This is unfortunate news

[Raiden]

No, the mosquito thing was different.

Scientists somewhere genetically modified the species most likely to carry malaria so that they would survive better than the wild type, and also engineered in a gene that causes them to be less hospitable places for the malaria protozoans to hide.

This, IMO, was incredibly stupid for 2 reasons.

1) They did it to drive down the death rate from Malaria. This in itself is a noble cause, but malaria is one of the last potent checks to the human population, and since we don't seem to be anywhere near enforcing birthrate limitation laws, the population will skyrocket if it works, and then future humans will be cursing us anyway when billions of them die to some super-mutated flu virus instead of a few hundred thousand or so to a parasite that is easy to avoid.

2) Making a difference between the safety/hospitality of one mosquito to the others different is like asking for stronger Plasmodium parasites. One of the easiest ways to jump start natural selection is to make a habitat (the innards of a mosquito, in this case) more or less inhospitable to a certain species or to a certain strain of a species.


That may have seemed off topic, but it really wasn't. The only way to actually halt the loss of biodiversity and stop these things from happening is to stop messing with the ecosystem in general.

It's a tall order, but if we stopped all the things we were doing globally to the planet right now that were overly harmful, we would be just fine. Of course, that means to immediately stop having babies for one, which would never happen. :/