As a former biology teacher, this sounds like orthodox Darwinism to me: genes “trying” to make as many copies of themselves as possible.

Whether transgenics are good or bad has nothing to do with whether they’re natural. Lots of ooky things are natural.

I’m not knocking Darwin. Perhaps if he had had the benefit of DNA splicing, he might’ve tried it in a lab, too. But bioengineering life forms does seem to take the Darwinism — in other words, ordinary evolution — out of the equation.

Caroline, interspecific gene transfer happens in nature every day. That’s how humans learned to do it. Saying transgenics are unnatural or non-Darwinian lets proponents of the technology turn around and point out (correctly) that they are neither. “Ordinary evolution” is extremely messy. A flawed but valuable book on this topic is Acquiring Genomes by Lynn Margulis.

In the end, shouldn’t the discussion be about whether the process and products are safe, tasty, beneficial, and humane?

The “process and products” might indeed be “safe, tasty, beneficial, and humane,” but the FDA isn’t exactly doing much testing of any of those four categories.

“Ordinary evolution” — including classic hybridization and breeding, courtesy of thousands of years of human experimentation on plants and animals — has an advantage over lab transgenics: It’s slow. Even punctuated equilibrium is, relative to modern science, slow.

Slowness doesn’t guarantee evolutionary success, but at least it weeds out lots of bloopers.