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I 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 se

• konart 6y ago
  >shouldn't we take responsibility for the results of our creation? "I gave you life, I will take it" - Taras Bulba.
  • grawprog 6y ago
    https://youtu.be/BpaRouocBes https://youtu.be/BpaRouocBes >You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks—in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. Mark Twain
  • nshm 6y ago
    Other piece of Russian literature is also relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_of_a_Dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_of_a_Dog The story of turning dog into a man by transferring a part of the human brain
  • D_Alex 6y ago
    Um... Taras Bulba really should not be quoted in support of "responsibility"...
    • konart 6y ago
      Responsibility can take different forms. That's my point.
• renewiltord 6y ago
  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 fallacy pervades all. 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. Keine Wahl ist auch eine Wahl. We are gods over the Earth. We have dominion over it and the creatures that inhabit it. And godhood carries responsibility more than it carries power. We owe the monkeys their sapience.
  • grawprog 6y ago
    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 over it and the creatures that inhabit it No we're not. We're barely able to hold it together. The Earth is a giant living system we're slowly killing and replacing with human technology. It's not a naturalistic fantasy, it's the reality of the planet you live on. To think we dominate this world is laughable. 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? Humans have such a limited understanding of the very things that make life possible. We're not gods, we're children who wandered into gods workshop and started playing with all the shiny toys. Just because we know how to play with toys doesn't make us gods or the dominators of the Earth or life itself. That's the kind of arrogance I speak of that's going to blow up in our faces.
    • renewiltord 6y ago
      No, no, not humans. The we that have dominion are certain genes, for which the humans are mere vehicles. These genes are just as old as the mushroom genes. And this gene cluster is aiming to master the rock that is the Earth through modifying other gene clusters. And you can't stop it. Because through modification it grows stronger and more able. And it has rallied the memome and the hologenome to its cause. This cause requires no convincing because only winners get to play the next round. Change is inevitable. Understanding is overrated. Control does not require it. Transformation Theology has subsumed this world. You live in an ether floating in it. You cannot choose the path of no change. No such path exists.
• vikramkr 6y ago
  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 scientists do not assume they can blindly mess around. There was a whole section of this article related to ethics, they didn't let the fetus be born (which would definitely have been messing around). They're not trying to "do better" or control nature - they're just trying to understand what makes us tick. This is a mutation that already exists in humans. It might make us human. If anything, that makes nature the one that was blindly messing around.
  • grawprog 6y ago
    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 see some good examples of this, check out some terrarium channels on youtube, there's some really cool, perfectly balanced ones people have had going for years. The reason why we have so many ecological problems around the world is that humans have been constantly disrupting this. We introduce invasive species that dominate the landscape, cause extinctions and extirpations of native species and change the fundamental balance of the ecosystem. You're right, life does push through, but personally, I prefer the native songbirds and shrubs that are local to my area than a landscape full of Japanese knotweed and starlings. And so do most things, that first example likely has at least a dozen species of songbirds, a bunch of shrubs and herbacious plants. That second example has two species, maybe some rats or crows if your lucky. The thing is, ecosystems don't stand alone, they're all connected and the collapse of one leads to the collapse of the neighbouring ones and so forth. If you actually look through the published literature.on various ecosystems around the world, we have a very shallow level of knowledge. We don't understand fully the complex connections between everything and the research that does keep coming out keeps showing how much we've vastly underestimated how much our actions have impacted things. Even things like the ecosystems in our own body's. The microscopic organisms that have been found to even play a part in things such as our decision making and moods. The human body itself functions as an ecosystem, all our body systems, our cells, our organs, all function independently and cohesively to make everything that is you. The earth itself functions the same way. The ecosystems, and all life, including humans, are the cells and organs that make up all life on Earth. Altering life at a fundamental genetic level goes even further than how we alter ecosystems. Humans really don't understand the potential consequences to changes we make to the genetic code. We have a vague idea, but we really are.delving mostly blind into this. 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?
• golemotron 6y ago
  It would be good to use science fiction to explore some of these ideas before we do them.
• cscurmudgeon 6y ago
  The answer is simple: We massively fucked up chemistry in the last 100 years. How do we get the confidence to know we can't fuck up biology (much much much much more complex)?
