This is simply unethical.
Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution
131–140 of 384 posts
Re: Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’re missing survivorship bias - nature didn’t just create these balanced ecosystems, it creates anything that goes, and things that don’t work out just die. Humans ruining earth for themselves is just as natural, just that we might die as result. But life won’t - it’s much more resilient than just one species. Or several.
Following this line of logic you can justify anything. If I kill your entire family, that’s natural. Would you be ok with that? I think if you accept at all that there is suffering and there is beauty, then you shouldn’t hide behind “everything’s natural” and instead try and have a backbone and stick up for something more.
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Re: Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I prefer the native songbirds and shrubs that are local to my area than a landscape full of Japanese knotweed and starlings." Don't you think, you feel that way, because you grew up with the native songbirds? "If we barely understand how life works on a macroscopic level, what makes us think we're ready to change it at an even lower level? " Like the other poster have said: nature does not plan in advance or makes e…
It's an easy qualitative decision to consider a variety of species with pleasant calls and plants which coexist in their own niches better than swarms of one single species of bird and an aggressively invasive plant species which chokes out all other growth. Knotweed in particular is an absolute pox on the landscape in North America.
Ok, I don't know of the specific case, it is just, that here in germany, the "invasive" species people complain about, I wittnes as a welcome variation. Brings in more color. The areas that do get dominated, will very likely balance it out with a different species, soon.
edit: had to translate it, but: we also have knotweed and people complain, but I actually like it. And I do not see it dominating, just a spot here and there, just like nettles.
Re: Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution
#134As a fan of the Planet of the Apes franchise, I like this article.
Next: give apes human-like hands suitable for tools.
Re: Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution
#135Can we improve our own brain this way? I mean, brain of our kind, not some already living person. What if we can create a creature smarter than us?
More likely the poor thing's going to be severely epileptic or have other debilitating brain malfunctions, if it would be viable at all. People here are reading way too much positive functional consequences into this manipulation.
In principle, of course genetic manipulation could be used as one tool to create a creature "smarter" than any human (whatever that means more specifically).
In practice, until we start having a much more coherent theory of functional brain physiology, applying the tool to that end pretty much amounts to mucking around, with likely tragic consequences.
Re: Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also such things as nuclear weapons, genetically engineered virii, patents on life, tampering with ecosystems, plants designed to be sterile to ensure a seed market, lakes full of sterile fish stocked for sport. >No, if you can save billions and you choose not to, you have killed them. If you can uplift species and you choose not to, you have killed their cognition. We are gods over the Earth. We have dominion o…
A fool with a tool is still a fool...
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Re: Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Our track record for messing with the fundamental fabric of reality is creating antibiotics, and over the period of a century saving so many lives that wars of earlier periods are negligible in comparison. A natural reaction from people with high sanctity/degradation (in the MFT sense) is to avoid touching the trolley lever at all points. Decision making is considered association with the decision. The naturalistic f…
It's also such things as nuclear weapons, genetically engineered virii, patents on life, tampering with ecosystems, plants designed to be sterile to ensure a seed market, lakes full of sterile fish stocked for sport. >No, if you can save billions and you choose not to, you have killed them. If you can uplift species and you choose not to, you have killed their cognition. We are gods over the Earth. We have dominion o…
Curious; I not only don’t understand your world view, I don’t even have enough of a handle on it to know how to engage with it.
For example:
> The fungi will consume all of us some day and outlive us all. I mean some are among the oldest still living life on earth as it is. Like millions of years old and still going. How can you dominate something that's existed longer than you and will out live you and everyone you know?
Yet anti-fungals are trivially available at low cost. Indeed, the very claim of yours that:
> The Earth is a giant living system we're slowly killing and replacing with human technology.
Is literally not something I can only even understand as agreement that we have dominion, yet I know you intend to deny that.
Re: Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution
#138I find it hard to describe how I feel about this. These scientists essentially created what may have been a new species, that perhaps would have had similar sentience to us and had them terminated after 100 days. The cat's out of the bag with this research so to speak now. Someone's bound to do this again The part about whether they should have been born or not, which was the ethical thing is what tears at me. Is it…
You're giving nature too much credit. Nature doesn't try and balance life. Nature doesn't care- it throws asteroid impacts and supervolcanos and natural disasters all over the place. Life just happens to be very very resilient and consistently able to jump back and fill new niches. Nature also "created" us - were a product of the universe like everything else. If we are destabilizing, so is nature. And most scientist…
However in the exact same vane that "Nature doesn't care"... We as Humans should and DO care.
We are not Nature, and thus these existential defining issues should at least give us some pause to debate and evaluate the moral quandaries and responsibilities that this level of engineering power wields.
Re: Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution
#139What the hell?!? There is no pro-choice argument for killing the fetus here - the mother monkey is not sapient and was not consulted as to whether she wished to carry the potentially sapient baby to term or not. This is straight up feticide.
+1 to "There is no pro-choice argument for killing the fetus here"
There is no pro-choice analogy to make here.
As for the rest of your comment about feticide... I think there is room for discussion here.
Re: Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution
#140Is there a better source? I'd like to know what gene they added and if there is any reason to believe that could have been an evolutionary step. Gene's dont appear whole out of nowhere. Was it an extra copy of an existing gene? A mutation and duplication? Some weird replication error?
I'm also curious about all the related morphological changes that must go along with increased brain size, such as different proportions of the skull and face and wider hips on females to accommodate birth. It seems unlikely one gene can modulate all of those, let alone yield the social structures required for increased rearing time.
Developmental biology has a whole lot of plasticity and works primarily by self-organization of cell populations. It’s not a computer program where you have to allocate memory for skulls, eyes, ears and more — it’s actually more like a population of organisms that align themselves towards specific goals (“hey team, we need a hand — now time for fingers! You guys in the middle, die off!”)
You can think of a gene for i.e. brain size just being an instruction that’s “you can press harder on the other populations to maximize your growth” and the other populations are likely to accommodate the stress during development, and change size and shape accordingly.
There are of course harmful mutations that are unable to be compensated for and lead to failure to thrive, but when you see a successful morphological mutation it’s because the systems are very adept at integrating new stimulus during growth.
(Similarly, social structures are emergent properties as well.)