Thanks, Eric. That's a long post, but the subject deserves scrutiny. I fully expect that, in the future, fish hatcheries will develop techniques to make their fish grow faster & be more lure vulnerable than they are today. Not just breeding, aka the slow Darwinian process, but environmental factors that spur on fast development of traits we desire.
And if seagulls can develop organs to reduce salinity in their blood, what if we could do something similar in fish? Perhaps some freshwater species could thrive in brackish water where they do not today. Lots of possibilities, exciting!
Biologists are trained to dismiss living systems that look designed as illusory products of chance. Engineers, on the other hand, have eagerly seized on clever designs to help them develop new technology, a field called biomimetics. I hope to live long enough to see many breakthroughs ahead.