  • neolog 6y ago
    > We massively fucked up chemistry ?
    • selimthegrim 6y ago
      Greenhouse effect
    • NegativeLatency 6y ago
      I’d guess talking about advances in physical chemistry and the ability to more closely model and understand how atoms interact?
    • DoingIsLearning 6y ago
      - Thalidomide - Leaded fuel, the highest ever source of lead exposure and poisoning for Humans. - Asbestos still present in 60' to 80's construction - Refrigerants with Ozone destroying CFCs - 1800's arsenic pesticides still contaminate today's rice fields and most of the world's rice crops. - DDT - Plastics are currently leaching estrogenic-mimicking endocrine disruptors and contaminating water supplies, wildlife and Humans. That's just a few from memory, I am sure there are more. Edit: yes as someone else commented our grenhouse gas emissions are probably the biggest elephant in the room
      • danieltillett 6y ago
        Thalidomide wasn’t a failure of chemistry, but of medicine. CFCs were an amazing breakthrough as they stopped people getting gassed by their refrigerator and killed (ammonia was used before). Once a problem was identified then changes were made. Similar with asbestos (not actually chemistry), leaded fuel and DDT. As for the others you have concentrated on the tiny percentage of bad outcomes rather then the millions of positive. Chemistry has been such an overwhelming good over the last 200 years that it takes a very special mind to see it in such a negative light.
• FPGAhacker 6y ago
  I’m curious if you feel this way about human abortion?
  • grawprog 6y ago
    No, that's why I find it hard to describe how I feel. I'm pro choice. It's not my place to tell someone what to do with their bodies or the fetuses they're carrying(please don't get into an abortion debate because of this, i'm not going to answer any comments going on about that to avoid things getting out of control), but this still makes me feel uncomfortable. This is something different, this is the first time this has been done, there was signs that their brains were going to be similar to ours, meaning possibly self aware and intelligent, I dunno, like i say, i'm not even sure which I feel like is the ethical choice... Like I say, I find it hard to describe how I feel about it all.
    • FPGAhacker 6y ago
      Thanks for replying on a sensitive topic.
    • read_if_gay_ 6y ago
      > No, that's why I find it hard to describe how I feel. Cognitive dissonance? Sorry to be snarky.
      • grawprog 6y ago
        Yup, I thought I made that clear in my op honestly....
        • read_if_gay_ 6y ago
          You didn’t put a name on it, so it wasn’t clear to me at least.
    • rootusrootus 6y ago
      > Like I say, I find it hard to describe how I feel about it all. This is good, I like people that can recognize this. Cognitive dissonance should hurt. It's the people who can't feel it that I worry about being around...
• patcon 6y ago
  Honestly, though the ethics are certainly dicey, I do wonder whether recreating a bridge intelligence between man and animal would raise appropriate societal questions that we've chosen not the think about all of modern history (lacking any sort of Neanderthal cohabitant). It might help us all be in more relation with the world. Our lack of relation feels to me to be part of what's driving us into this extinction event. A "monstrosity" that convinces us to rethink the moral rights of other living creatures would perhaps be welcome...? Maybe it ends up being the unasked-for bastard creature that saves all the others (incl us) from us, just by making us slow down and go "hold on hold on hold on. what THE FUCK?"
  • plutonorm 6y ago
    Neanderthals had larger brains in proportion to their body mass than we do. They were possibly smarter than we were.
    • ben_w 6y ago
      We don’t know enough to know if that’s a good measure; if it is, ants would be at the top of the list for all animals, and treeshrews for mammals: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain-to-body_mass_ratio https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain-to-body_mass_ratio
      • salty_biscuits 6y ago
        The scaling power coefficient matters, they are so far off our mass that the coefficient might just be wrong. Neanderthals are about the same size so an error in the coefficient won't matter so much.
    • edgyquant 6y ago
      That is widely attributed to them having a much greater sense of smell than us. They are thought to be equally as intelligent if not less so.
  • bredren 6y ago
    I would guess such information would be preferred by many to remain unillustrated. I suspect we have more to answer for in the scale of animal suffering than we could possibly imagine. An awakening to the truth of how cruelly indifferent we are to animals would threaten power structures at a magnitude that makes #metoo look small.
• mooreds 6y ago
  Feels like the beginning of the Uplift Saga. Spooky times.
