I would assume it's because monkeys are more intelligent than the animals we tend to eat; cows, chickens, sheep & pigs.
Also, intentionally paralysing a creature, leaving it to live in that condition, and then performing experimental surgery/procedures on it is significantly different than slaughtering it.
Whilst I appreciate the scientists mean well, and I do understand how this could benefit humanity; this sort of research still seems unethical to me, and at the very least makes me feel sick.
As a software developer and reverse engineer, this feels like hacking anyway. It's not particularly scientific just to "capture and replay" data without much understanding of how it works.
The intelligence argument is nonsense. Pigs are as intelligent as dogs. Describe the treatment of livestock (pigs, chickens, cows) but frame it as something that is happening to dogs and you'll drive hundreds of thousands of outraged meat eaters to signing a petition. The reason is cognitive dissonance, we're taught from the moment we can understand that it's okay to farm animals and very few people ever really think about the consequences of that. To be humane means "having or showing compassion or benevolence" which is about as far from how you can describe the treatment of livestock that you can get. To suggest that the the real problem with livestock farming is the slaughter demonstrates a clear misunderstanding of where the real problems lie, slaughter is one of the most humane parts of livestock farming.
Dairy cows spend more than half a decade being repeatedly raped and abused until they're slaughtered because their bodies have been destroyed by the milking process, and they spend that half a decade having their young snatched away from them over and over again. If having the emotional intelligence to mourn your stolen young isn't enough to justify ending the inhumane treatment then it's certainly not intelligence that humans care about.
If this research is unethical then learn about gestation crates, which immobilise pigs for months of their pregnancy.
> To be humane means "having or showing compassion or benevolence" which is about as far from how you can describe the treatment of livestock that you can get.
The problem I have with this is that like in so many other subjects, a too general term has been used to describe a specific type of practice. Traditional farming is very different than factory farming (which seems to be what you are describing), and there are many levels between them. You may still have problems with how a traditional farm is run, and that's fine, you can present those. But presenting features of factory farming as problems with "livestock farming" implies that all livestock farming is like that, and that's untrue.
If you believe all livestock farming is immoral, please use, or at least add justification for the cases where it's not factory farming if you are going to call out all livestock farming. If you are instead specifically targeting factory farming, please endeavor to accurately label it.
> Considering that 99 percent of US meat comes from factory farms[1], there's little point in discussing other forms of farming.
First, that would only possibly be true if we constrained ourselves to meat production. The original comment I replied to specifically called out dairy, and it's partially what I was thinking of when I replied.
Second, that doesn't make sense because it's useful to discuss alternatives when discussing problems. Even if they aren't a feasible drop in replacement, that doesn't mean there aren't aspects that can possibly be encouraged. Also, it may help narrow the arguments and objections to the core problems people have. For example, is factory farming undesirable because animals are confined, animals are in pain, or because animals deserve a better lifestyle, where they can exist at least somewhat like they would in nature (i.e. do animals deserve not to be tortures in ways that are not just physical)? Focusing only on factory farming may yield reforms that address symptoms, not the problem.
Inaccurately aimed or qualified criticism leads to arguments from people who may agree in principle. It's counterproductive.
If there are ways of farming that are ethical that are already in use (the 1% in your argument), then we absolutely should discuss those. We would want to start increasing that number.
It changes things considerably whether livestock can be raised ethically. If they can, we can try to do that. If they can't, then the only ethical solution is to stop raising livestock. So discussing that 1% has practical implications.
You can't raise livestock for hundreds of millions of people "ethically" -whatever that means-. That's why people industrialized the process, and on most big factories there's little human intervention.
I can't picture the day where people stop eating meat. It just won't happen, not matter what arguments you present.
The best way to go is replacing it, and the perfect postulate is lab meat, which I hope, is going to be massively produced at low cost in the next ten years. And even if it doesn't ill people, tastes the same as natural meat, you will find resistence.
So, to summarise: lab meat at lower cost than natural meat, demands plunge, billions of animals are saved every year.
once lab meat/lab milk can be produced at or below cost of farming, cows will likely go extinct, unfortunately.
