And now we are, and now people seem far more worried about it. Before we’ve been doing this, we had that random element and didn’t really know what we were doing, maybe not thinking very many steps ahead. It’s almost like it should be the opposite. And that makes us feel a little bit squeamish, I think. And what we’re trying to do now is really eliminate that sense of randomness to make changes in an organism that we know are going to get into the next generation, and then into all the generations that come after that. When we take two lineages and we breed them together, there is some randomness in how their DNA combines. We have been manipulating DNA, but we haven’t really been able to get rid of that element of chance that is evolution as we’ve been doing this. I think that when people think about what’s next, this idea that we might be using genetic tools to manipulate DNA from organisms directly, they see this - I think correctly to some extent - as something that’s different than what we’ve been doing in the past. These have emerged really in the last couple of hundred years, but it’s clear that we’ve been manipulating these plants and animals around us for much, much longer than that. And the breeds that we have today really, are not 10, 20, 30,000 years of innovation. You mentioned dogs: I mean, when we think about dogs, what we think about really are the things that we have today. And we have made huge, huge differences to things. I think what you’ve been talking about are all these different technologies that our ancestors have been developing and using for tens of thousands of years. But why are we so squeamish about that notion going forward? So, we’ve always been modifying the environment. Even the landscape, what we think of as North America, changed over the eons as Indigenous people changed it. If you look at what they used to look like - we have paintings of watermelons from 300 years ago - they looked very, very different. You’re being very wolf-like today” - and then, of course, fruits and vegetables. When I was reading Life as We Made It: How 50,000 years of human innovation refined – and redefined – nature, the two things that popped in my head were dogs - and when my dog is bad, I say, “Ah, that’s the wolf coming out of you. Shapiro: Yeah, pretty much our role in nature is to terraform the Earth to make it more suitable for us. That’s something humans have always done. We’ve actually been doing it for a long, long time to this planet: changing the ecology and the animals that have been inhabiting that ecology. But it’s not just a science-fiction concept. Pethokoukis: One of my favorite science-fiction concepts is terraforming, where we go to a moon or a planet and start changing it to make it more suitable for humans. You can download the episode here, and don’t forget to subscribe to my podcast on iTunes or Stitcher. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.
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