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Blending Mice and Men
An anonymous reader sends in this piece about chimeras - not the ones with a THAC0 of 11, but a more general term meaning any multi-creature hybrid. A comprehensive look at the moral and scientific issues surrounding this area of biotech.
THAC0 was the one where the lower your score was the better is. Counter-intuitive? Armor Class forever! Long live d20!
But can we combine a Commander with a Taco?
The worse cruelty is that no female, mice nor women, would sleep with such a person/thing.
Well, I take that back. If their freekitude makes them rich, then the babes will probably come.
Table-ized A.I.
The latest Chimera's discovered can be found here on worth 1000. Behold what science can do now!
Ok, I don't see how morals come into it. But wtf would you want humans crossed with mice? To make people with rolling shit?
The Farewell Tour II
I'm a very opinionated person. I am very pro-life, believe abortion should be illegal, and frown on stem cell research.
However, this is completley different for me. Who's to say the a mouse with a brain composed of human cells are any more of a human than a normal mouse? No one cares about killing lab rats, not even the PETA people. What's different when human cells are involved?
We kill literally hundreds of thousands of our own cells a day. Yet, we aren't being condemned for it. It's ridiculous to ban research of this sort. The only way I could see this being a bad thing is indeed if it takes place where they somehow become integrated with society.
Mix humans with creatures any day. Just don't the the converse.
Funny, that's exactly what I wanted to do to that book when I had to read it for English class.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
The only way I see blending of mice and men is when our hands are merged with our mice when gaming 24/7 on the hot new RPGs!
_
Free 27" Sony WEGA TV
I wanna horses yanker! Nothing you can buy from spam compares.
Table-ized A.I.
..there is a pervert...or a few. Especially if the freak has a freaky sex organ...or a few. Than, again, how would I know - I'm just a humble slashdotter - nothing freaky except imagination.
The implications of a "humanzee" is enough to keep philosophers and religious thinkers busy for quite a while.
Does a humanzee really have a soul? Should they be granted "human rights"? Can we use them to test drugs or clean out clogged sewer lines? Really quite interesting.
Just another humbling experience for those who think humans are something special apart from the rest of creation.
Suddenly, God rolls a 52 on the wandering monster table, and you are attacked by a mouse with human brain cells!
Wow. A super intelligent mouse. Aren't they afraid that mouse will then get a slow-witted sidekick and try to take over the world?
Aw, I thought this was gonna be an article about us Democrats...
First things first, they need more descriptive names. What's that mouse-like thing in the corner? A chimera. What's that pig in the pen? A chimera. And the sheep?
Pretty soon some arcane naming convention will evolve, and a college-level genetic engineering will be much like organic chemistry with its names oxy-lacto-3-alpha-nano-5-methane.
If we have a few of these mice men around, suddenly some of us geeks are lookin a whole lot better
In my opinion the "we should not do this" argument splits into three branches: it's dehumanizing for humans, we're opening pandora's box, and it's bad for the chimeras.
I'll leave the first and second branch alone and focus on the third. These sorts of experiments probably put the chimeras through a great deal of hardship: we're creating organic systems which are not found in nature, and very probably have deep physiological problems.
My grandparents' ranch bought a critter that was 3/8 buffalo, 1/8 cow, and 1/2 yak. It was a very messed up animal and walked around in a constant state of confusion- I would guess due to conflicting instincts and brain chemistry.
I can only imagine what a mouse with human brain cells (mentioned in the article) would feel like- it'd almost certainly feel unwell, to say the least. Worse yet, how a non-human critter with human brain cells exposed to culture would feel like (and thus being smart enough to 1. know how messed up he is and 2. feel more dimensions of pain).
We may be creating hell on earth for some of these critters. That's not very cool.
RD
I just hate that science get hinder by a small group of ignorant politician. yeah, call me flame bait but this is true.
You'd be surprised...
I might as well preempt the trolls on this one: I know that such things will only be fesable far beyond my lifetime; but if these hybrids are to both be humanoid and have human intelligence, then likely yes, I would (with a female of such a creature).
Now, let the trolling commence!
P.S.: You either haven't seen enough of the Internet or are too naive to know what kind of a hornet's nest you've opened up with this comment---I can't tell which.
Legolas encounter chimera
Legolas throws arrow. 2d8 hit!
Chimera's HP reduced by 6.
Oh! Oh! Chimera mutates! DNA transformation 300g1000 (g = base pairs)!
Chimera becomes Golgimera.
Legolas palpitates and trembles.
Legolas poisoned! His liver is failing!!
Gandalf throws X-Ray Radiation attack!!
Golgimera mutates yet once more!!
Monster books don't know what it is.
Suddenly Galadriel appears and cast "Scramble Gene"
Golgimera becomes human liver!
Yay! Liver is implanted to Legolas.
Legolas is saved! Hip hip hoorayy!