A less vulgar correlary is that once horse racing is outlawed, horses will mostly go extinct as well, as the racing industry is responsible for being able to acquire feed/hay/veternary care for the average horse owner. Without it will be practically impossible to keep 'pleasure' horses.
From what I've heard most land-use in the world goes towards animal agriculture - mainly for growing feed. Don't quote me, but I think it's over 40% of all land use in the USA. On balance I'd be far more concerned about the destruction of habitat for already endangered wildlife.
The desire to protect dogs/cats/horses over other animals isn't cognitive dissonance. Our relationship to certain species goes deeper than intellectual debates. We have evolved dogs from wolves, and so to have we evolved alongside them, to see value beyond meat. We have an instinct that protects dogs and cats because they are more valuable than food. They gather and protect our food. Pigs may be more intelligent, but they don't guard our doors at night and so we lack the same protective instincts. This isn't simple cognitive dissonance, but dissonance between modern intellectual values re intelligence and evolved survival instincts.
I wonder if this is slowly changing as values change. In NZ there is a growing movement to eradicate pests to help protect native species. Cats fall on the wrong side of this goal. There have been public calls by high profile individuals to eradicate cats. Maybe someday birds will be seen to greater value than cats down here.
That's a very modern trend. Even if they did 'ban' cats I really doubt anyone would look to eradicate them. We aren't going to see cops raiding people's houses to kill their pets. It will probably take the form of mandatory spay/neuter programs to wipe out the population over a period of several years. The feral cats will be trapped and similarly treated until there are only a very few that need to be actually killed.
I do wonder whether a place like NZ might then have a rat problem. Rats also do real damage to native species, including birds as they eat eggs. Removing a key rat predator inside cities might have repercussions.
We do have a rat problem. There are quite a few predator free areas in NZ which are islands or fenced inland areas. With fenced off areas, more problematic than rats are mice, which can get though truely tiny holes in fences, jump quite high and are hard to control. At least rats can be fenced out more easily. In terms of killing pests, some great equipment has been developed recently. A homegrown CO2 powered ", self resetting trap has impressive functionality and ongoing testing is really promising.
Society has flip-flopped on treating cats as pets or as pests, or even as witch familiars. Call me when people agree to kill dogs, who can wreck native populations a lot worse than cats, if left to breed unchecked on streets.
From the wiki article. Never heard about a eq score before.
Mean EQ for mammals is around 1, with carnivorans, cetaceans and primates above 1, and insectivores and herbivores below. This reflects two major trends. One is that brain matter is extremely costly in terms of energy needed to sustain it.[19] Animals which live on relatively nutrient poor diets (plants, insects) have relatively little energy to spare for a large brain, while animals living from energy-rich food (meat, fish, fruit) can grow larger brains. The other factor is the brain power needed to catch food. Carnivores generally need to find and kill their prey, which presumably requires more cognitive power than browsing or grazing.[20][21] The brain size of a wolf is about 30% larger than a similarily sized domestic dog, again reflecting different needs in their respective way of life.[22]
I think average neuron count in the cerebral cortex is good if not better. Some really large animals are outliers, but the EQ score is probably misleading in smaller animals.
start is incorrect since human subjects are already being used from time to time. Way less than animals though, and often (e.g. electrical stimulation to fight epilepsy/tinitus) though not always (e.g. recording from electrodes in malicious brain tissue which is going to be removed anyway) they benefit so much it would be almost unhuman not to help them.
The times that has been done have raised complicated ethical questions beyond the obvious. Many have refused to use the data gathered despite some of the it being potentially helpful as the use of the 'tainted' data gives a validity to the method of gathering.
http://bioethics.as.nyu.edu/docs/IO/30171/Steinberg.HumanRes...
Unfortunately not entirely true, depending on where you live.
Americans would be astounded to learn the usual settlements awarded for deaths due to traffic accidents (as an example I'm familiar with) in South America.
Payments of 25.000 dollars aren't uncommon. Colombia and Uruguay pay around U$ 150.000 per death. Heck, even first world countries like Spain can pay less than that.
So, an expensive monkey pet can be more expensive than a human.
Probably because many treatment options can cause harm. So no researcher wants to take the very real risk of harming another human. If you harm an animal unintentionally, and in the name of trying to do something good, not many people will question it. But if you kill a paralyzed patient, or make him suffer excruciating pain, you're likely going to feel remorse and his family is going to demand an answer.
