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Ohio Zoo Attempts To Mate Female Rhino With Her Brother For Species Survival
An anonymous reader writes "Unfortunately for the Sumatran rhino the fate of the species may boil down to a plan by the Cincinnati Zoo to breed their lone female with her little brother. 'We absolutely need more calves for the population as a whole; we have to produce as many as we can as quickly as we can,' said Terri Roth, who heads the zoo's Center for Research of Endangered Wildlife. 'The population is in sharp decline and there's a lot of urgency around getting her pregnant.'"
They were not the first two humans.
Contrary to what your local pastor may have told you, the bible says no such thing. Cain's wife was one such member of the pre-existing human society that existed outside of the Garden. The creation of Eve is stated clearly to be performed on an entirely different allegorical "day" than human females per se.
Pre-Adamics are what is consistent with science, and correct reading of what Genesis actually says.
There is much more to be said here, and much more potential insight to be gained, but since I doubt you are interested in more than the immediate question specifically insofar as it helps you reject theism and no farther, I'll leave that for another day.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Genesis 5:3
He created them male and female and blessed them. And he named them "Mankind" when they were created.
Genesis 1:27
27 So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
28 God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground."
Humanity per se created, and given rather Darwinian directives incompatible with staying in a garden.
Genesis 1:31
31 God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning--the sixth day.
Sixth "day" ends.
Genesis 2:5
5 Now no shrub had yet appeared on the earth[a] and no plant had yet sprung up, for the Lord God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no one to work the ground, 6 but streams[b] came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground. 7 Then the Lord God formed a man[c] from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
As noted in the footnote, "earth" is alternately (and accurately) translated as "land", and not incompatibly that this particular land had not been rained upon, nor had plants grown here. My model is quite literally that of a garden on the surface of the Earth, taking up a subset of the Earth's surface, as common sense and science would naturally dictate, though not dictated by your effort to interpret as whatever is -least- likely.
Genesis 6:21
22 Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib[h] he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.
And with this act suggestive of genetic engineering from a DNA source, which you will mock as written here and would immediately assent to if you read this exact same thing as a broad description of a modern-day cloning procedure, let your futile mockery resume.
On your other points:
2) Learn how sets work.
3) It unquestionably symbolizes a great many things. Your incredulity on the matter doesn't override actual scholarship and the text itself.
4) Yes, it is.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Several species have "successfully been conserved in captivity" up to the point that no zoo wants any more of them. They are effectively killing animals and doing global birth control on these species in captivity, while the natural population is so small that they lack even genetic diversity to be viable enough to reliably survive extinction. Given these fact, you'd say they would reintroduce captive bread animals in the wild. This never happens and never will, unless they are going to change a lot of things. First of all, captive release is extremely costly, nobody wants to foot the bill for a reintroduction program of Black's Rhino. Second of all, captive animals may have diseases that could in theory threaten wild animals, even animals of different species. For that reason, nobody will permit these animals to be released in the wild, or have them interbreed with wild animals.
Zoos are nothing but the living equivalent of a postage stamp collection. All these breeding programs are nice for fellow stamp collectors, but will never ever help wild populations with genetic diversity or just plain extra animals. That doesn't mean they don't have a purpose. If we and our kids can't actually go to a zoo and watch these poor caged animals, we wouldn't give enough about them to actually fund some (often rather futile) attempts of saving the habitat of the wild version of what we just fed a bag of peanuts.
Unless the above changes and animals are actually released in the wild on a regular basis, incestuous cross breeding Sumatran rhinos in a Zoo won't help the extinction of these animals a single bit. I suggest we find a solution for this first, before we risk Down Syndrome Rhinos in our Zoos.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
If you acknowledge that as having any kind of truth, then you have to acknowledge that it also states that those were specially blessed unions. If you don't acknowledge the supernatural tilt, then the scientific view is that being the earliest humans, they had a higly complex and diverse genetic code that allowed for the extremely low risk of common gene train wrecks happening in utero.(something like that)