Sorry about that.
I thought you were a neomorph.
Come on in!
I've just been snooping around David's laboratory.
This is where he did all of his experiments to make the creatures we see in Alien: Covenant.
Most of these bits of apparatus are pretty weird, but that's why earth sent me here
to investigate.
It takes a fellow Dave like me to decipher the research of another Dave.
In case you don't know who I am, I'm Professor Dave, and I explain science stuff.
So as we see in Alien: Covenant, the robot David decided to play god and make the perfect
organism.
He's not the first to attempt this by a longshot.
Humans made David, and those albino people we know as the engineers made humans.
So it seems like everyone is playing god these days.
But did you know that humans have been manipulating life on earth for millenia?
It's true.
To see the literal fruits of our labor, all you have to do is walk down the produce aisle
at a grocery store.
Broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kale, and Brussels sprouts, these are not natural creations,
they are products of mankind in a very real sense.
They're all derived from Brassica Oleracea, the wild mustard plant.
This incredible diversity can be produced from a single plant species through selective
breeding.
When farmers took plants with the biggest flower clusters and cross-fertilized them,
continually, over many generations, they eventually got a completely different plant with huge
flower clusters which we know as broccoli.
Selecting for the biggest leaves or leaf buds is what gave us kale and cabbage.
Selective breeding is a form of evolution called artificial selection.
This works kind of like natural selection, except that instead of being guided by blind
chance and the pressures of survival, it's guided by the will of a sentient architect,
so it happens much faster than evolution by natural selection.
The same goes for all the breeds of dogs we know today.
A few hundred years ago, most of them didn't exist.
Dogs used to all look kind of like wolves.
But if you take a bunch of tiny dogs and make them mate, and then you take their tiniest
offspring and make them mate, and you keep doing that over and over again, you eventually
get something like a chihuahua.
This wouldn't do so well in the forest against a wolf, so we can see that the existence of
an organism like this has nothing to do with survival, it exists because humans decided
to play god.
So far, the result of humans playing god has been broccoli and chihuahuas, so it's pretty
harmless.
But David seems to have taken it a bit further.
What's most interesting about David is that his idea of artificial selection seems to
be aligned with natural selection.
He doesn't want to create the tiniest or cuddliest or most delicious organism, he wants
to create the deadliest, thus the best equipped for survival.
As to why the deadliest species is necessarily the perfect species, I can't say.
If you ask me, deliciousness is far superior to deadliness.
But David was something of a broken robot anyway.
He didn't just kill his human creators, he killed the engineers, who were his creators'
creators.
I guess he figured that if he can kill them, he must be superior to them, and thus best
suited for creating the organism that they could never achieve.
But how did he do it?
All he had was that black goo, which we call the pathogen, the body of Elizabeth Shaw,
and whatever is lying around here.
I mean, what is this stuff?
What do you do with this?
At any rate, this leaves us quite in the dark as to how David was able to generate his neomorphs.
We humans aren't quite as scientifically advanced as the engineers, but we're no
slouches when it comes to biology and genetic modification.
We know that any kind of gene splicing or manipulation on the molecular level requires
highly complex tools and machinery, and this place looks more like a medieval dungeon.
So we have to conclude that this pathogen has properties that are inconceivable to humans.
Perhaps it possesses a sentience, even if an artificial one, that allows it to infect
a host and rearrange genetic material as it sees fit.
Whatever the case may be, David's tinkering with the pathogen, various species that are
native to this planet, and the body of Elizabeth Shaw, has produced some astonishing specimens.
Naturally, David's work paints a harrowing picture for genetic modification, and these
days it seems like a lot of people look at our own genetically modified organisms with
as much contempt as they would a xenomorph.
But is this really fair?
Are GMO crops as bad as a killing machine with a bonus mouth and acid for blood?
In the end, I think fear of GMO's is just another manifestation of our natural fear
of the unknown.
But just as with the rest of science, much of what isn't known to the public is known
quite intimately to those who specialize in science.
Some hear the word chemical and immediately assign a negative connotation, whereas the
chemist knows that it's all chemicals.
We have popular culture to blame for fanning the flame of misinformation in this realm.
Glowing green ooze that turns turtles into ninjas makes for a fantastic childhood.
I was Donatello.
But it leaves people with the impression that all scientists are Davids and Dr. Frankensteins,
when in reality they're just trying to further mankind's understanding of the universe
around us.
To a biologist, artificially selecting a particular allele of a gene is not that much different
from inserting a novel gene into an organism's genome, at least not conceptually.
The technology we've developed simply allows us to do what the inventors of broccoli did,
just in a more efficient and highly directed fashion.
Make no mistake, genetic modification is a good idea, and a powerful tool.
This doesn't mean we should turn a blind eye to the behaviors of large corporations
like Weyland Corp, because large corporations will always sacrifice ethics on the altar
of profit.
But this fact should not bring about a cynicism towards science, because science is pure of
motive.
The rampant chemophobia we see today is a byproduct of a civilization whose scientific
expertise has ballooned so big so fast that most citizens have no hope of keeping up,
and the activities of the scientific elite are as mysterious to most as the illusions
of a magician.
The only difference is that science isn't magic.
It's based on what we can observe, and anyone can learn it.
If anything we've talked about today leaves you wanting more, check out my YouTube channel,
Professor Dave Explains, for tons of tutorials on biology, chemistry and biochemistry, physics,
and lots more.
I break down topics in ways that are succinct and easy to understand, and if you watch them
all, you'll have a rich and comprehensive view of everything around you.
Without this foundation of basic scientific knowledge, all you can do is repeat what you've
heard.
But there's so much misinformation out there, so it's easy to be deceived.
The powers that be use this confusion to divide us over nonsense, so that we can't unify
when it really counts.
With all these xenomorphs running around, it's a critical time.
Which side will you be on?
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