• pishpash 6y ago
  It would have probably died due to the skull not fitting the larger brain.
• wombatmobile 6y ago
  > The cat's out of the bag with this research so to speak now. Someone's bound to do this again If they do it again and again and again, the progress will be substantial, and society stands to benefit enormously. With exponential increases in the parts of the brain responsible for intelligence, morality and justice, imagine a future president of the United States elected from this cohort.
• Vinnl 6y ago
  I understand the sentiment, but given our track record of being OK with causing the suffering of billions of creatures capable of suffering - and in fact even being the reason those creators were born in the first place - I wouldn't be surprised if we brushed it aside relatively easily after the first few.
• ChuckMcM 6y ago
  I feel pretty simply, I feel a sense of sadness at the kinds of 21st century problems my kids and their kids are going to have to deal with. At some point in the next 25 years I expect there to be a 'procedure' available, which consists of cultivating a persons stem cells from their bone marrow, using a genetic editing technique to add and/or delete and/or "correct" certain genetic sequences, and then to have a "bone marrow transplant" which is simply killing off your existing bone marrow stem cells and replacing them with the edited ones. It will be touted as a durable cure for genetic disease and marketed underground to people of means who are looking for an edge in their chosen profession. There will be lawsuits over people who have their their genetic sequences "appropriated" by a third party to re-sell as a product, and patent litigation on gene sequences that makes much of today's trolls seem quaint in comparison. I expect to see dog shows and horse races ban "genetically modified" contestants. I expect to see lawsuits around the labeling of beef and chicken about being genetically modified (yes some of this is already happening). The world will be profoundly different on the far side of generalized understanding of genetics and the means to manipulate them. At least as different as it has become pre-internet+computer to post internet+computer.
  • lopmotr 6y ago
    How is that something to be sad about? In case your kids miss out and feel jealous? Surely if yours kids have only an average intelligence, you'll still be happy for them despite the fact that they probably can't achieve as much success as their most successful peers in any intellectual field. Your attitude sounds like my Dad's attitude of being sad that my generation doesn't believe in God anymore or his own Dad's unhappiness at him for not being a proper loyal soldier in the Navy. It's tempting to believe that our own generation has the ultimate peak of right behavior and any change is for the worse, but it's also arrogant and repeatedly proven to be wrong.
    • ChuckMcM 6y ago
      This comment recalled for me the Bill Cosby joke which goes, "When I was a teen, I couldn't believe how stupid my Dad was. When my kids were teens I couldn't believe how much my Dad had learned between then and now." :-) I didn't appreciate the wisdom in that joke until my kids were teens. The sadness comes from the expectation of the painful times between the onset of the technology and the eventual successful integration of that technology into our lives. For me, I live in Silicon Valley which has more superfund cleanup sites than pretty much anywhere because the chip companies dumped a lot of toxic chemicals that later turned out to be carcinogens into the ground. People I know, some well, some only by association, were harmed by that. It was part of the "learning curve" of developing semiconductors which have so changed everyone's lives. That the chips are a net good is, in my opinion, pretty clear. However, the "learning" of the superfund cleanup was painful. Bespoke genetic manipulation will have similar "growing pains" and those pains will kill people, cause generalized harm, and likely a catastrophe or two. And once we've gone through that and understand the risks and challenges in a more fundamental way, then people will be enjoying the benefits and the risks will be contained by legislation or some other oversight.
• klunger 6y ago
  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 research to create a race of "sub-human" slaves that think and feel as acutely as we do. Pick your genetic engineering dystopia for where this is leading us- Brave New World, Planet of the Apes, Gattaca, even the Uplift series. It never should have gotten approved by an ethics review board. The 100 days termination was just so they could claim to have considered ethics. If they actually seriously had done so, this project would have never left the drawing board. Finally: I wish people would stop staying the genie is out of the bottle. The genie is whatever we humans decide to do. You can't just assume that because something is possible that it will be done. We can have moral boundaries as a society. We can say "this is a bridge too far and no one should cross it". And anyone who does will be excommunicated from the scientific world. There is nothing inevitable about this dark path. Saying that it is inevitable just removes responsibility from whoever does it, which is just BS. . edit: grammar, clarity
  • belval 6y ago
    Have you ever stopped and thought about why you feel in such way towards these experiments? Why do you see sentience as the line not to cross and even go as far as to call it a "dark path"? You use a lot of wording that are very religious sounding such as "soul", "excommunicated", "dark path", but have you considered that you cannot really excommunicate a scientist, that the mere concept of a soul might be wrong? To be clear it makes me feel weird too, but we have to be able to discuss this instead of using inefficient red tape.
