• piccolo@sh.itjust.works
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    2 months ago

    Well, when you find evidence of the the romans building aquaducts by throwing mud randomly. You let me know.

    • scholar@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Piling rocks in the shape of bridges, then copying the designs of the bridges that survived the best with minor iterations. Some iterations made worse bridges; these weren’t copied, but the rest survived and led to better bridges.

      • piccolo@sh.itjust.works
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        2 months ago

        The romans didnt randomly piled rocks and built bridges. They put in a lot of engineer forthought before even beginning construction. Certainly some were primed to fail because of miscalculations and misunderstandings (something that plagues even modern engineering).

        • scholar@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          I think we’re getting carried away with analogies, the point is: any technique that deliberately modifies the genome of an organism to achieve a desired result is genetic engineering, and such an organism is a GMO