[vhawk01]

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What I meant is that natural selection is unsupervised/undirected evolution that leads to changes (generally improvements) in the gene pool.

Genetic engineering is something different.

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Sort of. But not really. Cheetahs direct the natural selection of gazelle, and thus themselves. They do it in a much cruder fashion, to be sure, but it isn't exactly unintentional. They are intentionally trying to eat gazelles, with the inevitable result being slower gazelles get eaten and gazelles get faster. Its still natural selection.

EDIT: what I mean is, of course it IS different, and practically, its VERY different. There are going to be all sorts of peculiarities and unique situations. But its still essentially natural selection. Its just far more potent, sophisticated, RAPID selection. Ultimately its those that reproduce most that will be most represented. It doesnt matter HOW they reproduce or what traits get them reproduced more often.

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But in the case of genetic engineering it's not who reproduces the most that's important, but how the reproduction is done. So how does matter. In what is typically thought of as 'natural selection' it's just the who that matters.

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I guess you could argue it isn't natural, and you CERTAINLY could argue that calling it natural selection is stupid and misleading and it should have its own term, so that it implies the difference. But its still essentially the same thing.

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Depends on how you interpret 'essentially' and 'same thing'.

I think being able to differentiate between the two things language wise makes sense and is useful. And I don't know of another term that describes what is commonly thought of as 'natural selection'. But I could be wrong.

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Thats not true though. I think the problem is you think evolution is about individuals or species, when in reality it is about genes. In genetic engineering, natural selection, whatever, the genes that are most fit become most represented in future generations. So natural selection has led us to prefer certain traits and find them useful, and we are using pipettes and PCR to increase the prevalence of those genes in future generations, rather than "eating the slow" or whatever, but nonetheless, the most fit genes will be selected by organisms and environment.