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Human-Animal Hybrids Fail
SailorSpork writes "Fans of furries and anime-style cat girls will be disappointed by the news that attempts to create human animal hybrids have failed. Experiments by British scientists to create embryonic stem cells by putting human DNA into cow or rabbit eggs had raised ethical concerns, but the question of how we would treat sub-humans will have to wait until we actually figure out how to make them."
Maybe we should resolve the ethical concerns before we perform the science ...
This is opening Pandora's Box.
"Man is nothing without the works of man" -- Helvetius
To bad DNA doesn't work like this. This is almost as bad as someone thinking the can make 'atomic super men' ala Futurama.
...but the question of how we would treat sub-humans will have to wait until we actually figure out how to make them.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Hell, we're still dealing with how people should treat other actual humans.
This guy's the limit!
This has a lot of the same false problems that seems to plague morality based discussions of human cloning. The idea that a clone is going to be some sort of non-human entity with no moral standing one way or the other is just plain nuts. If you clone a person then that person has all of the rights any other person would have. It's really just a complicated way of giving birth. Even these human-animal hybrids are badly named, as they aren't going to be catgirls or manbearpigs or anything of the sort, just normal people with a really weird birth.
The only time ethical concerns should really come into play is when you're attempting to convict someone of a crime based on DNA evidence, but it's not like the law has not had to deal with this sort of problem before. Identical twins have already generated plenty of precedents to draw from.
It drives me crazy when congresspeople are spending hours and hours talking about how cloning is an affront before god and has to be stopped, but can't seem to make a good argument as to why other than citing bad movie plots or vague "They won't have a soul!" type arguments.
I read the internet for the articles.
Whatever happened to doing things because we *could*, rather than because we should?
enough about some other guy's sexual fantasy life being destroyed
can we get back to the urgent need to make fully human women with four breasts and two vaginas now please?
Unless you want to share with your friends, two vaginas and four breasts are useless.
The key is to give men four arms and hands, that way even if the woman only has two breasts you can still use the other two hands to grab her ass. As an added bonus if they ever develop a four breasted woman humanity would be ready for it.
I really find myself wondering, where's the "duh" tag for this article? Sheesh. We've known for *decades* that radical hybridization simply don't work. Anyone remember the totato / pomato? Not the grafted gimmick plant, but the actual genetic hybrid? Yeah, didn't think so. That didn't work either.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
And when it smells blood it goes into a biting frenzy, and it breeds out of control.
Yeah, but what if it all goes wrong, and we end up with a killing machine that loves meat and breeds like crazy? Oh wait...
And we're tired of people like you who treat a sentient life form as fucking science project! Then you scream, "but... but... I'm not a Nazi! I'm experimenting on ape-men, not Jews!"
Part of why I mentioned the pomato is that the potato and tomato are both members of the same genus, Solanum, a.k.a. the deadly nightshade family. For that matter, tobacco is part of the same grouping, making the apocryphal tomacco another intra-genus hybrid. Yet none of these intra-genus hybrids is viable.
Now, what the article is talking about is hybridization of species even further apart, walking back up the taxonomic tree by several nodes. If we cannot even produce viable intra-genus hybrids, we sure aren't going to be producing viable intra-family, intra-order, or intra-class hybrids any time soon. FWIW, my own guess is that it'll take us 10-20 years to get an intra-genus hybrid, and much longer for hybrids of species further apart -- partial genetic borrowing notwithstanding, such as the glow-in-the-dark pigs crafted using certain jellyfish genes.
Basically, my point is that, in the absence of any hybrid between humans and chimps or bonobos, the two other extant species widely regarded as the most closely related to H. sapiens, we should not be the least bit surprised that hybrids with species that aren't even *primates* should fail in utero, and I would go so far as to say that their failure would fall firmly in the "No shit, Sherlock" category of unsurprising. (No offense meant, just stating my personal view of the article.)
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Because then I could argue that" Yes, they may be experimenting on their own kids but at least they did not abort them.
Where do you draw the line?
Hard to say, which is precisely why I have a problem with abortion. At some point, between conception and the age of legal majority, we have a legally protected person. But birth seems arbitrary.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
It's clear how you would treat them considering your choice of words.
'sub-human' versus 'semi-human'
Great way to hold no bias at the opening of THIS discussion.
O_o
I wouldn't consider the mad hatter mad. Just reality impaired. He sure can make a mean cup of tea.
Now you see, this one is hard to moderate. If it's Obama you're talking about you're a likely troll. If it's Bush you're talking about then you're hilarious.