we ever learned how.

We are in no way special in this universe or in our actions. We are just copying what we see in nature.

[0]: https://slate.com/technology/2014/07/the-great-oxygenation-e...

"I prefer the native songbirds and shrubs that are local to my area than a landscape full of Japanese knotweed and starlings."

Don't you think, you feel that way, because you grew up with the native songbirds?

"If we barely understand how life works on a macroscopic level, what makes us think we're ready to change it at an even lower level? "

Like the other poster have said: nature does not plan in advance or makes ethical discussions. Nature just is and everything in it trys to adapt. Some prosper, some die out. Now with our technology we disrupted quite a bit, but why must we understand everything we do, when nature aparrently does not either?

With research like this, I am more worried, what things like this, does to us. To maybe get to the point, where new babys are created in a laboratory and the less successful experiments goes to the bin. All for Evolution.

Now I am grossed out by that thought. But from a philosophical point of view, I have to ask myself: "who defines that this is bad?"

Maybe this gets us to the stars, so life can spread, in case earth life gets vanished, by a big asteroid. So maybe it is ethical to do all we can, to get there? To preserve life itself? (humans are not at all adopted for space, radiation, zero g etc., so CRISPR?)

(well no, I don't think it is ethical to do by all means, but I do think ethics are subjective and the next generations might have different ethics)

It's an easy qualitative decision to consider a variety of species with pleasant calls and plants which coexist in their own niches better than swarms of one single species of bird and an aggressively invasive plant species which chokes out all other growth. Knotweed in particular is an absolute pox on the landscape in North America.

Ok, I don't know of the specific case, it is just, that here in germany, the "invasive" species people complain about, I wittnes as a welcome variation. Brings in more color. The areas that do get dominated, will very likely balance it out with a different species, soon.

edit: had to translate it, but: we also have knotweed and people complain, but I actually like it. And I do not see it dominating, just a spot here and there, just like nettles.

Not every weed moves as fast as a virus. It might take decades before we realize that some species have disappeared, and in their wake, others are going too, and we are left with a homogeneous ecosystem where a new virus will come and be even worse (like the wheat rust which decimated the single species of wheat growing in North America). Obviously, Nature, being random, might cause destruction on its own (like when plants appeared and the high level of oxygen they produced killed earlier species), but this happens on millions of years. And sure, nothing prevents "Nature" from killing humans too. We are not more precious than any other species, from the Nature point of view.

"we realize that some species have disappeared, and in their wake, others are going too, and we are left with a homogeneous ecosystem "

Species come and go all the time. Globalisation just made it a lot faster. So there will be imbalances and local system collapsing and temporary a dominating species etc., but alltogether the diversity of species will be increased, with fast global exchange. Because there are more candidates to fill a niche.

Local established ones still have a home bonus. Their DNA is adopted to the local climate and soil, unlike the invaders. They won't vanish anytime soon.

The thing really threatening diversity are monoculture fields with pesticides.

Everything is a chaotic riot tumbling down the energy gradient from the Sun.

> Nature doesn't try and balance life

Actually it does. It's quite likely that this is neither the first universe nor the last. But it's certainly one of the more stable ones.

> If anything, that makes nature the one that was blindly messing around.

Quite hard to image that something even close to this has happened by pure coincidence - e.g. mutation - before.

“You're giving nature too much credit.”

What a statement.

I think also that "New Species" may also be a big leap.

Its an enhanced mutant example at best...

What is a species but a mutation of another one? Let's not forget most definitions of "species" are tenuous at best. The natural world is not so easily categorized.

"Species" vs a gene mutation is pretty well defined for mammals, it's usually obscure lifeforms like microscopic worms and bacteria where that term might be less useful.

Don’t blame wanting to prove Planet of the Apes could be real (but not having the balls to do it) Nature’s fault. That stupidity is just human mad science.