U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient

>Evolutionary biology is overused as justification for human behavior.

Let me get one thing straight. I am not justifying anything. My angle is, what's the point? Don't justify anything at all. We're evil for killing, so be it. I am looking at it from a completely dispassionate angle. I do not need to somehow merge and mutate my moral framework to make it work with the existing reality.

>We were not "designed" to eat meat because we were not designed.

Ok we were "designed" by natural selection to eat meat. I am not making a theological argument.

> Chasing an animal down, killing it, and eating it is in my opinion a significantly different activity than subjecting it to thirty likely-invasive procedures over the course of its life and then continuing to perform experiments on its dead body. Not saying it's more or less morally questionable, but significantly different.

In the wild, carnivores devour the flesh of their prey while it is alive and awake. Possibly more significant if not equal in being morally questionable.

>Other animals have also been shown to "befriend"/care for/grieve over animals of different species, so our own capacity to sympathize for animals should be no surprise.

No it is not. But what is surprising is that this empathy is the dominant behavior to our own evolutionary detriment (however mild). Empathy evolved to aid in survival of our genome, but when empathy evolves to the point where we are unable experiment on animals to assist in helping our own species... that is something unnatural.

Weird that these statements are made (and I don't mean by you, it's a trope to make them by people in general in discussions like this, I'm not picking you out) that it somehow justifies, or ameliorates, the awfulness of experimenting then dissecting (as someone said) a helpless intelligent creature.

I think these statements justify animal trials and using it to benefit humans definitely. But it doesn't justify or make better that it's still an awful thing to do to an animal and for the animal I think. It's weird right like where they get the blood of some sort of poor little sea creature that's got a blue copper containing blood it's just awful.

I really think we need to revise and reform a lot of how industry interacts with and especially commoditizes animals. I'm not saying we need to be vegans at all but I think there's so much room for improving how we talk think and act about this stuff. To make I guess what is probably an obvious point but I think the reasonableness of that point is not obvious but I think it can be a reasonable and obvious point without really attacking anybody and that non-threatening nature of that reasonable and obvious point I think is what is important about what I'm saying. It's possible. Less this comment be dismissed as some sort of low effort outrage--my heart's beating 50 beats a minute right now I'm not upset. I just think we can improve things there massively but that doesn't make anybody a monster.

Yep, back in high school we had a few days devoted to dissecting and documenting the anatomy of a fetal pig. It was really surprising how similar they actually were.

I already said this in a different comment, but the difference is that we were not designed while a Swiss army knife was. Design implies intent— it implies that something was developed for a purpose, that it's supposed to be used in a certain way.

Whether or not I use the corkscrew on my Swiss army knife doesn't change the fact that someone built the corkscrew for the purpose of opening corked bottles.

The enzymes/features humans possess that enable us to consume meat were selected for because at some point in the history of our species they enabled our ancestors to survive while others without the related genes did not.

This can change at any point, for any species. If we are no longer in an environment where eating meat confers a significant survival advantage then the fact that we evolved to be able to eat meat has absolutely no bearing on whether or not we should.

Thank you to all the sentient animals who have given their life.