| > In other words, what the are you even talking about? I'm not talking about naturalism. I'm talking about economics. We're trying to grow muscle tissue without the rest of the organism present, and now we're finding out that you need basically the entirety of the rest of an organism in order to support growing vast quantities of muscle tissue. Read the article. The exact problems that need to be solved -- supply nutrients and fluids, protect the tissue from infection, allow the tissue to be grown as large as the food supply that is available for it, etc. -- are exactly the same problems that an animal already has to solve in order to survive long enough to reproduce. We're not talking about taking what a bird does and scaling up the concept to something large enough to carry a human. We're talking about taking what an organism does and replacing everything except the muscle tissue with an artificial replacement. You need a circulatory system, immune system, digestive system, respiratory system, temperature regulation system, waste removal, etc. It's not a bigger version of what nature has to do. It's identical to what nature already has to do. They're the same problems on the same scale. It doesn't really matter if we're talking about scaling to massive 100 ton batches. A blue whale is 200 tons. That's why it's so hard to create something artificial to compete economically with animal husbandry. Evolution has already had to solve the identical problems, and it's already done so with the requirement of selecting for efficiency of resources. All we did with animal husbandry was also select for optimal growth and domesticity. And the scales that nature already operates at are already within the range of what is logistically workable for human industry. It's not that nature does it better. It's that nature's been solving this problem since abiogenesis and it wasn't particular about the flavor of the muscle tissue it got. It shouldn't surprise us that it's solution is cheaper cheaper or more efficient. It has over 3 billion years of a head start. |