Posted on 07/31/2006 7:49:24 AM PDT by 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 earths 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 Barashs 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 worlds 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 [theyve] 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.
They already exist - Just go to any big city and look for the "registered Democrats".
Just why would I be offended by a lunatic doing something insane? Isn't that what lunatics do? What exactly would be his point, that he is a Monkeys Uncle?
Gump had this guy pegged. "Stupid is, as stupid does."
Well if they apologize it would be a step forward for most liberals.
No, we are nothing like a Chimp.
First, a chimp is a stupid animal.
We were created to have a relationship with the creator. Chimps were not created for that purpose.
O go hump a monkey
Many scientists were beat up in school and never got a date. They now must take out their anger on people of the Christian faith, an easy target in today's environment.
Who is doubting that humans and apes have genetic similarities? Just look at an ape and its behavior, and you can see it. Is this what he is trying to prove? The fact that a freak hybrid can be produced proves what to Christians that we don't already know?
IIRC Stalin already tried this as a means of creating a huge hybrid army... didn't work since they tried it "the old fashion way"...
Hezbians?
Libanzees?
> I've often wondered if we are decended from apes, why do we still have apes?
You are descended from your great-grandparents... but I'll bet you have cousins out there somewhere.
Say WA? Evergreen State ping
FReepmail sionnsar if you want on or off this ping list.
Ping sionnsar if you see a Washington state related thread.
> I wonder what survival advantage is incurred by the chimp's ability to crap in his hand and throw it at people?
At *people?* Probably fairly little. But at *predators*? Probably some good advantage there at being able to throw something foul with a fair degree of accuracy. If you're a leopard or something, stalking a chimp and you get hit in the snout with a mound of monkeysquat, your lunch plans will probably shift.
> We were created to have a relationship with the creator.
Xenu? Didn't he create humans out of clams, or some such?
I agree--human-chimp hybrids already exist. Not only at your local war protest, but at the White House Press Conferences.
Would they do the work Americans won't do? Like program computers, make steel, stuffed toy animals... Can't have them flipping burgers.
> it makes the muzzies downright jihadicidal. I wouldn't normally support a fatwa against anyone, but for this guy I might make an exception.
Really? I'd suggest just the opposite. Make a hybrid Chimera army, able to fight effectively and take orders. A Chimera of humans for smarts and weapons handling, married to chimp for strength... and pig for some facial features. Let 'em loose in downtown Jihadisville.
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