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Comment by zeteo | Hacker News Reader

>When you manipulate nature in a way you don’t completely understand, the consequences can be unpredictable and absolutely disastrous

How were those doctors in the 1920s "manipulating nature"? They were just trying to treat sick people in an undeveloped region.

There are a lot of hospital-originating diseases even today (e.g. drug-resistant TB in Russia).

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The natural way to deal with sickness is to survive it or die.

Creating a vaccine and injecting it into people's bloodstreams to try to gain an advantage over a virus' spread can be seen as manipulating nature. There is plenty of nature manipulation that goes on in the development and reproduction of a vaccine.

There is nothing "unnatural" about homo sapiens using tools to improve their condition.

Following that same train of thought, there's nothing unnatural about toxic waste dumps.

Are they not? Humans, like other animals, have waste. And like other more sophisticated animals, they generally make an attempt to isolate it from themselves. You see similar behavior from cats. You may as well argue that beaver dams are "unnatural".

This "natural == not human" thing is fine (bullshit, but fine), until you start trying to use it to make moral/ethical arguments.

Oh, I agree, the whole "it's not natural so it's BAD!!!" argument is infantile. My usual tactic for making people realize this is by pointing out how something they do, like living past 18 years old, is unnatural.

It's not like animals don't bring about their own ecological collapse some times.

Was there really a time when people only lived to 18 years of age on average?

Quite probably. High infant mortality rates do wonders to average life expectancies.

It depends on how you define "natural". Is anything that happens in real life "unnatural"? Didn't it come about through "natural" biological desires, created by evolution? As long as you don't believe in God, anyway.

So you have to define some dividing line, or at least a scale, telling when humans exercising their "natural" intelligence leads to "unnatural" results.

I don't know if I'm disagreeing with you or not. It's just a tricky idea that needs to be defined.

I was trying to illustrate how pointless the "natural vs unnatural" argument is. If we were truly concerned with only doing things naturally then we would be living in hunter gatherer groups and not living past 18. Farming wouldn't be allowed, as that's just as unnatural as any other extension of our tool use.

I can't see how tool use is unnatural by any definition. We do it without any prompting, as do chimps and even some birds. Ours are just more complicated. Living past 18 is a natural result of having enough food to eat and relative safety, again deriving from our natural intelligence.

My point is that it's an uphill battle to declare any given real phenomenon as unnatural at all.

Toxic waste is a perfectly natural by-product of our industrial processes. (You could argue those are natural too). Similarly, introducing these wastes into the air and ocean also leads to natural consequences.

I think the issue is that people confuse "natural" with "able to sustain human life". The planet Mercury is perfectly natural, but humans can't live there. In the same vein, we can do lots of natural things and our environment will find a way to balance things out.

Where I feel people are short-sighted is that eventually that ecological balancing act precludes the existence of human beings in this planet.

I believe you understand me perfectly.

There isn't. Homo Sapiens is an animal and what animals do are generally considered natural.

Now that isn't to say that a toxic waste dump is good (it is not) or healthy (it is toxic) or desirable (parasites are natural and certainly not desirable).

I think the interesting conundrum will occur when a higher form of animal (reptile or mammal) evolves to the point where it can only survive in a toxic waste dump. Then you will have to choose between cleaning up toxic waste and destroying the habitat of a new species, or preserving the species and dealing with the side effects of the toxic waste.

To date I believe there are only insect cases that have done this (less outrage when you kill off a new species of roach)

That being said, given the AIDS virus in apes, given that apes were being hunted, and given that there was lots of needle re-use going on, the rise of AIDs as a scourge was pretty much a 100% probable, regardless of 'who' was the alpha 0 patient.

Humans are products of nature, therefore whatever we do is 'natural'. There aren't natural chemicals and artificial chemicals, there are just chemicals. The whole distinction is silly. Nightshade will kill you just as a dead as synthetic atropine.

Doing anything will likely have unintended consequences, I would hazard a guess that vaccinating people has saved more lives than AIDS has claimed. Now that we have an AIDS vaccine, should we not vaccinate people for fear of causing an epidemic 80 years from now?

I don't think that anything we do is natural just because we are a product of nature. It's getting into definition and semantics here but something like cross breeding a chicken and a pig can't be called natural as far as I'd say.

I suppose that is not possibe but can you imagine chicken bacon?

  > How were those doctors in the 1920s "manipulating
  > nature"?

Even if you don't think that vaccines are 'manipulating nature,' I would say that mounting global campaigns to inoculate everyone and completely eradicate a disease is 'manipulating nature.'

Doesn't seem like understanding was a problem here - they were just reckless in failing to adequately sterilise medical equipment. I'd say the moral of the story is more 'beware of reckless do-gooding.'

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