I think the social taboo is self-reinforcing argument. Animals have the same rights as humans. Indeed, we are animals. Those who draw categorical lines to justify their morose experimentation ought to be judged in the same light as someone who would cage a human boy and deliberately sever his spinal cord in the name of a higher good. It's the same. I don't condemn the science, but I do condemn the hypocrisy.
>Animals have the same rights as humans. Indeed, we are animals
By that reasoning, oughtn't we grant the same rights to a sea sponge?
It's not clear to me that animals, as a general class, deserve any particular care or rights beyond what we might extend to living creatures in general. So far as we grants rights to animals, the clear criteria seems to be complexity (especially of the intellectual sort) and closeness to humanity.
My wife is in vet school and when I learned all of what you describe from her I have been phasing out dairy as best as I can. Still can't kick the butter cheese and icecream though :(
This is great comment! I always wondered why people were ok eating cows and pigs and not cats and dogs. It's got to be how we are conditioned from childhood to obey conventional thinking. Dogs are faithful to humans so we cannot eat them....
It doesn't have anything to do with cognitive dissonance. We allow ourselves to slaughter farm animals because we've benefit their species tremendously. The perpetual existence of domestic animal species is virtually assured. By contrast, we have done nothing for monkeys other than relentlessly destroy their habitats.
Trying things and seeing what happens is the essence of science; the only way we have to try to figure things out. Scientists have to get replication of an effect before they can design further experiments to dig into its details.
As to whether it's unethical--it sickens me too. It's horrifying but what if it gives us the key to solving spinal paralysis? It's a classic moral dilemma. I highly recommend this short story, which explores this sort of dilemma:
Science starts with observation, not experimentation.
Honestly, if this was software, I'd consider this sort of approach as nothing short of pathetic. When I first reverse engineered firmware flashing software for mobile phones, experimentation was the absolute last thing I did - and all that experimentation could do was damage my phone, not another living creature.
Instead I recorded observations of software operating under normal use (USB traces) and identified patterns in this. Only once I'd spent a long time determining patterns and built a model did I decide it was safe to perform some experimentation.
To be fair, biological systems are much more complicated than computer systems written by other humans. However, observation should always come first! This study seems crude to me.
This is going to seem personally harsh--that's not my intention. But you're flatly wrong. Fundamentally, collecting observations is an active pursuit.
An example: We didn't start to learn about electricity until we started messing with it. That's because there was very little to observe passively. Touching electric fish, rubbing amber to make static electricity, flying a kite into a thunderstorm--these sorts of actions produced the early observations that started us down the path toward the knowledge we have today.
Your example was observing USB traces. In order to do that, you had to plug a well-understood sensor into a well-understood interface. You did something, and observed the results. You just think of it as passive observation because you're taking for granted the enormous amount of prior knowledge that made it possible.
I do agree with you here. My point is paralysing the monkey didn't help them collect data about how a monkey walks, quite the opposite.
Reasonable observations would consist of using electrodes to monitor left leg movements vs right leg movements. Running vs walking, joint extension etc.
Build a waveform generator and compare the generated waveforms vs real waveforms and iterate.
(The scientists did actually do this.)
Once you've got a fair degree of confidence then you can try apply your work.
Paralysing a monkey just to replay captured data when we already know we can interface with the nervous system is totally unnecessary.
Edit: It should really go without saying that when it does come time to apply your work you do everything within your power to avoid harming a non-consenting creature. Does applying the work even require paralysing a monkey? Can it be temporary? What about sedation and then interfacing with the nervous system whilst sedated?
> We next exploited cortical signals to decode the temporal structure of extensor and flexor hotspot activation. The spiking activity recorded from the left motor cortex displayed cyclic modulations that were phase-locked with right leg movements (Extended Data Fig. 4a). We developed a decoder that calculated the probability of foot-strike and foot-off events from this modulation to anticipate the activation of extensor and flexor hotspots associated with right leg movements (Extended Data Fig. 4b). Evaluations in two intact monkeys showed that the decoder accurately predicted these gait events in real time over extended periods of locomotion, including when initiating and terminating gait, and during rest.