An anime series called Full Metal Alchemist (Alternate) deals with Alchemists trying to revive humans. Although the Chimeras presented in the anime seems far-fetched, I think it raises a lot of ethical issues that might pertain to the real scientific research into playing God.
Yes, there are philosophical and religious implications, but consider slightly more practical matters... Imagine the potential abuse of the poor hybrid wretches. Lab rat/slave labor/zoo specimen, etc. Not to mention racism (speciesim?). Just think of how much trouble we have RIGHT NOW with pureblood humans based on sex, skin/hair color, and so on.
- The race is not [always] to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. -
Creatures born with such mixed genes are generally neither better nor worse than any other creature with "pure" genes. If they are actually worse they will die. If they are better, they will thrive. Nothing wrong here, that's how the biosphere of this planet operates.
And besides, why should we automatically assume that a being with some "standard" set of genes is by default better than a chimera? Humans lost a lot of senses and a lot of survival traits in their evolution. Maybe these chimeras are, in fact, the future humans? If a man-mouse chimera is capable of teleportation and telekinesis, like Lt. Puck, for example, then I am all for it.
the accidental creation of The Littles, in which case someone should alert the Bigg family about them living in their walls.
Someone also might want to alert the Fitzgibbon's that they should keep an eye on the Rats living under their rosebush as they might be up to no good.
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
What is this new food you speak of?
From TFA:
Now Weissman says he is thinking about making chimeric mice whose brains are 100 percent human. He proposes keeping tabs on the mice as they develop. If the brains look as if they are taking on a distinctly human architecture -- a development that could hint at a glimmer of humanness -- they could be killed, he said. If they look as if they are organizing themselves in a mouse brain architecture, they could be used for research.
I wonder how humalike a mouse with a 100% human brain would be. I guess I'm asking: to what extent does size matter?
IIRC, we humans use only a small percentage of our brains. Does anyone out there know if mice use a similar percentage of their brains? If they use a different percentage with a mouse brain, it would be interesting to see which percentage they end up using with a human brain.
being a single guy and worrying about being led astray by beer goggles.
In the future they'll have to worry about getting drunk and waking up with a real dog. Well, half.
Ruff!
sigs, as if you care.
Maybe now they can actually serve real buffalo wings at Pizza Hut.
Who gets to decide on what is ethical and not? Umm, Ethicists, not politicians. Personally, as long as their use utilitarian or even Kantian views, I don't see a problem.
Every post I make begins with the assumption P=~P.
That's funny. When I read THAC0, I thought, "where do I know that from?" Now I'm regressing. Thanks. A lot.
"Just another humbling experience for those who think humans are something special apart from the rest of creation."
Or just more proof that we don't know what we're doing, but oh boy does playing God feel good.
Hey they crossed a bush with a human and we elected it President. Unfortunately the IQ fell somewhere between the two. Better luck next time. Just proves gene splicing is a tricky business.
The first time I ever heard about chimeras in humans I believe was a Discover article. It bagan with an anecdote about a woman needing a kidney transplant. During the testing for suitable donors it was determined that her three children were not suitable and that SHE WAS NOT THEIR MOTHER. Here body carried two different sets of dna. The dna in her uterus was different than the dna in her blood.
I, for one, welcome our new mice/men chimera overlords.
This already happens, in a form of twin birth where a pair of fraternal twins fuse into a single embryo. This can result in an "embedded twin", where one twin is partially absorbed into the body of the other. You get individuals with second faces on their shoulders, etc. But there is the happier case where the twins get mixed up at a very early stage in blastular development and develop normally from then on. This produces a chimeral individual whose cells are of two different genotypes.
This is extremely rare; a case was discovered in 2002 when a woman needed a kidney transplant. Tissue typing revealed her to be a tetragametic individual, having developed from four gametes instead of two. Half her cells were genotypically different from the other half. During development, this woman and her twin fused into one embryo, and appeared to the world after birth to be one person. There are probably more people like this out there. I seem to remember a story where another woman surprisingly failed a maternity test for her own son, and was found to be chimeral.
See here (or its Google cache to avoid slashdotting) for details.
Well, it does beat the crap out of the mouse-brained human overlords we seem to have now!!
To make people with rolling shit?
No, I'm more evel than that. I want to make mice with squishy shit.
D+D sucks. Play 7th Sea, L5R, or Shadowrun instead.
same thing we do every night pinky... try to take over the world!
simple coincidence... or prescient cartoonists? you be the judge!
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
The scariest point in the article: "he and others have been considering transplanting modified pig organs into people and have been wondering if that might pose a risk of pig viruses getting into patient's cells. Now scientists know the risk is real, he said, because the viruses may gain access when the two cells fuse.".
We already know the results when humans spend too much time too close to pigs and chickens. It's called influenza. Now, maybe some poor mutant creature, bringing pigs/birds closer to humans than ever before, can birth a bug that'll kill off a sizable portion of the human race.