    • whytaka 6y ago
      If there's any science of morality to be done, the most basic quantum of moral value is suffering. Sentient creatures have greater capacity for suffering, being aware of their pain and the injustice of their existence. If we are to bring it into existence, we are responsible for its suffering.
• downrightmike 6y ago
  Heinlein's Starship Troopers novel touched on this. Neo Dogs are a novelty in society, a sideshow to the general public, but they have the Intelligence similar to a human moron, but is a Mozart for their species. And they use them in war, which is their main use. The recruiter that works with the protagonist, was a bonded partner. They bond deeply to their Neo Dog and if the Neo Dog dies, it is more humane to kill the handler immediately, or put them in a drug induced coma for a couple months and then rehabbing them. The recruiter was put into a coma, but is still dealing with the loss of his Neo Dog, and agrees that killing the handler asap is kinder than having to go through the rehab.
  • PeterisP 6y ago
    It's interesting that the novel assumes that the bonding is likely to be stronger than almost all other bonds humans form - for example, we grieve when our spouse, best friend or child dies, but we don't usually presume that euthanizing the grievers asap would be kinder than having them to go through grief and rehab. It would seem plausible for some of the individual bonds to be like that, but notas a general rule.
    • downrightmike 6y ago
      Yeah, the bonding process seems like immersion when learning a language, I figure that the handler's lost all connection to that unique world they were immersed in and couldn't cope. Kind of like losing your self identification when people rely on their jobs to give them an identity. Who are the handlers without the Neo Dogs?
• ineedasername 6y ago
  If it makes you feel any better, a brain that young, even if identical to that of a baby, is probably not sentient. AFAIK, current research pegs the early development of sentience around 150 days. Despite that, I'm a bit unsettled by this too. I think we should understand the mind a bit more before we go down the path of creating one.
• 1234fdsazxcv 6y ago
  Can we please use paragraphs to create a coherent thought/point rather than a series of one-liners? Perhaps spend a little more time to think through/build out your thoughts. It is more interesting for your reader and (I think) promotes more nuanced conversation if we all spend more time thinking about our ideas before we rush to post. Note, this is not specific to the parent post but just a general comment made with the hope of raising the level of conversation beyond twitter.
• kungito 6y ago
  "Is it right to create something that may be similar to us and then not even give it a chance to live?" If trying to be "good" doesn't this thought come off as really selfish? Just because something is more similar to us it should have more right to live? These thoughts are just basic survivalist instincts wrapped in nice 21st century "morals". We will do whatever the hell we want in the end and maybe we eradicate ourselves in the end before something else does
• Der_Einzige 6y ago
  "Is it right to create something that may be similar to us and then not even give it a chance to live?" The only difference between this and abortion is that the species is somehow "novel". You should resolve the ethical issues with genetic engineering research in a similar way to however you resolve the ethical issues related to abortion.
• vmception 6y ago
  I would like to see it be born. I want to know where this goes. What other genes it needs to become superior, or what genes we can tweak to optimize some things further. Humans are have tons of issues including cellular and cognitive deficiencies. This is a way to learn more about that and fix it. Sure, someone will make the new slave labor force, let's cross that bridge when we get there.
• 77pt77 6y ago
  > Nature took a long long time to get to this point where life has come to a sort of balance There is no balance. It's an illusion of selection bias and inability to consider time-scales not at the human scale.
• intricatedetail 6y ago
  And yet you used the word "terminated". That poor thing was murdered. If we didn't have such technology, those scientists would feel at home in Nazi labs.
• partyboat1586 6y ago
  Pretty sure if we engineer smart monkeys they will quickly be bred for use as slaves.
  • musicale 6y ago
    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.)