Ya. They collected data from monkeys 1 and 2, then they injured monkeys 2 and 3. They collected data from monkeys 2 and 3, then they removed the spinal cord from all three.
You can't compare the two because one was created by humans and one was not. It's ridiculous to compare these two. Here's a more accurate scenario:
You need to debug this software without a keyboard, mouse, monitor. The language is an assembly language written by aliens with no documentation that uses quantum states in protons to manage the machine. Oh by the way, it's encrypted and obfuscated into nothing but MOV instructions. And there's 100 billion MOV instructions.
That's the kind of complexity we are talking about here. So get off your highhorse and let the experts who just made a paralyzed monkey walk do their jobs.
Actually, the electronics analogy is apt for more difficult cases than the OP's. If communications are encrypted or signed you may be out of luck unless you can extract the software from one of the devices; sometimes that's almost impossible, sometimes it can be done but only by disassembling the device (frequently an irreversible process) and reading the data off an EEPROM chip or something. If the protocol directly involves hardware (e.g. hardware crypto), then the state of the art permits nothing better than experimentation, combined with some crude 'in vivo' attacks like differential power analysis. In theory, after decapping and delayering the chip (also irreversible), a scanning election microscope can show the transistor layout clearly enough to reconstruct its functionality, but no software exists to do this automatically, and with billions of transistors good luck doing it manually.
Except they didn't exactly make a paralyzed monkey walk, did they? They simply paralyzed a monkey.
There are parts of this study that seem quite legit (another poster referred to them above).
However, the paralysis, surgery, and replay of data into the nervous system, just to be the first to "claim" they made a monkey walk was not one of them.
I already mentioned software is very different to biology, my issue is with reckless experimentation that has caused a lot of harm to a creature and provides no real gain. What were they actually hoping to achieve with this part of the experiment? It's already well understood that we can interface with nervous system, this is nothing new.
P.S. concern for the well being of other creatures isn't a particularly high horse. It's called empathy.
It's not "reckless experimentation" for "no gain" at all.
Here's a practical application for this research. Someone with a disease will eventually suffer from paralysis due to the degen. nature of the disease. Applying the technique from the research, we could record their body movements before they become paralyzed and then restore their ability to walk later.
I think that's a pretty real gain. Just because it's in a fledgling stage of research doesn't mean it's worthless. Medical research is a much longer timeline than even complex software. You make incredibly small baby steps precisely because you don't have tools like a debugger, logic analyzer, etc, etc.
Research of this nature requires reading the electrical spike trains of small sets of neurons (often even individual cells).
EEG will give you a measurement of the combined electric field of every single neuron that is active in the entire brain. You can use multiple electrodes and run machine learning algorithms to get a qualitative measure of a macroscopic chunk of brain activity. So, terrible spatial precision.
MRI gives you anatomical information.
fMRI gives an idea of blood flow in the brain (about millimeter precision which is also not good enough) which is a time-lagged (a few seconds) _response_ to sustained neural spiking in a region.
Think of it like this: The brain is a computational organ where there is very little hardware-software separation. We're not going to be able to patch the software (say, to treat paralysis) without patching the hardware (say, with implants)
The point of my comment was that getting good testing is surely easier on humans than monkeys. Actually going in has to happen at some point - why not do this on humans that have volunteered? Cellular level investigations are obviously important but getting a wire in somewhere is not going to happen at a level this small. It will be image guided surely. X-ray would by my guess and hopefully MR but that obviously has its complexities as MR with additional wires isn't that straight forward. A decent MR DTI can help when you want to know where the fibres go, but as you say, the hardware/software division isn't quite so clear with live things.
The point of my comment was that getting good testing is surely easier on humans than monkeys. Actually going in has to happen at some point - why not do this on humans that have volunteered?
1. Humans do volunteer and it does happen, but even with full consent, regulations will always be stricter on human experimentation than on animals.
2. We don't understand the brain very well and it is easy to make mistakes when working with neural tissue. The consequences of causing irreversible damage/death are much higher when the brain belongs to a human being. On the other hand, most people eat animals for pleasure.