And maybe pigs will fly over empty cities.
a 100% human brain?...so when is the chimera (mouse/human) considered a human?
or conversely, a human with animal transplants, when is he considered not human?
oh well, quite a handful of pure breed humans are quite inhuman...
"Ethics" in biotech research is just a set of arbitrary rules defined by popular social standards at this point in time.
In other words, it's meaningless restrictive nonsense.
I don't want "Ethicists" with an bachelor's in liberal arts deciding what people with Ph.D.s in Biology do in their research. It's asinine in the extreme. They are unqualified to decide.
Science needs to progress free of undue influence from people who haven't the slightest clue of how the field functions. It's the only rational thing to do. Set the emotions aside.
If you don't like the idea of creating "chimeras", don't create one. It's not your decision. Same with abortion.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
duh we have had one already it was candidate kerry!
From what I understand, a chimera is a creature that incorporates cells with different genomes. E.g., some cells are mouse cells, with mouse DNA, and some cells are human cells, with human DNA. Sort of like a PC with a Mac motherboard in it:=). Another thing, since most procreation methods involve the offspring organism developing from a single cell, a human-mouse chimera's child would be either a human or a mouse, but not another chimera. Odd, isn't it?
I suppose blending men with pan-galactic hyperdimensional beings could be a *good thing*
I remember thinking a the time what if something like the reverse happens, where one single egg splits in 2 and is fertilized by two different sperms. Would the resulting twins, sharing half their maternally inherited genes but not the father's, be viable? You could end up with a pair of siblings that are not quit identical, but not quit fraternal either. What would it be like to have a sibling of the oposite sex which has half your chromosomes but not the same sex organs???
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
"We already know the results when humans spend too much time too close to pigs and chickens. It's called influenza. Now, maybe some poor mutant creature, bringing pigs/birds closer to humans than ever before, can birth a bug that'll kill off a sizable portion of the human race."
Most likely. What's happening is that human meedling is creating conditions that either rarely existed, or don't at all. We've already seen what transplanted species e.g. Cats at Madagascar is doing. Transgenic crops. And what are our well reasoned solutions to situations of our creation getting out of hand? Don't ask, don't tell.
Screw mice. Wouldn't it be much cooler to blend humans with sharks, a la Deep Blue Sea? That way, we could rule both land and sea!
Of course, we'd also need a lot more of these.
ac 19, come on, no one uses THAC0 anymore http://d20srd.org/srd/monsters/chimera.htm
Like the saying goes, never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes. -Pyrotic
Does anyone know what the best torrent to get is?
Dude. Valve put up a bunch of fake torrents at all the torrent seed sites. If you waste your time downloading it you will find out (like many of us have recently found out) that the torrents only contain garbage. But people have put up some torrents that have the real full ver of HL2 + crack only they are labelled as she-male.roughtrade.avi.torrent or some other variation on a transexual AVI porn vid. Just search for the transexual AVI porn vid that has the most seeds and the most people downloading it and that is probably the one that is really the HL2 torrent.
I don't have a problem with mixing up all kinds of genetic materials to come up with weird creatures. It would be cool if some mutant monster thing got created that quickly multiplied, took over the whole planet, and enslaved us all.
How about if they transplant animal stem cells into other animals first and see what happens.
I know there are more immediate 'benefits' to immediately going straight to human/animal but there would be plenty to learn by studying animal/animal chimera and we might just avoid making some serious mistakes in the process.
What's the rush all of a sudden? People have suffered from genetic disorders and trauma and disease in the past and will continue to in the future, regardless of how many discoveries we make... why do we need to find all the answers now?
The scientific community needs to learn a little patience and self-control and get their heads out of the pharmaceutical industry's ass and take a breath of fresh air.
The only way human/animal makes sense at this stage in our understanding of this area of science is that the Return on Investment is more immediate.
Is that good enough reason to jump into the deep end before we know how to swim?
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
I hate dealing with moral dillemas.
As a geek, I am always eager to hear about new and exciting discoveries such as this. However, as a great believer in animal rights, I oppose any kind of animal abuse -- including, of course, experiments involving animals being hurt...
I'm an atheist, so naturally I have always rejected the claims of religious people about "morals" -- I deem their morals inadequete -- but this does make me have second thoughts about ethics over progress...
The summary mentions THAC0 and has a link. How can it be offtopic to talk about something in the summary?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Dont' visite with IE
www.madison.com
ÕÕ
What I don't get is that chimeras happen in nature. Such as chimera twins. Why are there any moral or ethical concerns about it?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
get up to version 3.5 of D&D and then well talk about rolling d20's
back in the day we didnt have no old school
In a post with the subject "Arbitrary bullshit", you say you don't want BA's telling PhD's what to do, that "It's asinine in the extreme. They are unqualified to decide." And then the irony; you say:
Take your own advice.
