Reply #34: mother nature has been selectively introducting foreign genes

[treepig]

from one type of organism into another for some 1.5 billion years now.

pathogenic viruses and bacteria (or even beneficial viruses and bacteria) that have multiple hosts can pick up a gene from one host, and deliver to another, even across kingdom boundaries.

most of these natural "genetic engineering" experiments done by mother nature are ultimately futile (because they confer no selective advantage to the host, and most often are actually deleterious) and the transferred genes are silenced or otherwise lost.

perhaps the bigger issue here is that by dramatically altering the environment, mankind is in essence forcing organisms to turn their own genes into "foreign" genes in order to survive (over time, the genome of an organism is essentially a blank slate, and can be turned into anything the environment demands provided that envirnmental change occurs slowly enough to allow the species in question to adapt - for bacteria that would on the scale of hours, for elephants the time scale is probably centuries.