To: NJ_gent
Ok so a few mutations or a few million big deal. Humans are just another link on an evolutionary chain according to scienc. So why would science care if human babies are killed. They are just as good a piece of scientific material as a monkey or a rat. What am I missing?
To: 3dognight
"What am I missing?"
The good scientists who do not and will not delve into metaphysics to look at things like a soul and such. Do humans have a soul? Any scientist worth half his weight in salt takes one look at that question, recognizes that he can't apply the scientific method to it, can't gather tangeable evidence either way, and can never prove or disprove it, and doesn't touch it with a 10ft pole.
Aside from that, you're also missing the ethics of science. Most scientists will agree that purposely doing harm to a sentient, intelligent being is inherently wrong.
Science doesn't care one way or another who lives or who dies. Scientists, on the other hand, are human beings with their own morals and ethics.
77 posted on
04/12/2005 2:04:53 PM PDT by
NJ_gent
(Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.)
To: 3dognight
"Ok so a few mutations or a few million big deal."
Forgot to mention - it's not the number of mutations so much as it is the incorrect idea that humans evolved from monkies, or that they can evolve into monkies. Modern apes and modern humans evolved from a common ancestor thought to have lived somewhere around 5 or 6 million years ago. Once that split happened, the species that evolved from there were distinct and separate as far as taxonomy is concerned.
To get from a monkey to a human would require an enormous number of extremely precise mutations to the genetic code of a monkey and would almost certainly force an immediate miscarriage. If you sat there and cherry-picked mutations, you could (in theory) turn a fruitfly into a watermelon. Of course, something that ridiculously drastic would require an environment and controls far beyond anything we've conceived thus far. We've managed a few relatively minor (though sometimes spectacular) forced genetic changes where the subjects survived. We can make certain plants grow in the dark, for instance. That's a far cry from the stuff nature does over a period of tens and hundreds of millions of years.
(For those screaming about the fruitfly comment, yes I did neglect to mention that as you're making these changes to the fruitfly's DNA, you're killing it, thus nullifying the entire experiment. Such changes would all have to be made instantaneously under conditions I can't even imagine, but it certainly should be possible strictly from a chemistry perspective.)
95 posted on
04/12/2005 3:18:49 PM PDT by
NJ_gent
(Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.)
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