Your post also reveals that you hold a common misconception of ethics. Ethics are what people turn to when the law and morality fail. They are rules for behavior that don't label things "right" and "wrong".
Medical doctors have to decide which patient to try to save. No law could be written to effectively handle all situations, and morality is of no help. Doctors have to work in prisons, on the battlefield, and with patients who tell them all kinds of things. Ethical practice helps answer the questions. First, do no harm. Help everybody you can. First come first serve (but Stop the Bleeding, Start the Breathing, Protect the Wound, Treat for Shock). And so on.
Lawyers have to operate outside of the law, also. As with MD's, no law could be crafted to handle every situation, and morality could keep someone from getting a fair trial. If a lawyer relied on morality, he'd set himself up as judge and jury. Ethics tell the lawywer how to behave, but not what's right and wrong. Ethics just aid the legal process, they don't form a basis for law the way morality does.
The result of your misconception is that you think one guy with a BA in Ethics is designing the rules for everyone in the field. No way. Ethical rules develop over time, like a best practices list.
I'd write more, but I'm tired.
sigs, as if you care.
Luckily, I took "Light Infantry" as one of my Regimental Doctrines, and the scenario called for Infiltrators. So I managed to setup about 150 guardsman after the Ork player had deployed his entire army. But still, having a Chimera or two as mobile weapons platforms would've come in handy. Multi-lasers seem tailor made for killing Orcs (wounds on a two, with no save). Though things would've gone a lot better if the damn Stormtroopers had ever deployed their grav-chutes and hit the table. That looted Basilisk was just asking for melta-love.
Oh, you meant something else. Nevermind.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
I for one welcome our human-brained mouse overlords!
they're only mouses in this dimension...
1-Insert Windows XP disk in computer
2-Install Windows XP
3-Leave basement
4-Shower
At this point, your chances are already higher than 0%. Next time we'll talk about what to do when contact with a girl is made for the first time.
Putting a cell from one type of organism into another type of organism is of questionable value. Let's take the testing of drugs as an example. When you blend the cells together, you not only have the two cell types, you have cells which are a mix. (In the article, it refers to pig and human cells interacting in this kind of way). You've increased the number of variables from one (it's a mouse) to some astronomical number reflecting every possible permutation of cell that could occur multiplied by every inter-cellular interaction that has been altered by the blending.
Personally, I've always thought that it would be more productive to have cultures of the different cell types, and see what a drug would do to each culture. Sure, you don't see the interactive effects, but it would let you weed out the drugs that absolutely couldn't be of any use. Since you could then use genuinely human cells, in a uniform, controlled environment, at least some of the data would be better than with animal testing, as you're using the intended target cells rather than something you hope is close enough.
I don't know what you can do about cell interactions, though. The cell culture method would work for very localized interactions, but the human body is not a localized organism. It is horribly complex, with a wide range of types of interaction. I cannot think of any good way of reproducing those interactions. Computers aren't powerful enough (yet) to simulate something on that scale and animals & chimeras introduce too many unknowns.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
They majorly forgot something.....
They forgot to put up Michael Jackson's picture...
Bring on the catgirls.
If we can determine cures and ways for our species to benefit from this then we should go ahead and continue to do so. However, if we're going to create a species that might hold a threat to our own then I say let's prevent a war against the Humanzee's and stop now.
Editors need a basic blog filter.
If it's on BoingBoing, Metafilter, Kuro5hin...etc., etc.
C'mon. When you think who's your daddy?, you can also think, who's your audience.
Blending mice? Sure. But men?
I don't know... it seems like one would need a seroously large blender to accomplish that.
n/t
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Speaking is just a mechanisim to communicate. It just so happens that we "evolved" a way of communicating by modulating and receiving gas pressure waves. What's so special about that.
I think there are a few things that make human communication unique and special. First off, humans do not know how to talk when they are born. They must be taught. An animal, on the other hand, will communicate in whatever form it uses whether it is taught or not. For example, my dog was never around other dogs when he was young, but he still howls and barks like every other dog. It's instictive. Humans don't have a communication instinct. In fact, young humans who have little or no contact with other human will have difficulty communicating. It is not instinctual for people.
Another thing I find interesting about human communication is the appeal to reason. You will never see an animal try to convince another animal through reason, like humans do. This reason is often built on a sense of right vs wrong, good vs evil. Animals base their "reasoning" on hunger, play, rest, sex, etc.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
Have we learned nothing from planet of the apes? But mabey I can get a head start on the worshiping of the neat new secrect improved Nuke that the Reds like to tell everyone they have.
just because your a schizophrenic doesn't mean people arn't really out to get you
It's thanks to the wonders of genetic engineering that soon there will be an end to hunger, disease, pollution, even war. I have created things that will change the world for the better. For instance, here is a monkey with four asses.
