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Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution
221–230 of 384 posts
Re: Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution
#222I 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…
Pretty sure if we engineer smart monkeys they will quickly be bred for use as slaves.
What could possibly go wrong?
(Besides the obvious cruelty and injustice as well as the extreme likelihood of rebellion and creation of a world government of evil monkey overlords, which might not necessarily be worse than what we currently have.)
Re: Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution
#223Can 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?
Surely, but at what cost? Exploratory human experimentation... maybe you're testing and aborting half developed humans which already many people would have significant problems, but eventually you're going to have to produce adults and not every experiment is going to be a success. It's hard to think of a future of our species where self-modification is not part of our evolution, but it is a very powerful tool and li…
China is probably working on it.
Re: Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution
#224[off topic] I hate the mobile web! This site is another example of how I hate it. An ad wall that required me to scroll before I could accept and then after a few seconds a pop up to sign up for a newsletter. It’s awful...
Re: Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution
#225I 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…
I don't. It makes me sick to my stomach. I am speaking as someone who is pro-choice, pro-GMO's and pro-stem cell research, etc. This research has crossed a line that none of the above do. It is creating a new kind of sentience, a new kind of soul. And, what's the point? To confirm a theory about a gene? So fricking what. That really doesn't matter, not in relation to the possible consequences: someone taking this res…
Maybe what we really need first is a new religion and ethics, one that would eliminate the "playing god" dilemma and enable faster progress in the right direction. It could picture us animals as insignificant and not worthy the attention of the creator of the universe unless we reach ourselves a certain level of intelligence, consciousness and empathy.
Re: Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I don't give it credit, like it's trying to gain balance, but functioning ecosystems do maintain a balance. Most of our climate problems have come from humans disrupting this. If you take any functioning healthy ecosystem on earth, one generally less tampered with by humans, you'll find from a microscopic, right up to a macroscopic level, the life in those ecosystems have adapted to function together. If you want to…
> If you take any functioning healthy ecosystem on earth, one generally less tampered with by humans, you'll find from a microscopic, right up to a macroscopic level, the life in those ecosystems have adapted to function together.
You're still taking essentially a static view of a dynamic system, because you're looking at too small a timescales. What we see as "natural balance" is essentially a freeze-frame of nature. The equilibria we see aren't stable - they're just very slow to changing. Everything is evolving and in a constant war with each other at every level - from microscopic to macroscopic. Nature itself doesn't care about the environment as we see it today[0].
The problem with humans boils down to what makes us truly special: intelligence and socializing enabled us to evolve a meta-organism of society at rates many orders of magnitude faster than biological evolution. Language and writing lets us propagate knowledge and technologies between generations, and intelligence lets us problem-solve and simulate in mind space - pruning the solution space quickly and in an efficient way, over evolution's directed RNG.
Point being, no other organism can respond with the speed at which we evolve our societies and technologies. That's why we disrupt the ecosystems and the climate. We're too fast for nature.
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[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event is a good example. An evolutionary leap, leading to most life dying off, only for new and more complex forms to eventually take its place. But as it is with life, whatever comes after a mass die-off isn't the same thing that was there before.
Re: Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution
#227I 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…
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.
I don't think that there is any evidence that other animals don't already have the same sentience as humans do.
I agree that this is unethical, but other forms of using lab animals or factory farming in my opinion are equally unethical in my opinion.
Re: Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution
#228Gorilla Grod approves.
(disclaimer: Grod is actually an ape not a monkey.)
Re: Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution
#229Are they going to call him Caesar?
If only it was born out.
Re: Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution
#230So "Planet of the Apes" was not so far fetched after all. Now somewhere someone will think ... hmmm why can't we replace all our complaining factory workers and their wages/healthcare/retirement plans with these "creatures" and only pay them peanuts and banana's.
> Now somewhere someone will think ... hmmm why can't we replace all our complaining factory workers and their wages/healthcare/retirement plans with these "creatures" and only pay them peanuts and bananas.
Pretty sure Amazon and Uber are already on it.