Ok, this is a topic I've been thinking about recently....natural response to unnatural stimuli.

Let's take grafting as an example.  The beekeeper takes great pains to combine bees of the proper age (unnatural..combs never get moved from one cavity to another in nature), along with the proper resources, all the makings of a colony ready to explode in population...except that there is no queen (also unnatural...a colony could never get to that level of vitality with no queen).

Now, we remove worker brood from their cells and place them in plastic cups (some use wax, I use plastic..unnatural)...and place these cups in the middle of fresh pollen stores oriented as queen cells are oriented.

If we do it right, 30 or 40 queens can be raised and fed by the bees in this colony, and with a few more tricks (starter/finisher) productivity (from a queen rearing perspective) can be hundreds of cells/virgins a week, even for a small producer.

There is nothing unnatural about what the bees are doing.  The circumstance the bees are thrust into is quite unnatural.  The process of applying unnatural circumstance to elicit a "hyper-natural behavioral response" (the over-expression of a natural response...and yes I just made that up) is not a natural process, it's an exploitation of natural response.

Lets compare the targeted use of RNAi technology and/or dsRNA against specific genes in specific viruses to dog breeding.  "Natural selection" tends to select for the kind of "street dog" you see stray in the cities and in third world countries....much more like a wolf or coyote than like a dachshund or great dane.

The same exact mechanism that causes such stray populations to "regress to the mean" is the one that was used to build dachshunds and great danes in the first place...the difference is one is being guided by nature...by natural process, and one is targeted by human desire.  The results are starkly different.  They are not both "natural processes" even if they share a common natural mechanism.

The exchange of genes that occurs between bacteria, viruses, and larger organisms has been going on since, like, forever.  It's part of the texture of the genetic symphony.  What happens in nature is a complex interaction of "sounds" in this symphony, covering the entire spectrum of the genome.  RNAi is like someone playing a B flat on a trombone....all day.  One is complex and beautiful, and one is dull and monotonous (at least it isn't bagpipes).

So, I'm not sure if I've defined what is natural and what isn't...but I hope I've made some sense WRT natural responses to unnatural situations.  We'd probably all flap our arms and scream if we found ourselves teleported to 30,000 feet and falling...it's only natural.  ...but what about the teleportation device?

deknow

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