Dawkins Yearning for Human/Chimp Hybrid Again
Labels: Human Exceptionalism. Richard Dawkins. Human/Animal Hybrid.
I am not sure why some materialists are so fervently anti human exceptionalism. I suspect they believe that by humbling us into believing our lives are no more important than that of animals, it would undermine Judeo/Christiam moral philosophy in general and theism in particular. Some too, I think, wish to have us sacrifice ourselves to "save the planet," in pursuit of the neo- nature worship that seems to be growing.
This desire leads some materialists to yearn for scientists to find (or create) a human/chimpanzee hybrid that could interbreed with both species, and thereby "break the species" barrier. James Hughes yearned for such a hybrid to be manufactured through genetic engineering in Citizen Cyborg, because he wrote, it would prove humans are not special and undermine what he calls "human racism." Similarly, the crusading atheist and biologist, Richard Dawkins has repeatedly expressed the same desire, for example in supporting the Great Ape Project in an essay in the book of the same name in 1993. (The illustration on the left at the top of this post is a depiction of what such an animal might look from Dawkins' essay.)
Dawkins is at it again at The Edge, answering the question, "What will change everything," he answered, "Breaking the Species Barrier." He writes: Our ethics and our politics assume, largely without question or serious discussion, that the division between human and 'animal' is absolute. 'Pro-life', to take just one example, is a potent political badge, associated with a gamut of ethical issues such as opposition to abortion and euthanasia. What it really means is pro-human-life. Abortion clinic bombers are not known for their veganism, nor do Roman Catholics show any particular reluctance to have their suffering pets 'put to sleep'. In the minds of many confused people, a single-celled human zygote, which has no nerves and cannot suffer, is infinitely sacred, simply because it is 'human'. No other cells enjoy this exalted status.
To which I respond, so what? How would that change the moral value of humans vis a vis that of catfish and kangaroos? Besides, the contrary is true: Supporting human exceptionalism could fit within the neo evolutionary paradigm since caring exclusively for one's own species is almost universal within the natural world, and certainly caring for one's own species the most is. Why should we be held to a different standard? The only reason would be because we are exceptional, which also explains why our lives have greater value than animals that our genetic ancestors might once have been able to interbreed with--although even Dawkins would admit that hasn't been true since the emergence of modern man 100-000-1 million years ago.
But such 'essentialism' is deeply un-evolutionary. If there were a heaven in which all the animals who ever lived could frolic, we would find an interbreeding continuum between every species and every other. For example I could interbreed with a female who could interbreed with a male who could . . . fill in a few gaps, probably not very many in this case . . . who could interbreed with a chimpanzee. We could construct longer, but still unbroken chains of interbreeding individuals to connect a human with a warthog, a kangaroo, a catfish. This is not a matter of speculative conjecture; it necessarily follows from the fact of evolution.
Dawkins also claims that that the question of why we should be considered separate and apart from the rest of the fauna goes unasked. What world is he living in? Anti-human exceptionalism views are all the rage among the intelligentsia of a certain philosophical persuasion, which is part of what is leading us toward a culture of death. And then there is the popular culture that is moving swiftly in the same direction-think the horrible remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still.
If the species barrier is ever broken, Dawkins says he will experience "a frisson of enjoyment," a fancy way of saying he would experience the same thrill talk show host Chris Matthews reported ran up his leg while listening to President Elect Obama speak. I have to admit that if the Dawkins of the world are successful in destroying society's belief in human exceptionalism, it would send a thrill up my leg too. But unlike his frisson, mine would be of cold fear based on my sure knowledge that doing so would result in the undermining of universal human equality and on the concomitant universal rights that flow, as the UN Charter states, simply from being human.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 12:49 PM
15 Comments
15 Comments:
I don't subscribe to SHS's human exceptionalism moral Judaeo-Chyistian etc. philosophy. In fact I don't even understand it, and the part I do understand, about animal experimentation, I'll never agree on.
But this is just nuts. Why on earth would anyone want to do this in the first place? Yet another reason why non-human animals have more sense than we do and we'd all be better off without a large part of the human race. Or do we want to end up with what the ones we'd be better off without have in mind?
Perhaps Dawkins fancies monkeys.
Ha! Don't confuse him with Peter Singer!
The monkeys don't want anything to do with either one of them, or with any other humans who want to violate them in any way. How would we like it if we were in their shoes? (I know, they don't nead, wear, or make shoes...but that doesn't mean they don't have more sense than we have; that they don't produce any Dawkins or Singers is proof enough of that.) This "brainstorm" sure doesn't show any respect or consideration for them. Or for us.
