“Outdo” has multiple meanings, but pure engineering has made us go faster, fly higher, and survive worse cold, than anything purely evolved.
And if you mean purely organic items, not engineered, then you still need to explain the sense of “outdo”, because GM foods outdo non-GM foods in many ways we care about (e.g. bacterial rennet replacing cow stomach in cheese making, outdoing it by cost-efficiency and coincidentally making more cheeses suitable for vegetarians).
Edit: just to add, I wouldn’t accept “we have not done it from scratch yet” as a valid argument that we cannot do better than natural selection, any more than I would accept ”$person has not yet fabricated a CPU” as an argument that $person can’t code better than at least one professional CPU designer.
Irrelevant. I thought that would’ve been clear from me using the comparison as an example of a bad argument.
Also, not even correct, assuming I have been correctly informed that simulated evolution is used for some optimisations of e.g. precise physical transistor placement.
Are you sure you mean vegetarian and not vegan? Vegetarian cheese is pretty much the default in UK supermarkets these days, and almost nobody even knows that things like Parmesan are non-vegetarian.
Vegan cheese, on the other hand… oh dear.
I try it sometimes; vegan cheddar-alike tastes like vanilla ice cream that refuses to melt, but vegan feta-alike sort-of works.
We are in the infancy of genetic manipulation. A working understanding of CRISPR only developed in the past few years. There were some significant hurdles to getting to that point.
In the coming decades, we shall be programming genes like we program computers. We'll model organisms, formulate changes, simulate the formulated changes, then create the genetic "programs" (really, life forms) using some kind of biological gene expresser.
Right now we're in something akin to the vacuum tube era of computing where you need to be a government or a large corporation to do more than just tinker. As with computers, those barriers to entry will not remain in place for very long.
I'm not saying that we're going to be writing genetic Perl scripts. I'm saying that the basics of looking at genetically-based organisms as a type of programming/engineering is inevitable.
You may not have an "if" statement, but you have genetic segments than can cause the synthesis of a protein when present. You may not have goto statements, but you have stop codons that end the processing of the creation of a protein.
Read up on the genetic engineering solutions already being created regarding how payloads are created in bacteria, how they're delivered to target cells, how the payloads are activated, etc. These are step-by-step processes with conditional behaviors, loop-like replication of processes, spawning of processes, subroutine-like embedded processes, etc.
Genetic programming will be similar to computer programming in ways. It will be different in ways. But the arc of progression of how we start off with huge barriers to entry and little understanding to where we eventually manipulate genetics cheaply and trivially are inevitable.
Do you really think we can transfer the usual edit, compile, run, rinse and repeat workflow to genetic engineering?
From the perspective of the majority it's an acceptable tradeoff to sacrifice a few thousand humans for the benefit of billions. It could even cause less suffering than natural selection.
I still wouldn't want to be one of those pre release versions...
Do you mean why don't we have gray or green goo? The thing that outreproduce and outsurvive biological organisms. Maybe because engineers optimize for other things usually.
Synthetic biology covers literal reproduction of organisms: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_biology
“Outdo” has multiple meanings, but pure engineering has made us go faster, fly higher, and survive worse cold, than anything purely evolved.
And if you mean purely organic items, not engineered, then you still need to explain the sense of “outdo”, because GM foods outdo non-GM foods in many ways we care about (e.g. bacterial rennet replacing cow stomach in cheese making, outdoing it by cost-efficiency and coincidentally making more cheeses suitable for vegetarians).