I was just thinking today that if we are allowed to cage animals who have the mental development of a 6 year old, why can't we justify caging people who have the mental capacity of a 6 year old.
Oh it's all speciesism. A human has more inherent worth in the common human morals. It makes zero sense from a logical point of view, probably an evolutionary remnant.
No, it makes a lot of sense. Treating all species the same would make very little sense. Do bacteria have the same rights as lice which have the same rights as mice which have the same rights as dogs which have the same rights as whales?
In reality, it is a scale. How much we care about an animal varies depending on how big it is, how intelligent it is, what it is capable of and how it interacts with our lives. To pretend every species is the same is just wilfully naive.
Speciesism is ridiculous concept. Humans are inherently worth more than other animals. This does not mean that we should go out of way to maltreat animals, but when the choice is a human life verses an animal’s life then the human's should always come first.
In regards orangutans we can certainly do a better job of ensuring both can exist.
Ask yourself how many animals you would kill to save you own child. If the answer is a number without limit then there is no morality in letting someone else child die to save some animal.
No it a scale set by everyone who has thought about this issue for more than five minutes. Are you really telling me that you would let your own child die so some animal can live? If so you either have no children nor should you.
The FDA's ban on transfat is almost entirely after the fact. Transfats have been on the outs for a long time, and their use has declined in accordance.
The rise in the use of palm oil has more to do with people thinking that because it's natural, it's "healthy" for you (which is really only true if your baseline for comparison is eating tubs of margarine) thanks to folks like Dr. Oz.
So, since you can't see my eyeroll at the downvotes, here are citations:
I think what you might be missing is that your 86% number is from the Grocery Manufacturers Association, which is an industry trade group. I would not take that number at face value. I also wouldn't assume that group speaks for restaurants or even all grocers.
Also, the use of an oil doesn't contribute linearly to the trans fat content of whatever is fried in it. Users of hydrogenated oils for frying, for example, are purchasing gallons and gallons of the stuff on a regular basis, with most of that being discarded as waste. Yes, most of the big name fast food chains in the US have switched to other oils, but it's not clear whether all have or to what extent. There may still be a sizable bump in purchases of replacement oils, including palm.
Finally, even if the 86% number is ironclad and extends across the entire prepared food and food service industry, it represents a relative drop against an unknown whole. It says nothing about the absolute volume of hydrogenated oils still in use. IMO this validates the parent's concern.
This plus the general flippant snark of your comment and the weird Dr. Oz reference is why I downvoted you.
Why have we not genetically engineered all the other ape species on our planet with language and intelligence (at the very least language) and given them legal rights as people that they can defend in court.
The only way to give animals right is to give them a voice literally.
Some apes are already able to communicate using language - not spoken, but e.g. using a buttons console with symbols on it. They've also been taught sign language.
None of the apes learned "grammar", but they did communicate using language. Did that make a difference to the rights of apes? Of course not.
Whatever you get an ape to achieve, will be immediately defined as not quite sufficient to prove that they are human-like enough to have any rights. The only way to solve this argument is not to give them language but to realise that it is our responsibility to better treat other denizens of this world we share - irrespective of whether they meet some arbitrary criteria of human-ness.
There's a very simple self-interested reason for this too: if we ever encounter aliens, we currently would not have any viable argument to convince them that they should treat us any better than we treat apes.
We have some ideas and clues. Just gotta share some of those differences and see what happens. Do that a few times and you have intelligence and language in apes. We already put apes through horrendous experiments, what's a few more? We should at least be working on this as a goal. Otherwise these other species will go extinct it's a matter of time.
No, that's not how science fiction becomes science. Science fiction is to show what might happen given some assumptions on the state of future science, not what will happen if you try something that you currently don't have the technology for.
For instance, Jules Verne wrote about lots of 'impossible' journeys, which made for good science fiction. Trying any of those things before the technology was there would have not led anywhere, it would have wasted time and or killed people. And even when the technology was there it took some pretty hard thinking to make the journeys a successful reality.
What you are proposing is so far beyond the current state of the art that it is not science (yet, maybe never will be) but fiction. Trying it will simply not work and won't advance science at all.
I don't know what we're arguing about. That's it's impossible? It's not impossible. All I am saying is we should go in that direction. The rest will follow. The direction is giving language to other species and maybe even intelligence. The way to start to do this is to introduce human variants of certain genes like foxp2 to apes. We have already done it in mice... and keep introducing these differences between humans and apes until we produce an ape human hybrid that has intelligence.
Two amino acid substitutions distinguish the human FOXP2 protein from that found in chimpanzees,[15] but only one of these two changes is unique to humans.[11] Evidence from genetically manipulated mice[16] and human neuronal cell models[17] suggests that these changes affect the neural functions of FOXP2.
There is an enormous amount of developmental context to this and simply swapping in some genetic material without a full appreciation for the scope of the problem makes this at present day an impossibility. Hollywood might make you believe it is easy to make dinosaurs and to make planets full of apes rivalling the humans but in cold hard reality this is far from simple.
I'm not saying it is impossible per-se, I'm saying that with our current understanding of the matter it is impossible today and simply trying will not advance our understanding much. There are far simpler problems than this that are right now impossible.
Yes, FOXP is related to speech, no, activating FOXP does not automatically give you a talking ape, the way genes affect the brain is very complex and poorly understood.