How interesting that Dawkins says that something follows necessarily from the fact of evolution which appears to be, as a matter of empirical and physical fact, not possible. Since we're making predictions, my prediction is that "they" will never create an human-chimp hybrid--by which I mean a creature with half its DNA from each, as in the case of ordinary hybrids like mules--that will "survive" beyond a couple of days, if that.
If Dawkins is right, the failure of such attempts should decisively falsify evolution as he conceives it! (After all, he says it "necessarily follows...") But I'm not holding my breath for him to change his mind. He'll just say we haven't tried long enough yet.
Now, if we were moral and ethical enough not to experiment on non-human animals in the first place, this would not be going on. But we want to allow for freedom of expression of the human mind, "progress," etc. Well, this is where belief in "progress" leads. This guy ought to be in jail, along with a lot of other people. Instead, he's running around loose and nobody dares to say anything or stop him because he's a "scientist."
I always thought that the Clintons were after a dictatorship and that the expansion of the prison system by that administration was part of the preparation for that. We imprisoned animals in laboratories already, and what we try on them we end up "benefitting from" ourselves. Now we've got, after Bush/Clinton/Bush, Obama/Clinton/Kennedy/Chicago again, along with plenty of prisons, which we'd be wise to fill up with those who belong in them before they fill them up with us.
Did this start with the U.N.? Yes it did -- both the incomplete premises on which I think "human exceptionalism" is based and the ability of the death culture to take hold, and no wonder. A big help the U.N. is with its troops or whatever they are wearing their little blue hats and with its corruption. There the U.N. sits, right next to the filthy East River where the mob dumps bodies (and yes I think that rivers, like the rest of nature, have a right to be respected). We should have been dealing with Russia when we were letting Eleanor's namby-pamby claptrap get started. We're all human; what a revelation; it's as obvious as Eleanor's front teeth. THAT isn't going to save the human race or stop the death culture. In fact, it's made things worse. All the countries have to make nice and get along now, everyone is equal, God forbid anyone should fight or misbehave in kindergarten.
Well, they aren't all nice, and much of the the human race isn't nice, and better to dispense with niceness to those who really aren't nice. Because this "everything is really all right, everything is supposed to be all right, let's not fight, let's all get along" nonsense is at the heart of the collapse of morality and of western civilization, and at the heart of the death culture, and it's just a way to stop people from fighting for themselves, which is why nobody "objects to" or "doesn't like" anything any more; they "have a problem with it." They've got a problem, all right. No teeth (Eleanor took them), no backbone; now it's "politically incorrect" to have teeth and backbone, it's "not nice." That's how the death culture, which needs everybody to be "nice" (not fight, is fueled by "nice," and preys on those who are really nice, and really helpless, was able to take over.
Life is fighting, and worth fighting for, and when the standard instead is the "everybody let's get along" shibboleth of the U.N., naturally the result is the death culture. No, the European countries can't be distinct any more; its representatives can't even have their own religion; "We are all one." What is this, Buddhism? No, we are not that enlightened. It's not in the nature of the West to be "all one," a concept which, for us, leads to the death culture. Everyone is not as good as everyone else, and those who are not as good are the ones who want to get rid of the rest of us via the death culture. That's what all this "peace and love" stuff is about. We can't afford it. It works for Buddhists, who have been doing it for a very long time. We can't just come along and adopt it because we think it's a nice idea; it's theirs; it's not for us, just as first-cousin marriage is not for us.
Very nice -- the U.N., the Nuremberg Code, leaving Russia to its own devices, letting the German eugenicists continue to run around loose, because, after all, science is important, all at the same time, and then we wonder why, along with the hype of John Lennon, we got the hype of the death culture. When our civilization was born, we didn't have all this "progress" yet; now we've got it and it's dying; but we should be able to have more of it? We can't survive to have it at all at this rate, and what it's brought us is utilitarianism because we wanted it for utilitarian reasons.
If we want to be able to keep people alive with technology, and not have them euthanized as the result of having the technology, we have to realize that the technology itself came out of some people thinking they were better and smarter than other people, which is how we got to utilitarianism, and realize that there was a better way to go about things, based indeed on every human having value and all the wisdom we need being within us, and that we can't benefit in the end from their methods because they were derived from an unethical source. The U.N. approach let the eugenicists run around loose so that they could 'keep developing science for the good of humanity,' and naturally we got the death culture back instead. Cannot have cake and eat it too.
