It depends on who considers what better. Nature gave us the free will and intelligence comprehend scientific advancements, just like it gave a lion speed and large teeth to bring down pray. If you believe technology isn't better then why did you come on the Internet to this messageboard? Wouldn't the Internet be the ultimate waste of time?
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Scientists plan interspecies cloning
- Thread starter Violator79
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It depends on who considers what better. Nature gave us the free will and intelligence comprehend scientific advancements, just like it gave a lion speed and large teeth to bring down pray. If you believe technology isn't better then why did you come on the Internet to this messageboard? Wouldn't the Internet be the ultimate waste of time?
well, that it does, doesn't it? if you're one of the people that considers it better, then you usually don't seem to care about the people that think it's a bad idea, and judging from the responses many a people do, but they are called foolish and that they "just don't understand".
that's really my problem with science and technology, it can be a uselful tool to help people's lives, but people take it to far. you can say that you don't belive in god, but if you say that you don't beleive in science, which is really even less tangable because at least there's a possibilty that God isn't entirely a figment of the imagination of his creators- and people will think you are insane.
someone mentioned Nuclear bombs before... the invention of a device that can destroy all life on this planet for precisely that reason, sounds pretty much like the opposite of intelligence to me.
Science is a "figment of the imagination". But it has undeniably produced results and improved our lives, something that we can only speculate that religion has. The key difference is that belief is subjective, science is objective. Another key difference is that while God stands and falls on his supposed existance, science is useful whether a theory is correct or not, as long as it's close enough. God relies on blind faith, science, if anything, encourages disbelief. That is not to say that philosophical aspects of religion is not good for anything, but in order to claim an absolute truth, God (an infallible God at that) still needs to exist.
Basing your system of ethics on God has two distinct problems; 1) you can't prove that your system inherently holds any water without proving the existance of God (good luck with that), and 2) anyone with an opposing view can essentially void your argument by claiming that God wants the opposite of what you want. Both arguments are equally valid, or invalid, without resorting to some sort of fallacy (which does nothing except making some people think your argument is more relevant while it is not). It's subjective. Science is not, therefore, arguing within its framework is far easier (if only because it's actually possible).
So you'll have to forgive me if I prefer objective facts over subjective opinions. Genetics is perhaps one of the most promising fields of science today and can solve an enormous amount of problems. Yes, it can be abused, but by that logic, we'd still be living in caves without fire (lots of people die because of fire) or opposable thumbs (practically any tool can be used as a weapon. A corkscrew can leave a pretty nasty wound I bet). I, for one, am not going to stop what could be the most important discoveries in modern times, help billions of people, because of what some supposed god supposedly wants. If he wants us to suffer because he doesn't like us to use the brain he gave us, then quite frankly, screw him.
Violator79
Take a Hit, Spunker!
LOL!!! Now I have to ask this in a joking manner so don't take offense, but, if you did clone yourself, would you go and fuck yourself also?
everything is subjective. I understand your position, I really do. I'm not arguing for religious views, I'm just arguing against a viewpoint that is not situational and flexable to the idea that it might not be the absolute truth. It's really just a matter of what you consider to be a problem and what you consider to be a solution. In my humble opinion, I think the two are inverted in this case.:2 cents:
This is a really dumb post
- people take science and technology too far do they ? What a lot of shit, would you like to give some examples ?
Perhaps cars (after all horses were ok), if not then planes (we already had cars and trains), why invent the e-mail & the internet (we already had the telegraph & phones) or why try modern drugs and chemotherapy (when we had potions and penicillin)
And as for the use of the excuse of "you don't understand" by the scientific community - well, do we understand
- i reckon for about the last 150 years a lot of people have been using technology they don't fully understand
- i couldn't build a tv, cell phone, aeroplane, internal combustion engine etc but i still recoginise their usefulness and they don't "scare" me
does anyone know what a luddite is
you just say that because "you don't understand" how things were before. none of the things that you mentioned solve any problems, except to temporary remedie the one's that they created.
the abilty to travel long distances is probably the biggest bane of humanity. on the most basic level what that means is that people didn't build things 15 miles away from each other if they didn't want to walk that far, or they did if they wanted the privacy. on a level of "thinking outside the box" that means that people lived in a small area and didn't move, which created a tight-knit community where everyone knew each other and had relationships and accountabilty and they had to all get along with each other because they didn't have a choice. Yeah, we really had to get the fuck away from that. It also forced people to have to make use with what they had because they couldn't get anything else so they didn't waste or trash or over-populate. There was no need for cars until the invention of the car when everything shifted over to being geared toward car culture, instead of people culture.
