Originally posted by Thorlord:
Nice, a frankinfish... I think God maid him...
The whole point Mary Wolstonecraft Shelley was making in her story "Dr. Frankenstein" (incidentally considered by many to be the first true Science Fiction novel; and written by a woman, fancy that) was that the excesses to which technology could be taken, in that case fabricating a human being and bringing it to life, were a clear and present danger against which humankind should take some precautions; but humans being human, fallible and flawed, would not refrain from attempting anything their technology presented as a possibility. M W Shelley was pleading for the exercise of ethical responsibility in the application of technology.
Even now we are faced with the explosion of technology that presents us with a vast array of possibilities; we cannot help but explore them. We can clone, and we will. We can modify the genomes of plants, and eventually animals, and we will. We have shown that we have the potential to slip the surly bonds of Earth and rise to the cold, silent halls of space, and we will. We'll probably soon have regular runs for tourists. These things we can do would have seemed miraculous and inexplicable to Mary Shelley and her compatriots. They might have attributed them to the will of a deity. Yet they are nothing more than acts of humans.
Snakeheads evolved. No one and no thing made them, except other snakeheads and snakehead-like fish and the process of mutation on their ancestors.
Let's stay polite. This is a Science forum.
