> >> there is an essential difference between naturally evolving genetic and
> man
> >> directed
>
> I'm curious. When did man become not a part of nature?

when he decided to throw god outside himself into the heavens !

humans can't remove themselves from nature but they sure can dream
themselves  doing so .
 humans by their actions , coming from this dreamed
state , are pulling the elasticity of life to the extrems . It doesn't
change
anything in absolute termes but in time can create great suffering when the
elastic comes back to the center.

one species as clever it can be  can't recreate  the harmonious  regulating
effect on one species ,
that the whole of the ecosytem can have .



How do you know we
> are not just a "tool" being used to impart certain changes in the
> ecosystem?

to justify their own  spinning off  center , humans had to makes themselves
believe they are on a mission , god's hand on earth .
possible !
we knows for sure that since the neolithic revolution a handfull of men have
used other humans and everything else to impart certain changes in the
ecosytems to compensate for  their own sense of uprootedness, worthlessness,
and separation . those feelings being the result of separating from god .


>
> Why is it you assume we are not actually capable of "improving" something?
> All things being equal, what is really wrong with a "bigger" squash? My
> point was sometimes this happens "naturally".

there is nothing wrong with a bigger squash as long this caracteristic is
the
result of complex interactions between elements and the other species that
constitutes its environment  ( that insure that all the essential
carcteristics of the plant are not compromised by favorising one  trait ).

what is "wrong" with chosing this caracteristic ( bigger squash) as a
criteria of
"improvement "is that you makes yourself in a position to eat more of it
that nature intended your species to eat .Or you can makes the plant more
vulnerable to diseases ( that are in fact rebalancing )
why do you think peoples get into trouble with tomatoes or peanuts ( common
allergen )? In my opinion it is because they eat way too much of it in
comparaison of what a hunter gatherer could have eaten .a wild tomato is big
as a small finger nail and don't grow in field even less so being
transformed by factories .

> >> Wheat is obviously the most striking ex of that
>
> Again, who cares about genetic manipulation of wheat if they don't eat it?
> And, if we avoid grain feds animals...

what we have done to wheat is also occuring  to a lesser extent ,  with all
the other foods, , that
humans are eager to" improve " .
wheat is the oldest manipulated food .it
shows us to what extent we can go wrong . the original ancestor of wheat
could have been eaten by paleo gatherers without harms because their intake
was regulated by its size , the difficulty to gather quantity of it and to
thresh it . that is the all point of human manipulation of foods it allows
peoples to eat too much of some things and not enough of others .It have a
price.
>
> >> they killed 19 millions of chickens to stop the avian flu
>
> "Nature" has killed off hundreds, perhaps thousands, of species. Man is an
> absolute amateur when it comes to that :)

species comes and goes , in life there is no death just transformation from
one form to an other.
>
> >> when it comes to genetically modified organisms ( GMO)
>
> My post wasn't about gene splicing.

gene splicing is just one step farther in the technology to serve humans
appetite to play god .
they din't demonstrate the ability to do so wiselly with more simple
technology .

jean-claude
>