I move that these creatures should be breed en masse and released for nerds to kill with their plus 4 swords of ultimate death. They can gain experience that way....
C'mon guys! It'll be great, I swear.
Therefore this should have been modded Funny, not Insightful.
Asinine Moderators.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
a small group of ignorant politician
Why yes, a single politician would be a very small group indeed.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
OK, the mice I can understand, but how do you get the men in the blender?
Ok, maybe they're not chimeras in the sense of two radically different lifeforms, but the article considered a mother carrying DNA in their blood from their child as being close enough, so I think it's OK to consider any lifeform in which there are two or more non-identical DNA sequences present.
DNA is horribly unstable stuff. That's why mutations occur. It's also why certain cancers occur. All it takes is for a cell's DNA to be altered. A bad copy, a reaction with a free radical, whatever. What you get is a cell with different DNA than other cells.
99% of the time, that's not a problem. The cell destroys itself or gets destroyed by the body's defenses. No big deal. Some of the remaining time, the cell goes cancerous. Either the cancer or the organism is destroyed.
Most of the remaining incidents would likely be chimeras of a kind, especially if the organism is still developing. There's absolutely nothing to stop a cell mutating subtly and then copying that mutation into every copy of that cell ever made. If it's a useful mutation (it can survive and it confers an advantage) AND it occurs early enough in life that descendents acquire that mutation, we call it evolution. But I can think of absolutely no reason why a useful mutation cannot occur at any time in an organism's lifetime. It's just going to be rather more regional and it probably wouldn't be conferred to descendents.
Although much less likely than a single cell mutating, I can see absolutely no reason why it would be impossible for multiple cells to mutate in a way that would (a) individually function and (b) function together as a single organism.
Exposed to an environment that is sufficiently hostile to DNA, there is a non-zero probability of just about any imaginable set of mutations occuring. This creates an interesting philosophical problem. There's a lot of debate as to when human life begins. But by the arguments given above, there is a non-zero probability that any life could be human, and a (much higher) probability that any human is not entirely human.
If cells can mutate, blend, fuse, do whatever cells like doing on weekends, etc, then is it meaningful to consider how human a chimera is? We must all be chimeras. It's just a matter of degree.
"Human" cannot, then, be the state of an organism, because no organism is guaranteed a uniform state, unless it's unicellular. At best, it can only be a composite of states. However, that might not be good enough, either. Let's take the most extreme example possible - some idiot decides to blend humans and chimpanzees - not through breeding, but through genetic and chimeric techniques.
Now what happens? The cells will very likely fuse extremely well, being far more similar in nature than the pig/human example in the article. Let's say that the result is a "perfect" 50/50 mix. Are they human or not? Would it be possible to tell, without careful DNA analysis?
Ok, now let's say that the ratio is 90% human and that it turns out most people accept the person is human. Fine. Let's also say that, as a result of normal cell mutations (as outlined above) and/or cell replacement the ratio falls over the lifetime to below 50% human. Are they still a person?
Or take the reverse scenario. They start off 90% chimp, and (through cell mutations/replacement) become over 50% human. In other words, can you "become" human after you're born?
It seems to me that the entire problem is very complex and that existing definitions of what an organism is simply aren't good enough to classify organisms that are non-trivially chimeric.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
"And don't give me nonsense about humans who can't speak - that's always either a physical problem, or deafness so they never learned how. Fix those problem and they can speak."
Not in the case of non-speaking autistics -- there's no mechanical failure involved, our brains (like those of other species) simply aren't designed to communicate via spoken words any more than non-human species are. We don't consider that a problem, and happily communicate in other ways; we have no interest in "fixing" the essence of who/what we are just because the average human happens to be different from us.
That's ill. . .
Did YOU do it?
I've never liked Madison Newspapers design anyway. It always seemed a little, I don't know, facist or something with that star and everyone looking the same.
But WTF? I pity the fool who downloads the update or visits in IE.
He painted a unicorn in outer space. I'm askin' ya, what's it breathin'?
MASTER SPLINTER! oh wait that was a rat...
Classifieds are still up, so it seems like just the root index was hijacked.
He painted a unicorn in outer space. I'm askin' ya, what's it breathin'?
Indeed, I am one of the people who, as the article put it, has a "negative backlash" against giving animals human traits. It's not for religious reasons, either. I'm no Religious Fundamentalist... (EDIT pre-sending: On a quick glance at what I typed, however, perhaps I'm a Humanitarian Fundamentalist. If so, then so be it.)