I don't know, he has a point. Science and engineering can go hand in hand. We built the bomb. We broke Enigma. We landed on the moon. We didn't have all the science when we started.
No, he doesn't have a point. You can't just splice some genes and add 'language' and 'intelligence' into an existing organism. (Assuming that you define them currently as un-intelligent and without language). It's not quite the same as changing some config bits. Though that doesn't rule out that one day we may be able to do so but for now this is simply (according to my knowledge of the state of the art of genetic engineering) an impossibility. Besides the ethical questions it would raise.
Building the bomb, breaking enigma and landing on the moon (and ITER, for that matter) were 'mere matters of engineering' by comparison, at least there we had a good idea of what we needed to achieve and what possible paths there were to that solution.
For the atomic bomb, for instance, the Uranium atom had already been split (in 1938), for the moon landings we already had the German V2 rocket and so on.
The steps may seem huge but the theoretical underpinnings were firmly in place when the technology moved forward.
Usually this alternates, one step is made by science to advance the theory which then can be put to the test and put into practice by engineering and experiment. This may lead to new insight and so on.
It's very rare for someone to say 'oh, it would be nice if we could do 'x'' and then to turn up with a complete and solved problem on the next iteration.
There's a reason the moonshot and the atomic bomb took several years and very large amounts of money to complete, and in neither case were we 100% sure that we'd achieve them.
No, he doesn't have a point. You can't just splice some genes and add 'language' and 'intelligence' into an existing organism.
And you know this how? Because of the copious amounts of experiments that have been performed, attempting to do this? I think it's equally silly to declare this certainly out of reach as it is to declare it certainly within reach. We haven't even tried, so how do we know what's possible? Perhaps all it takes is splicing a couple of genes from the human genome into a chimp embryo and kabloom: you have an intelligent chimp who can be as miserable about his or her condition as the rest of us.
No one has sat there and run the years' worth of experiments required to prove whether this is achievable with today's technology. We obviously can't say it's easy but we can't say how hard it is either.
The more interesting rebuttal, imho, is that genetically engineering some intelligent apes that can speak will not advance the cause of non-intelligent apes who can't speak, it will just create a new species of apes with a catastrophic uphill civil rights struggle ahead of them (if you think there's racism in the world today, wait till the chimps start demanding the right to vote, work, etc).
Which probably helps explain why we have not pursued that avenue of science particularly much: why do such a thing? It'd be ethically unconscionable, to set out to create another intelligent species who will be condemned to decades, if not centuries, of abuse, for no other reason than because maybe we can? Only a monster would set out to do such a thing.
Because of doing a whole pile of reading on this wondering how much of 'planet of the apes' rests on science and how much of it is fiction.
> Because of the copious amounts of experiments that have been performed, attempting to do this?
Some experiments to turn this gene on in chimpanzees have in fact been done.
> I think it's equally silly to declare this certainly out of reach as it is to declare it certainly within reach.
You missed a 'currently' in there, it is currently out of our reach. This mostly hinges on the development of the brain, not on switching on or off some genes.
> We haven't even tried, so how do we know what's possible?
We in fact have tried.
> Perhaps all it takes is splicing a couple of genes from the human genome and kabloom: you have an intelligent chimp who can be as miserable about his or her condition as the rest of us.
We already have pretty intelligent chimps, where we draw the line is pretty arbitrary, see Jane Goodall and her life's work.
To make short work of this: humans will never allow anything that is not 100% human to be treated within the same legal framework that we use for ourselves, we rely to great extent on mentally putting distance between ourselves and other species to go about our daily business. Heck, we don't even see most other humans as human, racism, war and so on all rely on dehumanization. Some countries don't fully recognize females (so, half our own species) as being able to vote.
> The more interesting rebuttal, imho, is that genetically engineering some intelligent apes that can speak will not advance the cause of non-intelligent apes who can't speak, it will just create a new species of apes with a catastrophic uphill civil rights struggle ahead of them (if you think there's racism in the world today, wait till the chimps start demanding the right to vote, work, etc).
Yes, but that's merely shifting the discussion, we could have that same discussion today without chimps that demand the vote in Proper English.
> Which probably helps explain why we have not pursued that avenue of science particularly much: why do such a thing?
> It'd be ethically unconscionable, to set out to create another intelligent species who will be condemned to decades, if not centuries, of abuse, for no other reason than because maybe we can? Only a monster would set out to do such a thing.
There's not a lot to read in that paper abstract, and I'm not spending money to support an organisation that charges for access to scientific papers (and especially not for an internet argument!)...
Based on the abstract, I see this as an attempt to mess with one gene that's hypothesised to be language-related, not as a deliberate programme to try and engineer intelligent chimps... So I'm afraid my point still stands. Your rebuttal is not convincing - it just addresses one gene. As you said, intelligence is a complex thing. To give this a "good try" I'd expect a programme that lasts at least a decade and has as its deliberate objective "genetically engineer intelligent apes"... I hope that such a programme does not exist!
But, as both of us have pointed out - humans don't even recognise other humans as fully human, let alone recognising the rights of an enhanced species... That's the real killer for this line of argument, not the possibility or lack thereof of bio-engineering intelligent chimps!
Why would that give voice to any animals except apes, and even then, only sometimes? Humans are animals, yet they rarely advocated for all the humans in the world, let alone other species. I really see no reason for apes species being any better.
[1] 1.B4 Opening https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9jaaKUWwBI