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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thistles" data-source="post: 129011" data-attributes="member: 3949">Ok, then why have the word "natural" at all? What you're doing now is equivocating about that particular word. When someone says, "natural or artificial" do you correct them and say, "um, excuse me, but that man-made thing is natural too because humans are natural..." You know exactly what I meant, and I hope you recognize how disingenuous that kind of word game is. Humans arose through natural processes, created the word "natural," and defined themselves apart from it.Without human intervention, these two species of spider would not meet. Phoneutria would not end up in the UK. Styrofoam would not exist. As I will address later, that isn't to say that the "unnatural" is bad, but don't pretend that words mean something other than what they mean. The hybrids in question are unnatural.  Questioning everything is good. Automatically doing away with things just because they're the accepted status quo is not. A knee-jerk rejection to be edgy or different or just out of habit is as bad as following blindly; maybe worse, because you forfeit the benefit of learning from others' mistakes. Society is great at providing us with tested ideas. Most are correct, but because they're so commonplace we only notice the exceptions. Omg, the earth actually isn't flat!I'll get to the other part later. Yeah, it is a human thing. There are different kinds of categories, too. You'll love some of the names: natural and artificial. This means that some categories are imposed and others are clear enough and exist just to be discovered. It's obvious that x is not y, and there are clear reasons why not. There's a natural category. The problem is where you pick your level of analysis. At the atomic level, we're all made of the same stuff. Why have categories at all? Oh, right, because it's necessary to survive. What you've (and by "you" I mostly mean Shampain here, but you seem to agree with him) been doing is accepting some of the classifications and throwing the others out without any justification. And now we need an ethics lesson. Without a common ethical framework, that's all ethics is. That's why I was questioning your use of the word "should." How do you get from "possible" to "desirable." How do I get from "this is how it is in nature" to "this is how it should be in captivity." Your ethical framework. I tend toward utilitarianism, so I appeal to the consequences of an action. You're probably more deontological. Without agreeing on where morality comes from, you wouldn't be able to give me more than an opinion about why murder is wrong. Captive crossbreeding? Not many, and most are known, like vagans and albopilosum. Wild crossbreeding? Probably Brachypelma baumgarteni. Maybe a few more, but by this point they're already speciated. What you're talking about with creating a new species is not unusual, and wouldn't require hybridization to accomplish. Where do you think new species come from in the first place? When we collect from the wild, if we don't inject new wild stock, we have created an isolated population that will over time deviate from the wild population. Given enough time, you get speciation.I'll get back to this when I have time, but I've gotta go to class now and this weekend is crazy.</blockquote>

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