When Life Gives you Lemons... or Did it?

Most breeds of dogs that we know of today, aren't natural. They were selectively bred from various "originals" and merged together, refining them over time and giving them one or two generations of breeding, till the traits that the breeder was looking for, became the dominant genes - and a species was born.

This was all the rage with scientists in the mid 18th century and 1900s. In a way Hitler tried to do this with human beings - to create an aryan / superior race.

Much of that spawned by Gregor mendel's pea experiment (the famous one we all studied in school) applying it into various fields. Horses, Dogs, Agriculture, Cows, Pigs, Poultry - mankind created a range of new species that would have taken nature millions of year (if it ever got around to it).

The astounding example is the lemon. Lemon is not a natural fruit, but selectively bred oranges that were sour and merged with another tree from the same family to create lemons. Irony is, Life didnt give us lemons, we gave ourselves lemons :)

Today's world has CRISPR. We can go far beyond putting things together and trying to get the traits we want, to on a DNA level doing that selection. Some call it playing God, for some it is accelerating nature's process.

The difference between now and the mid 18th century is our evolution of ethics. When they were breeding all these new species of dogs, horses and such - just like in Mendel's experiment 8 out of 10 were faulty outcomes. You get 1 or 2 out of 10 that were what they wanted and the rest were all just destroyed - and the experiment started again. In today's world you cant do such things. There would be an uproar.

On a different angle though, working on DNA level might also yield far better outcomes, that you might get 8 or 9 out of 10 to be the intended outcome.

The Hypocrisy of human nature is, we would drool and go awww at a pug, or golden retriever or admire the menacing look of a doberman, when they are all dogs that are outcomes of selective breeding. Not natural ones.