Psych Prof Advocates Human/Chimp Hybrids – But only to Offend Christians

Lifesite ^ | July 28, 2006 | Hilary White

[NYer]

WASHINGTON, July 28, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In an op ed piece in the LA Times, David P. Barash, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington, says that reproductive facilities should work towards creating a race of human/chimpanzee hybrids, but, he admits, only because it would offend Christians.
 
Some geneticists have postulated that their distant evolutionary ancestors may have interbred with those of chimps, and Barash argues that this means there is no moral difference between a human being and a chimpanzee, or indeed, between a human being and a sea sponge.
 
The psychology professor looks forward to the day when IVF facilities will create human/animal hybrids. He reveals, however, that his motivation is not a pure interest in advancing science, but his hatred for “know-nothing anti-evolutionism,” and “religious fundamentalists,” who hold human life to be sacred.
 
Barash says he advocates interbreeding humans with animals not because it would be a good idea in itself, but because it would offend believers. “In these dark days of know-nothing anti-evolutionism,” he writes, “with religious fundamentalists occupying the White House, controlling Congress and attempting to distort the teaching of science in our schools, a powerful dose of biological reality would be healthy indeed.”
 
Barash says that creating animal/human hybrids would effectively quash the belief that “the human species, unlike all others, possesses a spark of the divine and that we therefore stand outside nature.”
 
“Should geneticists and developmental biologists succeed once again in joining human and nonhuman animals in a viable organism,” Barash writes, “it would be difficult and perhaps impossible for the special pleaders to maintain the fallacy that Homo sapiens is uniquely disconnected from the rest of life.”
 
One of the ideological offshoots of Darwinsim is radical environmentalism, advocates of which hold that human beings are a kind of virus threatening the earth’s ecosystems. According to the pure materialist philosophy, the environmental threat is directly the fault of “a bogus ‘faith based’ worldview,” the “Judeo-Christian proclamation of radical discontinuity between people and the rest of ‘creation.’”
 
Such shrill anti-religious polemics are increasingly being challenged from within the scientific community as bigotry, however, and recent revelations have indicated that Barash’s pure Darwinian faith may be going the way of the dodo.
 
In a new book, “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief,” Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, asks scientific skeptics to approach religious belief God with a more open mind. Collins is among a growing movement in the science world that asserts there is no necessary rift between real science and religious belief.
 
Collins is far from the stereotype religious “know-nothing” presented by anti-religious Darwinists. One of the world’s leading geneticists, he led the international Human Genome Project that mapped the 3.1 billion chemical base pairs in humanity's DNA. He now runs the government research foundation guiding work in the medical applications of this historic international project.
 
Collins attributed his rejection of the atheistic position to the writings of Christian apologist C.S. Lewis, the early 20th century English professor known and loved around the world for his ironclad logic in explaining Christian doctrines and debunking modern liberal atheism.
 
At a conference sponsored by the C.S. Lewis Foundation, Collins said, “For a scientist, it's uncomfortable to admit there are questions that your scientific method isn't going to be able to address.”
 
Collins refutes the Darwinists’ out-of-hand rejection of religion. An article in the Washington Post quotes him saying scientists are “not supposed to decide something is true until [they’ve] looked at the data. And yet I had become an atheist without ever looking at the evidence whether God exists or not."
 
Collins decries both the anti-religious materialists who dominate his profession, and the Christian reaction that, he says, attempts to ignore hard scientific evidence. Both approaches, he said, are “profoundly dangerous. Both deny truth. Both will diminish the nobility of humankind. Both will be devastating to our future. And both are unnecessary.”
 

[Hillarys Gate Cult]

I think it would be best for all concerned if labs locked up all of their monkeys whenever they see him coming. Especially if he shows up with a bouquet of bananas.

[L,TOWM]

And a solution exists for this situation:

Toss some bubble gum back into the monkey cages.

Ummmm, so I've heard...

[af_vet_rr]

In an op ed piece in the LA Times, David P. Barash, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington, says that reproductive facilities should work towards creating a race of human/chimpanzee hybrids,

We already had one of these, and just think, his wife became a Senator after he left office ;-)

[Vaquero]

Sorry, nice sentiment but the genie is already out of the bottle. both in cloning, the development of nuclear weapons and a plethora of other potentially catastrophic inventions of the 19th 20th and 21st centuries. It requires work and a bit of luck to survive this time as a race, but sticking our heads in the sand is no way of solving this.

[Rummenigge]

Evolution is not somehting you believe in - it's a theory with a lot of facts and findings supporting it - so you assume it's right until somebody finds something better.

For the rest your correct - we share nearly all of our genome with chimps. I wounder if a hybrid species might even be fitter for live then we are ...

[Deepest South]

"who hold human life to be sacred"

Ya think if someone were to hold a gun to this guys head or to lets say one of his loved ones he would beg to stop or just say "go ahead and off the sea sponge?

Just wondering what human life is important to folks like this.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

Another dumb-ass professor.

[Diamond]

How is an explication of the moral law and its application to cloning sticking one's head in the sand?

Cordially,

[Northern Yankee]

I've often wondered if we are decended from apes, why do we still have apes?

[Vaquero]

someone will do it somewhere. China perhaps...

[OKSooner]

This guy's in good company. I couldn't find the thread on it, but Stalin wanted to create a race of monkey-men to fight the fascists.

After all, a man is a monkey is a sea sponge...

[RexBeach]

Wow. I'm on the same level with a sea sponge!?

Hmmph. I'd like to see a sea sponge drive my 400-HP Mustang Cobra!

To Hell with sea sponges.

BTW, Professor Barash sounds like a genuine PITA.

[Calpernia]

>>>>human/chimpanzee hybrids

Well, I'll admit, I've dated guys that would have made me a contributor to this scenario if it became serious enough.

[OKSooner]

"For the rest your correct - we share nearly all of our genome with chimps. I wounder if a hybrid species might even be fitter for live then we are ..."

Well, that's open to conjecture but they'd probably have better spelling.

[bigfootbob]

U of WA freak professor ping

[Aquinasfan]

And a solution exists for this situation: Toss some bubble gum back into the monkey cages. Ummmm, so I've heard...

Really? That's funny. What about cigarettes?

[mel]

And not to mention so excited to abort themselves

[muleskinner]

Go here:
http://www.mnh.si.edu/anthro/humanorigins/ha/a_tree.html

[Rummenigge]

Who knovs ?

[Aquinasfan]

Everything you need to know about this guy is here.

At the same time, much of my attention has recently been directed to understanding the underlying evolutionary factors influencing human behavior, a discipline sometimes called "evolutionary psychology."

I wonder what survival advantage is incurred by the chimp's ability to crap in his hand and throw it at people? Maybe if we give the professor ten grand he'll figure it out for us.