In addition to all that, this wonderful invention is one of the most deadly things ever made, not even counting all the pollution that it spawns. In the 1990's more people were killed in car accidents than in every war the US has fought in put together. Is that really worth it, and for what? It hasn't made anyone's life easier or less complicated.
all the same thing can be said about trains, accept that they have a far more fucked up history. alienation, ecological destruction, industrial accidents galore, and add onto that stolen land, bloody violent conflicts and horrible oppression and exploitation of workers.
Now that everything is industrialized and trillions of tons of poison, chemicals, and radiation are floating around causing all sorts of new diseases and cancer rates to go up and up and up we all scuddle about for new medicines to save us from ourselves. yeah, what a brave new world we've made.
The fact that only a very slim majority of the world's population get's to enjoy these "luxuries" at the expense of all the poor people that have to slave and toil and die for them makes it seems like a pretty sick, fucked up waste to me.
the abilty to travel long distances is probably the biggest bane of humanity. on the most basic level what that means is that people didn't build things 15 miles away from each other if they didn't want to walk that far, or they did if they wanted the privacy. on a level of "thinking outside the box" that means that people lived in a small area and didn't move, which created a tight-knit community where everyone knew each other and had relationships and accountabilty and they had to all get along with each other because they didn't have a choice. Yeah, we really had to get the fuck away from that. It also forced people to have to make use with what they had because they couldn't get anything else so they didn't waste or trash or over-populate. There was no need for cars until the invention of the car when everything shifted over to being geared toward car culture, instead of people culture.
In addition to all that, this wonderful invention is one of the most deadly things ever made, not even counting all the pollution that it spawns. In the 1990's more people were killed in car accidents than in every war the US has fought in put together. Is that really worth it, and for what? It hasn't made anyone's life easier or less complicated.
all the same thing can be said about trains, accept that they have a far more fucked up history. alienation, ecological destruction, industrial accidents galore, and add onto that stolen land, bloody violent conflicts and horrible oppression and exploitation of workers.
Now that everything is industrialized and trillions of tons of poison, chemicals, and radiation are floating around causing all sorts of new diseases and cancer rates to go up and up and up we all scuddle about for new medicines to save us from ourselves. yeah, what a brave new world we've made.
The fact that only a very slim majority of the world's population get's to enjoy these "luxuries" at the expense of all the poor people that have to slave and toil and die for them makes it seems like a pretty sick, fucked up waste to me.
:1orglaugh Another real dumb post - so you are a luddite then
There are still people, albeit very few now, who live in the same kind of communities you describe - eg bushmen in the kalahari & certain tribes in the amazon
to try and portray them as having some idealised existence is bollocks - they have way lower life expectancy, less certainty in food and water supplies and they also have battles & wars just like us "evil, modern people"
Everyone lived like that back in the day - wherever your ancestors are from - but human nature & enviromental factors caused people living in different places to respond to the different challenges differently
It was technology that led to farming, and then to the production of a surplus which allowed people to spend some of their time thinking about improving their lives ( without having to spend every minute being a hunter / gatherer ) - once the genie was out of the bottle who then wouldn't want things that made their life easier :dunno:
whatever. agree to disagree. I think that you rally don't know much about these societies, and like most comparison, are making a knee jerk reaction. you really can't compare bushmen feuding with the ability to drop megaton bombs with laser guided accuracy. that's not the issue anyway. I don't say that they are perfect, shit happens, conflict is unavoidable. that's life- but I maintain that they are better and most of thier members are satisfied and happy with thier way of life which is not something that can be said about indsutrial western civilization. They bushmen don't need shirnks and anti-depressants and cops and jails and drugs and TV to get through their day. and the fact is that americans work more than nearly every country. subsistance farming is not that much work, only an hour or two a day if you want to take it relaxed. It's only the demands of commercial agriculture, laregly forced upon people by outside nations that causes them to have to work so hard.
anyway, this doesn't have anything to do with the topic. I just wanted to say that I think people are pretty irresponsilbe with technology and I've made my point. whether it's to your satisfaction or not, I don't care. If you don't like it ignore me and go play X-box.
anyway, this doesn't have anything to do with the topic. I just wanted to say that I think people are pretty irresponsilbe with technology and I've made my point. whether it's to your satisfaction or not, I don't care. If you don't like it ignore me and go play X-box.
