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Comment by cylon13 | Hacker News Reader

> The announcement of the new chimeras will no doubt be labelled “unnatural” or “playing God” by some people – but the same could be said about many scientific breakthroughs. An iPhone is unnatural.

This is quite possibly the worst take about anything I've ever heard. Intelligent human-monkey hybrids brought in to the world for the purpose of having their organs harvested, vs lil pocket computer.

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"Unnatural" is a strawman that's trotted out whenever "professionals" get caught doing something with the potential for profoundly negative consequences and reasonable people point this out. "Oh I see, so you don't like SCIENCE. Why don't you go back to the woods and bang rocks together you SCIENCE HATER."

Science is an amoral tool. It's up to humans to figure out how to use that tool properly. Personally, I'd say there's nothing wrong with lab-grown organs, but creating them via a hilariously dystopian method reminiscent of Michael Bay's "The Island" is almost certainly a Very Bad idea.

Every day the people running the world seem to be trying harder and harder to become the cackling comic book supervillians that conspiracy theorists have always made them out to be.

The lil pocket computer is harvesting your thoughts though.

we're forcibly feeding our thoughts into the lil pocket computer

Well, hopefully not thoughts thoughts, not yet anyway.

The author isn't dismissing the ethical issues. He is saying calling it "unnatural" in and of itself isn't grounds for making such a claim, as the world is filled with unnatural yet ethical things. In fact, he goes on for a few paragraphs touching on these more substantive issues.

The word unnatural has more connotations than simply "artificial", though. That's clearly the meaning here.

"Clearly" to you, but not at all to me. The fact that he brings up unnaturalness in one sentence and then spends the following few paragraph discussing actual ethical issues tells me he isn't dismissing ethical issues.

Saying "clearly" is not offering any counter argument; it is just an assertion.

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