From God to Goats

I just watched the Playing God episode of Horizon on iPlayer and it was quite interesting. A few things were, well, wrong, but not severely so. These criticisms are based on religion and genetics.

Religion

First off, 'Playing God'? God, as in the monotheistic omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient and omnibenevolent being? Not really.

He (or She, God is in fact agendered but as humans are patriarchal God is always depicted as a He) created everything. This includes creating good and, because good can only exist with its opposite of evil, creating evil.

To play God, humans would have to create everything. This is, however, problematic. God, from a religious standpoint, has already created everything so there is nothing more for humans to create.

This may be disproved with 'God didn't create cars', but the metals, plastics and other car-things (I wouldn't have a clue) are made out of elements, which are natural. Humans just assembled them differently. So in this episode of Horizon the people were merely assembling life in different orders.

Thus, 'Playing God' is an inaccurate title, but I suppose 'Assembling Life in Different Orders' would have been a tad too long.

Genetics

The 'spider-goat' and the diesel-producing yeast were fascinating. The problem was that the programme claimed that it wasn't possible to produce these naturally. Admittedly it’s very unlikely and probably wouldn’t happen but likelihood, probability, is not the same as possibility.

With genetic engineering, they managed to produce a goat to produce spider silk in its milk. (The applications of spider silk production are fascinating.) Now, spider silk is a protein and goat milk is full of protein. With a mutation, it would be easy to have a spider-silk-like protein within goats’ milk. Admittedly this would hold no advantage to a goat so if it did acquire this mutation, it would most likely fade from the gene pool.