Cellular level investigations are obviously important but getting a wire in somewhere is not going to happen at a level this small
It does happen, there exist small electrode array implants that can be placed in neural tissue to both induce (for example, cause sensations that one can feel) and read-out activity. Such implants are in fact used in some human subjects (there are issues such as development of scar-tissue however).
A decent MR DTI can help when you want to know where the fibres go, but as you say, the hardware/software division isn't quite so clear with live things.
Yeah, for neural interfacing a connectome is not enough, you need to work at the neural code level. Reading out each spike with full spatial resolution from a distance will probably never happen.
Believe me, neuroscientists do not enjoy the fact that invasive experimentation has to be performed on blameless animals; unfortunately it has to be done, unless people are willing to live with the level of understanding/treatments we have now and never move forward.
I think you may misunderstand me as I wasn't clear
"Cellular level investigations are obviously important but getting a wire in somewhere is not going to happen at a level this small
It does happen, there exist small electrode array implants that can be placed in neural tissue to both induce (for example, cause sensations that one can feel) and read-out activity. Such implants are in fact used in some human subjects (there are issues such as development of scar-tissue however)."
What I mean - in a human subject the placement of any implant is not going to be guided by anything approaching a cellular level of imaging resolution. It will mostly use conventional radiological image guidance to get close and then measure electrical signals once close. Or is this in fact what you are saying?
We need single neuron level mapping for any hope of a decent Brain-Computer Interface. Or even for really understanding how the brain works, in order to simulate it or progress in biologically inspired AI.
Neural lace looks promising. But wouldn't be the first to volunteer for one :)
Sidenote: I feel slightly uneasy about all this stuff.
On one level it is progressing our knowledge, but both the methods of the research (animal testing) and potential implications of deep human+machine symbiosis, combined with CRISPR on animals and humans, feel instinctively bad. It won't stop at curing disease.
> Science starts with observation, not experimentation.
well, yes, but in a lot of neuroscience research, mainly the fundametal research, the initial observation stage led to the knowlegde that you first need controlled experimentation in order to perform any further valid/interesting observation at all
Scientists are not sadists, and welfare is taken extremely seriously. What people don't see are the efforts to enrich living environments, provide sedation and analgesia, or the reams of protocols on monitoring and rapidly terminating experiments if the animal is distressed. None of this exists in livestock farming.
Also, for me intelligence is besides the point. If someone is suffering, I don't factor their IQ into whether or not I should help them. What I am saying is that if we are happy to accept animals suffering for our benefit, then we should not be selective about it.
You are making a generalisation here. There is plenty of poor treatment of animals in science. I'm sure things are better than they were but claiming that everything is good and everyone is too doesn't square with human behaviour at all.
The point is that intelligence is sentience. The more aware you are of your own condition the more capable you are of suffering. A jellyfish does not suffer the same as a human, at least not in the way we'd typically measure suffering.
I partially agree with you, but sentience isn't the same as intelligence. From having had dogs I get the impression that most of them are every bit as sentient as I am.
There's also a large amount of speciesism involved in how we feel that's not concerned with intelligence or sentience. As an example, I can conceive of a scenario where someone with a severe learning disability might be less aware and less capable of abstract problem solving than some corvids are. That wouldn't affect my decision of which one to assist in a disaster.
Someone else already debunked your intelligence argument, but I would like to add something.
Think about how the medical field developed... for biological science you often are going to have to break a few eggs. It sucks... I really understand the motivations you have behind your feelings about hurting animals for human gain, but there isn't any "manual" for biology, hacking away is often the only way to test hypotheses.
> Also, intentionally paralysing a creature, leaving it to live in that condition, and then performing experimental surgery/procedures on it is significantly different than slaughtering it.
It seems very similar to intentionally placing an animal in a cage it can't move around in and leaving it to live in that condition. The conditions are, as I understand it, more cruel and unusual than "experimental surgery/procedures."
Also, intentionally paralysing a creature, leaving it to live in that condition, and then performing experimental surgery/procedures on it is significantly different than slaughtering it.
Whilst I appreciate the scientists mean well, and I do understand how this could benefit humanity; this sort of research still seems unethical to me, and at the very least makes me feel sick.
As a software developer and reverse engineer, this feels like hacking anyway. It's not particularly scientific just to "capture and replay" data without much understanding of how it works.