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Lets also consider how much more money and brainpower would be redirected to the development of significantly more advanced technologies if experimentation on a

Lets also consider how much more money and brainpower would be redirected to the development of significantly more advanced technologies if experimentation on animals was to be even partially banned. Things like more advanced simulations, tissue/organ engineering and better non-invasive testing of humans. "Necessity is the mother of invention" and currently animal testing is often the "easy" and "obvious" way to do something.

ezconnect 5y ago
How would you prove the simulation and organ engineering works? Test it on humans?
- metta2uall 5y ago
  You could go a long way with the standard scientific method - make predictions, do measurements, compare.
  - ezconnect 5y ago
    Compare it to what? Compare it to assumptions? How do you test it? How would you know it's correct?
refurb 5y ago
Imagine how quickly we come up with more efficient ways to get to the moon if we just banned all current rocket technology! (Thats silly. We’d just stop going to the moon for a few decades to centuries).
mattkrause 5y ago
Nobody really LIKES doing experiments. Even in vitro work is slow, tedious, and expensive. Anything involving living organisms is orders of magnitude more aggrevating. If we could simulate things instead, we absolutely would: cheaper, faster, less suffering, etc. But we can't. The canonical example is a nematode called C. elegans. It's small: 959 cells, 302 of which are neurons. It has been studied thoroughly. We have a complete "wiring diagram" of its entire nervous system, we know the origin and fate of every single cell, it has been sequenced and probed and imaged with every technology under the sun. If there is an organism we should be able to simulate, C. elegans is it. But there aren't any good models of it, in the sense that you start a simulation and it behaves like a "real" worm. There are a lot of factors that we know we don't understand/can't model well: the passive diffusion of neuromodulators is probably important but is a nightmare to simulate. There are undoubtedly other factors we don't even know matter yet too. The worm is, of course, really simple. A human brain has about 300M times more neurons (and combinatorially-many more connections between them).
- metta2uall 5y ago
  Yes, I know we can't simulate a worm and that it's really hard - that's the point - much more brainpower and resources are required to make progress on the simulation front, but resources are finite and many of them are currently being spent on animal experiments - many of which are arguably not delivering value.

ezconnect 5y ago

How would you prove the simulation and organ engineering works? Test it on humans?

metta2uall 5y ago
You could go a long way with the standard scientific method - make predictions, do measurements, compare.
- ezconnect 5y ago
  Compare it to what? Compare it to assumptions? How do you test it? How would you know it's correct?

refurb 5y ago

Imagine how quickly we come up with more efficient ways to get to the moon if we just banned all current rocket technology! (Thats silly. We’d just stop going to the moon for a few decades to centuries).

mattkrause 5y ago

Nobody really LIKES doing experiments. Even in vitro work is slow, tedious, and expensive. Anything involving living organisms is orders of magnitude more aggrevating. If we could simulate things instead, we absolutely would: cheaper, faster, less suffering, etc. But we can't. The canonical example is a nematode called C. elegans. It's small: 959 cells, 302 of which are neurons. It has been studied thoroughly. We have a complete "wiring diagram" of its entire nervous system, we know the origin and fate of every single cell, it has been sequenced and probed and imaged with every technology under the sun. If there is an organism we should be able to simulate, C. elegans is it. But there aren't any good models of it, in the sense that you start a simulation and it behaves like a "real" worm. There are a lot of factors that we know we don't understand/can't model well: the passive diffusion of neuromodulators is probably important but is a nightmare to simulate. There are undoubtedly other factors we don't even know matter yet too. The worm is, of course, really simple. A human brain has about 300M times more neurons (and combinatorially-many more connections between them).

metta2uall 5y ago
Yes, I know we can't simulate a worm and that it's really hard - that's the point - much more brainpower and resources are required to make progress on the simulation front, but resources are finite and many of them are currently being spent on animal experiments - many of which are arguably not delivering value.