Rather, a Human is something that, to me, has an innate quality over all other animals: not derived from religion, but rather from the innate quality of being human. Having a capacity to reason, for example. Call me biased towards Humanity, but we are the best thing this planet has produced (indeed, dispite the trouble we cause, which I acknowledge is vast). Giving human parts to animals, at least in large quantities, seems to me to be some kind of basic betrayal of humanity. Whose side are we on, anyways? =)
Small transferences, like the ones mentioned at the very beginning of the article, are mildly disturbing but not outright revolting to me. But as they go on, and talk about potential half-human fetuses in mice (and letting them die as the accidents that they would be), or monkeys with human intelligence disturbs me to the deepest roots of my being. Call it Pro-Humanity zeal if you wish, but Humans > Monkeys. I mean, look at us, and what we've done! We are all here right now, typing in a complex common language over wires that harnass the fundamental powers of energy, and into a complex system of "code" which are products of our thought and our will to create something that serves us beyond our desire for mere survival.
Indeed, humans have done some horrible things as well, and continue to do them. But as it stands, humanity is one thing I will hold an allegiance to. I don't believe in having zeal for a government (which tends to be one of the more faulty institutions of our humanity), or for most beliefs (the zeal for which some people wrongly hold to them cause a great deal of the horrible things I spoke of), or for most organized groups in general. But humanity as a whole is something that, to me, is worth pledging allegiance to. If another animal species can come to our point on their own, then so be it: they would be our peers. But to make some human/animal cross breed feels to me to be the closest I have ever come to calling something treasonous. Usually I find the word absurd, as its usual political usage comes with a heavy bias and hides a greater truth. But for some reason, it feels... appropriate here.
So in summation, Hum4n5 >> 4n1m475, Hum4n1ty r0xx0rz j00, and other such nonsense.
-Vendal Thornheart
The fact of the matter is, we are indeed something special. Not apart from creation, but special. We, and as far as current research shows, we alone, are the sole holders of the ability to reason: the ability to focus on goals other than those driven by immediate instinct. As Kant once said, we alone are independant moral agents.
Speaking of interesting points, the fact that we are even having this conversation is a pretty strong testimony to the uniqueness of humanity. We have formed complex written and oral languages, and use technology of our own creation to shape the world around us so that we can do things like communicate when thousands of miles apart. I'd say we're at another plateau from the rest of the Animal kindgom, wouldn't you?
-Vendal Thornheart
I myself, though mildly religious, am a believer in Kantian ethics: and thus, I base my judgments of morality not on Religion (which has morals but no rational grounding for them), but rather on Philosophy (which sometimes has morals but always has a more or less reasonable rational explanation for why).
I suspect that an Athiest who agrees with me on this issue (anti-Chimerian) is appealing to one of those non-Religious moral theories.
-Vendal Thornheart
it's funny, when you bring that up, it reminded me of an old thought I had when I was a kid. I noticed that people tend to fight each other because they need an enemy. I always speculated that if some alien species were ever to reveal itself, humanity would be much more peaceful within the species because this foreign entity would become the common enemy of humanity (perhaps regardless of the Alien's good or ill intent even). Granted, that is unfortunate but true... and if that logic holds, it would probably happen to any "subhuman" species that might ever arise, or any species that begins to exhibit intelligent thought similar to our own. It might solve a lot of intra-species conflict, but it would open a whole other box of violence.
-Vendal Thornheart
... sorry, I'll be quiet now.
-Vendal Thornheart
Natural chimeras are very rarely(eg: never?) transpecies...
Actio personalis moritur cum persona. (Dead men don't sue)
Why not gentically engineer meat to grow in vats...no creature with brains need be created.
What about that lion/tiger half-breed from a while back?
stuff
You should have kept this on topic by pointing to the chimeric porn vids. (most anime will do in a pinch)
Yeah, but it is hard to make a man/mouse half-breed to occur naturally. At least, that's what I'm told. I haven't tried it myself.
It'd have to be done very carefully.
But I did say OR not XOR
Every living thing has a Spirit - an Anima - it's form of respiration gives that creature a spirit in the truest sense. The spirit leaves with the creature's last breath.
A soul is what is left after the biological organism is gone, the life history of a complex spirit.
If you imagine yourself as a pen, and your life as that pen on paper, the life history you live draws a picture. When the pen is gone (death) - the picture in history will forever remain.
So the soul is the life history, its impact on others, its relationships to other people and the world, that is the soul - that which remains forever.
To the effect that Soul is recorded, people will remember it, but that soul remains, recorded or not.
All the great heros of Time have well recorded souls.
I think if an Animal has a well recorded life, it can rise to the level of a Soul - Benji, A Triple Crown winner, Flipper - creatures who live with a measure of Fame, well the qualify as having a soul too - because their life had some major impact on Human Society.
If/When humans ever travel the stars and meet other species traveling space, I think they would take great exception to think that humans alone had souls, and they did not!
What makes you think you or I have a soul? Where is it located and how much does it weight, etc?
9/11 Eyewitnesses to Explosive WTC Demolition 1 of 2
have one or two instances of anthromorphic rat lesbian softcore BDSM.
In Minnesota, pigs are being born with human blood in their veins.