Yes SHS I know that the Nuremberg Code and its requirement that all testing be done on non-human animals first was supposed to deal with the ethics problem. But it didn't because it required something else that is unethical. We can call it ethical all day long in order to serve our own purposes, but there you have it, it's not. The very discussion of ethics is a warning light; the most important things do not brook or require discussion and it's not even decent to discuss them; it's decent to DO them without discussion. That's why the utilitarians and futile-care contingent has created "bioethics." Those who have ethics don't need to discuss and have meetings and conferences about them. SHS is, rightly, defending a premise that brooks no debate; life IS supremely valuable and worthwhile and not ours to take away, even from ourselves,let alone from others. We KNOW what's right; it can be intellectualized if we like, but it comes back to the same thing as what we also feel. What's wrong doesn't feel right, just as we know that it isn't right. Just like the very notion of infanticide, e.g. killing Singer's hypothetical "defective" infant doesn't. Life is feeling, and sensing, and instinct, as well as thinking, and we can't rationalize what those things tell us away for the sake of that to which we have rationalized we wish to be entitled. Either we're entitled or we're not, and we're not entitled to do what both our feelings and our intellect can tell us, without need for discussion of ethics, is wrong, no matter how much we want, and feel we need, the benefits; to do that in itself is a form of hedonism as well as of utilitarianism; restraint also is necessary in that respect, whether we like it or not, and exercising it, not feeling free to abandon it, is what makes us uniquely human and "special."
Wesley writes: "Anti-human exceptionalism views are all the rage among the intelligentsia of a certain philosophical persuasion, which is part of what is leading us toward a culture of death." Come now, can he be serious about the "culture of death"? People have been killing each other in inventive ways for eons, and now, all of a sudden, "the intelligentsia of a certain persuasion are leading us toward a culture of death"? Dare I ask to what "persuasion" he refers? Are today's "intelligentsia of a certain persuasion" doing a better job of it than, for example, Stalin? Hitler? Chairman Mao? Ivan the Terrible? Genghis Khan? Vlad the Impaler? Nero? The "culture of death" is just so much empty sloganeering. It's business as usual --- always has been and always will be. As for human "exceptionalism" I suggest that anyone who takes that term seriously read a good biology textbook. Our closest relatives DNA-wise, chimpanzees, are nasty, vicious and murderous within their own species.
Stalin and Hitler were not a culture, they were individual people who had lots of power and did lots of killing.
I see the culture of death as an attitude infesting the west. It incorporates a particular set of beliefs and practices who's consequences result in death.
Abortion = death of the unborn
Ivf = death of human embryos
Euthanasia = death of anyone who want it
Contraception = rejection of life
I would disagree that Nazism wasn't part of a culture. The Germans renounced it only after they lost the war. What I find interesting is that you've excluded warfare, genocide, "ethnic cleansing" and capital punishment from your list. Why? Are these, to your mind, not part of the "infestation"? Or are they of less significance because of some theological or ethical construct? How can one equate contraception with death and zygotes with embryos, but gloss over the Rwandan genocide of 1994, the Serbian slaughter of Muslims or the Turkish slaughter of Armenians? It is puzzling, since you style yourself both "secular" and "heretical." Can you explain this?
I don't think my list is complete. A broader definition of the term "culture of death" could well include warfare and genocide as you pointed out. The difference I see between my short list and your extended list is that warfare etc has been around for ever and abortion, ivf etc has been accepted as a good by many, only recently.
While contraception doesn't directly kill anyone it does prevent life. Where contraception has been introduced into a society divorce and abortion have followed shortly after. I see this as a contributing factor in the culture of death.
SHS, I'm sure I don't ahve to remind you of the pressure-group Zero Population Growth, which in 1969 proposed that humanity be eradicated via a virus, which other primates would be given a vaccination to beforehand. Dawkins claimed in The God Delusion that Richard Attenborough has come out with a similar statement, but I haven't seen any corroboration of this. (At the time, the ZPG statement caused a prominent population contoller to ask, "with friends like these, who needs enemies?" - FD
Animal rights people say the same about Singer, and I'm sure primates would say the same about those who interbred them with humans if they ended up able to speak as a result.
If ZPG got its way, which of them would stick around to see whether the job got done, and how did they propose to track down and vaccinate every non-human primate on earth, or did they have some kind of an Ark situation, and just vaccinating every monkey they could catch, in mind?
ZPG's "modest proposal" coincided in time with the invention of "living wills" and with the "pro-choice," euthanasia, etc. movements. It sounds like the kind of thing someone would come up with while on drugs.
About human-chimp interbreeding, you say that "...even Dawkins would admit that hasn't been true since the emergence of modern man 100-000-1 million years ago. "
Actually, scientists believe that it may still be possible to this day. And in the very article you are quoting, Dawkins says, "It cannot be ruled out as impossible, but it would be surprising."
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home