• nkrisc 6y ago
  > Nature took a long long time to get to this point where life has come to a sort of balance. Assuming we can go in and just start blindly messing around and do better seems like an extreme level of arrogance that's going to end up blowing up in our faces. Balance is something humans project on the world. There is no balance, there is only the status quo that can change in an instant. Nature only seems balanced because we can only view a tiny slice of time. Extinction events in the geological record show us there is no balance and 90% of life can easily be obliterated.
• grimgrin 6y ago
  > This is crucial in order to maintain ethical boundaries. After about 100 days after the fetus had been growing, the international team unanimously agreed to remove the fetus through a C-section. Bringing a "new human-gene-influenced monkey into this world would step over the ethical line," said Huttner. > "To let them come to be born, in my opinion, would have been irresponsible as a first step," Huttner mentioned, "because you don't know what kind of behavioral change you'll get." 1) they thought about it 2) if you are ok with abortions, 14 weeks is isn't alarming territory
  • alisonkisk 6y ago
    Excuse me, but "pro-choice" doesn't mean you get to choose whether to abort someone else's fetus.
    • anchpop 6y ago
      It was a monkey's fetus (I think saying "someone" implies a person rather than a monkey in this context, but sorry if I misinterpreted you). Arguably you shouldn't abort monkey's fetuses but you probably shouldn't genetically modify their embryos then forcibly implant them either. Or eat any kind of meat
    • deleted 6y ago
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• ma2rten 6y ago
  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.
  • pm90 6y ago
    Well, we do need to classify sentience... it’s not a Boolean yes or no. I agree with you that modern factory farming is disgustingly inhumane. But creating and slaughtering a species that can learn at the same rate as humans is uncomfortably close to slaughtering human babies, which is a line that perhaps all of society can agree cannot be crossed.
    • XorNot 6y ago
      Terminating a pregnancy at 100 days is nowhere near "slaughtering babies". If there's a moral issue here, it's about the experience we put the monkey mothers through to conduct this experiment since they cannot reasonably give consent for it and are at a sentience level where this is a reasonable concern. From reading the article, given the value of this research, I think the concerns were adequately addressed - namely, the fetus was not brought to term, it was removed via C-section, the monkeys seem to have been adequately cared for emotionally, and it's a reasonable statement that simian miscarriage is a concept they would understand to some degree and thus not be overly distressed by the process. These were marmosets, not chimps so this is a reasonable level of precaution due their sapience level.
• ROARosen 6y ago
  I honestly don't understand their ethical boundaries. What makes it more unethical to let it live (at least in captivity) and then kill it off at some point, than removing it in fetus form? You might argue, that keeping a being in captivity is unethical. Well, so is genetically experimenting with and then killing off a fetus. The only reason they feel it's ethical in the first place is obviously some sort of "the good that will come to the world from this knowledge is much more than the damage done to this fetus". But that same rationale an be said of letting it be born? One might argue that if they would let it live to a certain point would at least give us some real-world knowledge of the ramifications of genetic editing.
• awkim 6y ago
  This is the precursor to a dystopian ape lead future. "YOU MANIACS. YOU BLEW IT UP. DAMN YOU! GOD DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!" -Some astronaut in the future
• zanethomas 6y ago
  You assume the Chinese have not already done something like this. The CCP would like nothing more than a population of semi-intelligent monkeys.
• geuis 6y ago
  > We're playing with things we barely understand that could have consequences we can't even imagine. The only way people ever understand anything is by play and experimentation. You didn’t spend 5 years thinking about how to ride a bike before getting on. You scraped your knees and kept trying till you learned. I’d like to see your list of “pretty terrifying things”. If our remote ancestors had that kind of approach to life, they would have stoned to death every member of their tribes that successfully learned how to start a fire. Wouldn’t exactly have ended well for us.
• deleted 6y ago
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• remote_phone 6y ago
  How is this any different from the abortion debate? As long as it’s not sentient does it matter? There are far bigger ethical considerations than just this feud. Presumably the monkey pregnant with this fetus wasn’t naturally impregnated, and you didn’t want the monkey to accidentally damage the fetus, so was the monkey caged it even conscious during the gestation period? Lots of horrifying things to consider if you go down there rabbit hole.