Agreed - will agree to disagree and we're well off topic
but you not given any non-military / weapons based examples of "bad" technology
you may have a point about anxiety, shrinks etc - i guess you could say ignorance ( for the bushmen etc ) is bliss
- they don't know much about the modern world & don't have the connected anxieties
but to say they are Objectively better off, dying younger & hungrier, then i'd prob disagree - trust me, hunter gatherers generally have had to do more than a couple of hours a day work
(think about it, if it was that easy there would have been no reason to develop the easier technology) :wave2:
but you not given any non-military / weapons based examples of "bad" technology
you may have a point about anxiety, shrinks etc - i guess you could say ignorance ( for the bushmen etc ) is bliss
- they don't know much about the modern world & don't have the connected anxieties
but to say they are Objectively better off, dying younger & hungrier, then i'd prob disagree - trust me, hunter gatherers generally have had to do more than a couple of hours a day work
(think about it, if it was that easy there would have been no reason to develop the easier technology) :wave2:
My problem ...
My problem with interspecies cloning has more to do with what bacteria and other by-products will result.
I've long stated that our continued medicinal technology is going to bite us more and more in the end. The more, better medicines we seem to produce, the more resistant bacteria and viruses seem to arise out of them.
Even if we find a way to create the "super human," they will still be subject to more resistant strains -- let alone all of us that are "sub-super" will have died as a result of natural selection.
About my only, odd belief is that we may be able to become resistant to most disease if we inter-racially breed heavily. In fact, I think it's God's big joke, that we men and women haven't inter-racially breeded enough that we have eliminated of the effects of many bacterias and viruses.
So, ironically enough, natural select is best preserved by the basic, natural procreation we've always had. At least that's my, actually very scientific (and hardly moral-based), view.
My problem with interspecies cloning has more to do with what bacteria and other by-products will result.
I've long stated that our continued medicinal technology is going to bite us more and more in the end. The more, better medicines we seem to produce, the more resistant bacteria and viruses seem to arise out of them.
Even if we find a way to create the "super human," they will still be subject to more resistant strains -- let alone all of us that are "sub-super" will have died as a result of natural selection.
About my only, odd belief is that we may be able to become resistant to most disease if we inter-racially breed heavily. In fact, I think it's God's big joke, that we men and women haven't inter-racially breeded enough that we have eliminated of the effects of many bacterias and viruses.
So, ironically enough, natural select is best preserved by the basic, natural procreation we've always had. At least that's my, actually very scientific (and hardly moral-based), view.
Re: My problem ...
I don't know if I would call our procreation natural. We have gone past the point of survival of the fittest. Even from a non-moral view it might be considered harsh. Would that mean we wouldn't allow somebody that was, say blind, to bread or live because in nature they would probably die out before that happened just like most other animals and they would pass on inferior jeans. I do agree with you in some respects. If you look at people's clothing form 150 years ago they look smaller than what people wear today, probably because the people were smaller. Some have suggested that we are gradually getting bigger and stronger because women more often than not will pick a man like that all other things being equal a greater percentage of the time to explain it. So maybe in that respect natural selection is somewhat alive.
Living things have been in an arms race against bacteria and virus probably since the two existed. We adapt then they adapt more. I don't think it's any different than before. In fact a good number of them aren't lethal. It would be counterproductive to them if they killed off the very thing they used to reproduce. Of course with something that mutates so readily there are always incidences where a strain of them will be a lot worse than others, or there will be some here or there that quickly kill. The speed at which viruses can change will probably mean that we will never get ahead of them in a natural non-scientific way.
I don't know if I would call our procreation natural. We have gone past the point of survival of the fittest. Even from a non-moral view it might be considered harsh. Would that mean we wouldn't allow somebody that was, say blind, to bread or live because in nature they would probably die out before that happened just like most other animals and they would pass on inferior jeans. I do agree with you in some respects. If you look at people's clothing form 150 years ago they look smaller than what people wear today, probably because the people were smaller. Some have suggested that we are gradually getting bigger and stronger because women more often than not will pick a man like that all other things being equal a greater percentage of the time to explain it. So maybe in that respect natural selection is somewhat alive.
Living things have been in an arms race against bacteria and virus probably since the two existed. We adapt then they adapt more. I don't think it's any different than before. In fact a good number of them aren't lethal. It would be counterproductive to them if they killed off the very thing they used to reproduce. Of course with something that mutates so readily there are always incidences where a strain of them will be a lot worse than others, or there will be some here or there that quickly kill. The speed at which viruses can change will probably mean that we will never get ahead of them in a natural non-scientific way.
Re: My problem ...
What I said is that we will get the "superhuman" one we have inter-bred so much that we have many of the best aspects and resistances of all our collective, human genes.
Part of our problem, and why genes have repeated, is because we have been marrying intra-race for so long.
Um, you read that completely the wrong way.
What I said is that we will get the "superhuman" one we have inter-bred so much that we have many of the best aspects and resistances of all our collective, human genes.
Part of our problem, and why genes have repeated, is because we have been marrying intra-race for so long.
Haven't they already done that? Tom Cruise has a child with the very human Katie Holmes! :-O
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