‘Frankenfish’ lacks purpose and is a breach of natural law

Hundreds of thousands of years ago, our race finished its incubation in the steamy jungles and sun-swept plains of Africa and spread across the world.

While life was harsh and the living world beset us at every turn, we were provided with everything we needed.

Many millennia passed, and with greater numbers and technological adaptations of increasing sophistication, nature was seemingly subdued.

During this process, many animals ordained to be on this earth at our genesis had since become extinct. Sometimes, that's the way things had to be.

But in the past few centuries, many species have disappeared for no reason. But today, we find ourselves facing an opposite perversion.

News broke on FOX, MSNBC and other stations last week that AquaBounty has conjured up the AquAdvantage Salmon, enabling the salmon to grow to market size twice as fast by manipulating its growth hormone.

Part of its DNA was mixed with that of an eel-like fish for the said purpose, which makes it grow to twice the length and a much greater girth.

Despite assurances by the company that the fish eggs will all be sterile and female, the consumer group Food and Water Watch points to a government document which says that up to 5 percent of them may not be sterile.

The fear is that the man-made breed of salmon could somehow get into the wild, especially as the company plans to grow the fish in Panama and send them to the United States. That isn't very reassuring. Even a mule gives birth once in a blue moon.

Critics are also skeptical of the claims that "Frankenfish" will alleviate a food shortage issue years down the road. It is doubtful this salmon would have any effect, with the proteins going into feeding those beasties negating the benefit.

As were our primal ancestors, we are still provided with everything we need. Don't give me that Malthusian myth that we are inevitably going to face mass starvation.

It's not overpopulation that endangers our supply, and uncompromising socialism and unbridled capitalism are not the answers.

What has been killing us is a simple lack of justice.

Wars and investment in more lucrative commodities, among other things, have been our bane. The rearing of livestock invests much more nutrients and effort than the cultivation of crops, but livestock is where the money is. It's all about the "Benjamins."

That said, some regions scattered throughout the globe composed more or less of wasteland, as far as agriculture goes, will always require a greater effort to sustain their populace, and perhaps in some places emigration will be the only answer.

We have been eating genetically engineered crops for some time, but altering the life of a sentient animal is a different issue altogether.

The soul of an animal rests with its species, genus or breed unlike us people who each have individual souls. Now does "Frankenfish" have a soul? Or is it a true salmon, living with a deformity?

In the Biblical narrative, one of Adam's first acts was to give names to the various animals he found.

While the story is to show that man's lingual and classification abilities are divine and that his creation was incomplete without woman, I suspect it drives much deeper.

In Socratic, Platonic and Aristotelian thought, by understanding the world, man bridges the non-rational objects, including the group-souls of the animals, and connects them to God.

In any case, Adam wasn't a creator but a creature.

Perhaps surprisingly, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals applauded the elevation of Cardinal Ratzinger to the Papacy, according to their own website and Catholic News Agency.

Despite immense differences between the two ideologies, PETA was in support of the Pope's concern that rearing animals in an industrialized manner has gone too far.

Animals pumped full of hormones and living in dark crowded pens, coops and stalls are not living like God intended them. Certainly a fish genetically engineered to not halt its growth hormone production would fit that category.

The only scenario in which it could possibly be morally permissible to breed genetically engineered animals would be if we were in a post-apocalyptic Mad Max-esque world and starvation was truly imminent.

But for now, we need not bother with such questions of moral gravity. We can feed everyone here and many more if we truly wanted to.

If you'd like more information, The Davis College of Agriculture, Forestry and Consumer Sciences here at WVU has done much research into consumer feelings and reactions to genetically engineered food, not only crops, but also seafood.

If someone were to ask me in a random scientific poll how I felt, I would tell them the following: When we came into being on this earth, everything we needed was provided, and any alteration that may be harmful is useless and is playing God.