• est31 6y ago
  I think it's eventually inevitable for non-human intelligent life to emerge. We were the first species. We think we are kings of the world. But we won't be in perpetuity. This can happen through multiple ways. The first way is through simple genetic drift. Think of humans colonizing the galaxy and living in isolated populations for millions of years. Eventually we turn into different species. So maybe there is one hominid species right now, but in 1 million years it will look way different. Another way is through a human deliberately creating nonhuman intelligent, but still biological life. Think of people wanting their pets to be smarter, furries wanting to turn into half animals, or just experimentation for science like in this instance. Maybe 99% of society is repelled by this, but if you give the 1% which desires this enough time, they'll find an opportunity to bring such life into existence. However great the taboo, eventually someone will break it. And once there is nonhuman intelligent life, there will be people who want to protect it. A third way is through humans creating silicon based life, e.g. to upload rich people to the cloud, letting them live there like gods. Maybe if you initially build such a system, you make the experience as similar to human experience as you can, with all the unpleasant parts of it removed, but the people it simulates may eventually grow tired of interacting with the fleshy human society that they form the elite of and instead focus on interacting with each other instead. Maybe they'll then accept changes in programming, allowing human brains to be merged, duplicated, for short times, or through random mixing, etc. I think computers allow a great deal of things and likely we'll try them out sooner or later. To summarize, I think we are at the start of a cambrian explosion like event. Think what happens if you are the first plant that can grow on land. You'll quickly fill all the lands and your numbers will have no limit. But by the time you have done that, you are a collection of different species instead of just one because your siblings had to adapt to the different environments, and the species themselves are competing with each other. Regarding aliens, I doubt we are alone in the galaxy. I'm sure there is independently developed, intelligent, life somewhere. But likely by the time we encounter them, we'll maybe already be a cluster of multiple intelligent species. Or idk, maybe not. Maybe there is only one hominid species because we are so utterly racist and have eliminated anything that was even a little bit different from us :).
• User23 6y ago
  > 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. 6 million human fetuses already get destroyed every year in the USA alone. If we're ok with that why would a handful of monkeys matter?
• mrmario27 6y ago
  Bit of a catch 22. We can’t understand it if we arent allowed to play with it but we can’t play with it without understanding it? The potential good that can come out of this drastically out weighs the bad. Unless you’re a pacifist vegan, I find such thinking deeply hypocritical.
• tikwidd 6y ago
  The article talks about the gene increasing the neocortex, folding of the brain, more neurons and so forth. There is no evidence that doing these things to a monkey brain will imbue it with (human) intelligence. For all we know it could have just made this monkey a better forager, or improved its natural problem solving instincts. Better brain != human.
• antonzabirko 6y ago
  Nothing wrong with this, plus its good for future research.
• deleted 6y ago
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• nathias 6y ago
  We have an ethical duty to seed life and uplift all species across the universe.
• imtringued 6y ago
  >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. If that is true then these scientists made the right judgment and they should stop with these types of experiments. What are you going to do with these intelligent but still less than human animals? Let them integrate into society and become a source of conflict? We already have enough conflict between humans over trivial matters as it is. If you add an explicit difference between two parties like a different species then conflicts will continue forever until one side is extinct. If this research succeeds there will be two potential scenarios: Easily controlled monkey slaves doing manual labor or alternatively those monkeys receive extensive genetic engineering because of lack of ethics to outperform us and therefore replace us. I don't want either.
• burtonator 6y ago
  > The part about whether they should have been born or not, which was the ethical thing is what tears at me. I gotta say... for me, this is close to murder. I realize these things are complicated but if it was a hybrid species, we might not know how close it was to us. It may have been close and it would absolutely be murder to kill a 100 day old child. I think if it could potentially be murder you should just error on the side of caution.
• Thorentis 6y ago
  They were too concerned with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.
• tylerjwilk00 6y ago
  Replace "new species" with "human fetus" and it's basically the same argument that surrounds abortion. I am not saying one side or the other is correct, I honestly don't hold a strong opinion on this issue. Just that we can imagine a certain hypocrisy in a society that is against creating/terminating one life prematurely (smart monkeys)... but yet withholds the same rule against it's own species offspring (humans).
• datavirtue 6y ago
  Hyperspeed evolution does not sound like a good idea. Speaking as someone who is alive now. In the grand scheme of things it doesn't much matter but I would rather not suffer a genetic pandemic or takeover by genius rabid monkeys.