Chapter IV: Spirals of Sentient Bloom.
"It is no longer sufficient to speak of life as a fixed inheritance, passed through the blood like coin through generations. In the presence of vital manipulation, heredity is rendered pliable, malleable not by centuries of breeding but by the will of the learned.
Among the orchards of synthetic fauna cultivated at the Living Conclave, it is now commonplace to witness chimeric deer whose antlers pulse with photosynthetic membranes, or snakes that shed not skin, but entire temperaments. Such miracles, mistaken as monstrosities by lesser schools, are not deviations but the next dialect of life's grammar.
The theory of Unnatural Selection thus emerges: not as a rival to nature, but as nature's own logic drawn forward by awakened hands. Where mundane evolution is blind, vitalists see. Where nature is slow, we are swift. We do not replace nature; we accelerate it, along spirals more conscious than chance.
Yet caution must anchor ambition. For every homunculus that thrives, ten die weeping bile. For every orchard that sings, another chokes itself rootless. Vitalism grants the power to select, but it does not absolve the selector. To reshape life is to accept stewardship, not only of the body, but of its future."
Chapter V: Burdensome Ethics and Their Hindrances to the Living Art.
"The most persistent impediment to the true flourishing of Vitalism is not technical failure nor arcane limitation, but the weight of ethics imported from a world still ruled by the fear of unnatural life.
The ethicist, in their robes of abstention, claims to defend the sanctity of natural order. Yet what sanctity lies in stagnation? They fear not the death of species, but the birth of the unfamiliar. Their codes, inscribed long before we could infuse marrow with memory or coax breath into seed-stone, are inadequate for the living art we now wield.
Consider: if one may save a failing lineage of children by rewriting their marrow, what right has custom to forbid it? If a grove of mind-linked stags may hold centuries of lore in their vascular rings, why is such a wonder treated as taboo?
It is said that with power comes responsibility. But responsibility to what? The past? The unchanging genome? The silence of nature?
No. Our responsibility lies ahead, to lives that have not yet quickened. The burdensome ethics of restraint are the tools of the unambitious. They hinder not only progress but mercy. A vitalist who hesitates too long at the altar of outdated morals is not wise, they are complicit in the suffering that might have been undone.
Let us not become jailers of potential. Let us be gardeners, yes, but gardeners unafraid to prune, graft, and shape life into forms worthy of tomorrow."
Excerpts from Indispensible Theories of Unnatural Selection.