I'm not sure I like having an easier path for viruses to migrate.
You quitting proves that the karma kap worked. The most annoying of the whores shut up. --CmdrTaco
Hey! I run Linux, Windows, and OSX, but I still have a girlfriend! It is possible!
A 30+ year-old documentary on mouse men.
It's speech. I wouldn't correct you normally, but you used "speach" like three times.
Anyway, in my opinion any animal rights argument is a colossal waste of time, as we don't even maintain a decent HUMAN rights standard right now, worldwide.
Put a Timex on it's wrist and you get a breeding machine that gives a a dickin' and keeps on tickin', and tickin' and tickin'...
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Wow, and since I don't care that much about HL2, if it's not a real HL2 torrent I get free shemale porn, awesome!
... when biologists make a chimera that can talk and actually ASKS and WANTS to be eaten? :)
Douglas Adams was a futurist after all.
Bruce
- such as making a conscious decision to imprison, mutilate, vivisect, shock, drug, kill, slice, dice and eat "other" mice?
[...] they could be killed, he said.
Ah, whew. For a moment I was worried they were being unethical or something.
Step one: Agitate a mouse enough to get it to bite your hand and not let go. Step two: Stick hand in blender. Step three: Turn on blender. Step four: Duct-tape. Finito.
"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
I'm interested in the characteristics of organs that might be transplanted from chimeric donors to humans. Suppose for instance that a kidney was gown in a pig using your stem cells. Leaving aside questions or morality or danger because of viruses, how long would the kidney live?
Would the telomeres in the kidney have the same length and offer the same life span as a purely human kidney - or would they tend to die at the same approximate time as a pig's life span?
In times of trouble, the smell of frying onions usually gives confidence and comfort.
Now when I call someone that, it might actually be true...
--- Generation X: The first generation to have SIG lines inferior to their parents... ---
Let's say I killed a chimera; what would be the chances that I would find his leg bone-pipe and be able to make it into a nice gun for my lower-level trader? Sorry, obscure Anarchy Online comment.
Let me clarify... let's start by redoing the study mentioned wherein they put quail brain tissue into chickens.. except instead of just observing the behavior lets go ahead and do in-depth studies of the results over the lifecycle of the bird, from embryo to death... and not just the brain.. let's look at the hormone glands and other organs.. then let's do it with several hundred chickens and monitor their group behavior to see if it also is influenced, their sexual behavior and dominance behavior and selection of mates and flocking patterns and finally let's go ahead and breed them through several generations to see what happens.
You forgot the taste tests! : )
And I give you my unlimitted approval on that idea. But while I'm adding stuff:
Also look at the interaction of individuals, minority groups and majority groups of these chimeras mixed with groups of regular chickens. See how they interact, see how the illnesses spread through the populations.
then let's do that again with as many types of animals as we need in order to come up with a complete understanding of what will happen when we insert homo sapien genetics into other animal species. Do it enough times and patterns will emerge that will be quite clear as to what will happen and what to expect. When we have those results decisions can be made based on real data, not just conjecture and ethical opinions.
But, why waste so much time and money on those tedious studies when someone, somewhere, is just gonna go ahead and insert human genes in other critters just to see how it turns out?
The thing about humans is, by the time they have the skills and ressources necessary to do something like that, they are also getting too old to have the patience to wait for all those lengthy studies to satisfy his curiosity.
Yeah, the mad scientist is a cliché, but he's cliché for a reason...
You can't take the sky from me...
We already have one from Disney - We call it Mickey Mouse!
I seem to remember that XXY creatures are plagued with all sorts of health problems, and "developmental disorders" in addition to sterility. I wonder if this is also true of the "fused embryo" cats?
Look at classic (not revisionist) Mormonism, where males take entire prides of females. Look at the Arabs. Look at the circumcision (removal of clitoris) practiced by present day savages such as those in the middle east. Look at how many indications we have of woman being treated as property - from the presumptions that underlaid US marriages in the 1800's to Kenya's amazing (in current terms) stripping of women's property rights, tossing them out of the house upon divorce with nothing but the clothes on their backs (and sometimes not even that.) Look at arranged marriages. I could go on for pages and pages. The record of women being used, as opposed to equal partners in "courtship" is substantiated from just about every direction you can think of. The recent spate of things like allowing women to vote, equal rights under the law, all these are wonderful, but they are not the result of evolution building women to be the equal of men in courtship. Human women are weaker, smaller, ill equipped to defend themselves, they are incapable of stopping impregnation regardless of if they are aroused or otherwise interested in the impregnating partner... and male humans have taken advantage of this at every stage of history.
