Reply To: Long-Finned variety?
And after all, a breeder can’t make any real claim to “producing” a mutation or new variant that suddenly appears in their tank through normal, nature-al, evolutionary processes anyhow, eh? (Other than giving the adults a comfy home to do their thing, and then playing a hand in the selection process. Transgenics aside perhaps.) The arrogance is rather in the claim to having “created”, not in our participation in the creative activity. If it is arrogant for humans to shape, using selection, the physical appearance of a new fish variation, then it must also be arrogant for humans to “breed” (better said as “provide suitable conditions for breeding”) the natural forms — to follow this argument, what right do we have to interfere with these natural processes at all?.
Humans still are part of nature and the natural ecology, despite our destructive habits, and despite our tendency to think we are not. By definition then, our actions are natural actions, even if they seem contrary to strange misconceptions about a supposed “peaceable animal kingdom.” The living web co-evolved together, with each species necessarily shaped by the species around them, and we are simply a recent member added to that interplay. The only really new difference now that humans are here is the apparent inability of the rest of the ecology to moderate our (far too often negative) interactions with it. Our role in the ongoing evolution of the creatures around us is not something apart from nature or natural processes, it is in fact simply part of it. Our role in the present mass extinction, on the other hand, is I think unconscionable.