Richard Dawkins
replies to Prince Charles' populist anti-scientism:
Agriculture has always been unnatural. Our species began to depart from our
natural hunter-gatherer lifestyle as recently as 10,000 years ago - too short
to measure on the evolutionary timescale. Wheat, be it ever so wholemeal
and stoneground, is not a natural food for Homo sapiens. Nor is milk, except
for children. Almost every morsel of our food is genetically modified -
admittedly by artificial selection not artificial mutation, but the end result
is the same. A wheat grain is a genetically modified grass seed, just as a
pekinese is a genetically modified wolf.
It may sound paradoxical, but if we want to sustain the planet into the
future, the first thing we must do is stop taking advice from nature.
Nature is a short-term Darwinian profiteer. Darwin himself said it:
"What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful,
blundering, low, and horridly cruel works of nature."