It is ridiculous to attempt to argue that courtship is a significant built-in for humans. Clearly, it is not. If it is a built-in at all, it is something that is so trivially suppressed for other benefits that it has probably had little or no effect upon the evolutionary development of the species. Hopefully we're seeing the last of women as property/breeding stock this century, but I wouldn't bet money on it, frankly.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Nay, you have me figured completely wrong... if you look at my other posts, I am utterly opposed to the concept of doing this hybridizing of humans, or otherwise doing strange or cruel things to other species. The fact of the matter is that we CAN do it... that is, we have the capacity to do so. It seems obvious to me that we *SHOULDN'T*, but the question of if its feasably possible because of our advances is obviously a yes.
-Vendal Thornheart
I would laugh in response, but the truth of what you said is too depressing to laugh about.
-Vendal Thornheart
All's good =)
-Vendal Thornheart
The link http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6534243/. It's an MSNBC site. I'm using Konqueror 3.2.2 to view it, and the text is lined up all wrong. So I went to Settings -> Configure Konqueror -> Browser Identification, where it said Konqueror reports itself as "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.2; Linux) (KHTML, like Gecko)" I unchecked "Send identification", reloaded the page and viola, suddenly the text is lined up properly. Go ahead, try it!
So Microsoft are purposefully screwing up their site for Mozilla users, and specifically those that send the browser information! Didn't they get caught doing this with Opera, when it caused a bit of a stir?
discussing the morals/ethics of this is fine, but isn't anybody just plain freaked out by this???
Get your torrents...
That being the case, then blending cells might result in blending at either the "regular" level OR the mitochondrial level (or both or neither). An exponential increase in possible effects.
There's a further possibility, but I don't know enough about microbiology to give you probabilities or any realistic mechanism by which it could occur.
If two cells, of different types, can be run together like that to form a chimerical cell, then other chimerical cells may be possible. Here's an odd-ball theory for you - picture the life in the really deep ocean trenches, that can only survive near thermal vents. There are probably single-cell organisms amongst them. Some of those may be primitive enough that they could be absorbed into a cell, the way mitochondria and chloroplasts were.
Since there is certainly neither sugar nor sunlight down there, there has to be some mechanism for processing the heat energy - however inefficiently - directly. Which suggests either the organisms down there can do that or have absorbed something that can.
One possible use for this would be to heat-harden plants, where the environment is becoming too hostile for them. Simply modify them to be able to use the additional energy available. Since the law of conservation of energy applies, if you've converted heat energy into chemical energy, then there's less heat. It may be possible to use this to allow a plant to cool itself to within temperatures it can tolerate.
No guarantees that the modification wouldn't cause some environmental disaster and wipe out all life on Earth (other than itself), but it would be a much more imaginitive way to end the world than wars, earthquakes, floods, etc.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Technically, any human with 2 X chromosomes (not sure about cases of non-disjunction), is a chimera since either the maternal or paternal X chromosome is randomly turned off at random times during development. That's the way we balance expression from the sex chromosomes. Other species up regulate the single sex chromosome.
So most women are chimeras between mom's X and dad's X. Chalk up another difference between men and women! ^_^
This sort of thing never ends well.
XXY results in Klinefelder's syndrome. The fused ones seem to be perfectly normal, healthy cats.
If they can give a human mind to an animal why can't they grow human bodies with animal brains? That'd be useful for everything from transplants and medical research to sex slaves.
I'd buy a pet that looked human but only had the mind of an animal. I guess I'm thinking of a beautiful woman that would act like my cat. Rush to see me when I got home, enjoys licking, touching, and rubbing, baths a lot, and always wants to sit on my lap. It could be something between a pet and a girlfriend. It'd be good for the pet too.. unlike a cat you could take it to resturants and stuff.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Imagine, said Robert Streiffer, a professor of philosophy and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin, a human-chimpanzee chimera endowed with speech and an enhanced potential to learn -- what some have called a "humanzee." Planet of the Apes, here we come.
Antisource - antivirus, antispam, antispyware
Read The Zen Gun.
One of the main antagonists is a human/primate chimera. Also animals staff much of the empire, because the human race is suffering a severe underpopulation problem.
http://www.oivas.com/bjb/zen.html
"His work is the very antithesis of tired hackdom. To invent an entire self-consistent cosmology and physics for a $2.50 DAW paperback (THE ZEN GUN, 1983) is one of those noble acts of selfless altruism that keep SF alive. There seems no limit to the man's inventiveness, his pyrotechnic bursts of fresh ideas. To these natural gifts, enough to sustain a dozen lesser writers, he adds an intense dedication to craft that gives his best work its eerie sense of dark complexity." - Bruce Sterling, Cheap Truth
http://www.amazon.com/unicef/
ISBN: 0879978511
Used copies start at ~$4.
It's like the pulp sensabilities of Philip Jose Farmer crossed with the physics mind of Poul Anderson, then hopped up on serious hallucinogens. In short, it's worth the time to track down a copy at your local used book store.
No, it wasn't me. I was just trying to find out more info (like if it was a known worm/virus) to e-mail to the madison.com folks.
ÕÕ