The orangutan trap
aeon.co
aeon.co
[1] 1.B4 Opening https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9jaaKUWwBI
> why can't we justify caging people who have the mental capacity of a 6 year old.
They do that all the time in psychiatric hospitals. They are just a bit nicer about it these days.
No, it makes a lot of sense. Treating all species the same would make very little sense. Do bacteria have the same rights as lice which have the same rights as mice which have the same rights as dogs which have the same rights as whales?
In reality, it is a scale. How much we care about an animal varies depending on how big it is, how intelligent it is, what it is capable of and how it interacts with our lives. To pretend every species is the same is just wilfully naive.
In regards orangutans we can certainly do a better job of ensuring both can exist.
According to what scale?
The rise in the use of palm oil has more to do with people thinking that because it's natural, it's "healthy" for you (which is really only true if your baseline for comparison is eating tubs of margarine) thanks to folks like Dr. Oz.
So, since you can't see my eyeroll at the downvotes, here are citations:
NPR piece noting that transfat usage has dropped by 86% before the ban: http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/06/16/414906829/fda...
And somewhat surprisingly the wikipedia article on the nutritional & health effects of palm oil is pretty well cited: https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Palm_oil#Nutrition_and_healt...
tl:dr; Transfats are bad for you. That's why they don't sell them. Palm oil isn't vastly healthier than other oils. Eat less fat.
Also, the use of an oil doesn't contribute linearly to the trans fat content of whatever is fried in it. Users of hydrogenated oils for frying, for example, are purchasing gallons and gallons of the stuff on a regular basis, with most of that being discarded as waste. Yes, most of the big name fast food chains in the US have switched to other oils, but it's not clear whether all have or to what extent. There may still be a sizable bump in purchases of replacement oils, including palm.
Finally, even if the 86% number is ironclad and extends across the entire prepared food and food service industry, it represents a relative drop against an unknown whole. It says nothing about the absolute volume of hydrogenated oils still in use. IMO this validates the parent's concern.
This plus the general flippant snark of your comment and the weird Dr. Oz reference is why I downvoted you.
The only way to give animals right is to give them a voice literally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_ape_language#Apes_that_d...
None of the apes learned "grammar", but they did communicate using language. Did that make a difference to the rights of apes? Of course not.
Whatever you get an ape to achieve, will be immediately defined as not quite sufficient to prove that they are human-like enough to have any rights. The only way to solve this argument is not to give them language but to realise that it is our responsibility to better treat other denizens of this world we share - irrespective of whether they meet some arbitrary criteria of human-ness.
There's a very simple self-interested reason for this too: if we ever encounter aliens, we currently would not have any viable argument to convince them that they should treat us any better than we treat apes.
For instance, Jules Verne wrote about lots of 'impossible' journeys, which made for good science fiction. Trying any of those things before the technology was there would have not led anywhere, it would have wasted time and or killed people. And even when the technology was there it took some pretty hard thinking to make the journeys a successful reality.
What you are proposing is so far beyond the current state of the art that it is not science (yet, maybe never will be) but fiction. Trying it will simply not work and won't advance science at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=FOXP2
Two amino acid substitutions distinguish the human FOXP2 protein from that found in chimpanzees,[15] but only one of these two changes is unique to humans.[11] Evidence from genetically manipulated mice[16] and human neuronal cell models[17] suggests that these changes affect the neural functions of FOXP2.
I'm not saying it is impossible per-se, I'm saying that with our current understanding of the matter it is impossible today and simply trying will not advance our understanding much. There are far simpler problems than this that are right now impossible.
Yes, FOXP is related to speech, no, activating FOXP does not automatically give you a talking ape, the way genes affect the brain is very complex and poorly understood.
Building the bomb, breaking enigma and landing on the moon (and ITER, for that matter) were 'mere matters of engineering' by comparison, at least there we had a good idea of what we needed to achieve and what possible paths there were to that solution.
For the atomic bomb, for instance, the Uranium atom had already been split (in 1938), for the moon landings we already had the German V2 rocket and so on.
The steps may seem huge but the theoretical underpinnings were firmly in place when the technology moved forward.
Usually this alternates, one step is made by science to advance the theory which then can be put to the test and put into practice by engineering and experiment. This may lead to new insight and so on.
It's very rare for someone to say 'oh, it would be nice if we could do 'x'' and then to turn up with a complete and solved problem on the next iteration.
There's a reason the moonshot and the atomic bomb took several years and very large amounts of money to complete, and in neither case were we 100% sure that we'd achieve them.
And you know this how? Because of the copious amounts of experiments that have been performed, attempting to do this? I think it's equally silly to declare this certainly out of reach as it is to declare it certainly within reach. We haven't even tried, so how do we know what's possible? Perhaps all it takes is splicing a couple of genes from the human genome into a chimp embryo and kabloom: you have an intelligent chimp who can be as miserable about his or her condition as the rest of us.
No one has sat there and run the years' worth of experiments required to prove whether this is achievable with today's technology. We obviously can't say it's easy but we can't say how hard it is either.
The more interesting rebuttal, imho, is that genetically engineering some intelligent apes that can speak will not advance the cause of non-intelligent apes who can't speak, it will just create a new species of apes with a catastrophic uphill civil rights struggle ahead of them (if you think there's racism in the world today, wait till the chimps start demanding the right to vote, work, etc).
Which probably helps explain why we have not pursued that avenue of science particularly much: why do such a thing? It'd be ethically unconscionable, to set out to create another intelligent species who will be condemned to decades, if not centuries, of abuse, for no other reason than because maybe we can? Only a monster would set out to do such a thing.
Because of doing a whole pile of reading on this wondering how much of 'planet of the apes' rests on science and how much of it is fiction.
> Because of the copious amounts of experiments that have been performed, attempting to do this?
Some experiments to turn this gene on in chimpanzees have in fact been done.
> I think it's equally silly to declare this certainly out of reach as it is to declare it certainly within reach.
You missed a 'currently' in there, it is currently out of our reach. This mostly hinges on the development of the brain, not on switching on or off some genes.
> We haven't even tried, so how do we know what's possible?
We in fact have tried.
> Perhaps all it takes is splicing a couple of genes from the human genome and kabloom: you have an intelligent chimp who can be as miserable about his or her condition as the rest of us.
We already have pretty intelligent chimps, where we draw the line is pretty arbitrary, see Jane Goodall and her life's work.
To make short work of this: humans will never allow anything that is not 100% human to be treated within the same legal framework that we use for ourselves, we rely to great extent on mentally putting distance between ourselves and other species to go about our daily business. Heck, we don't even see most other humans as human, racism, war and so on all rely on dehumanization. Some countries don't fully recognize females (so, half our own species) as being able to vote.
> The more interesting rebuttal, imho, is that genetically engineering some intelligent apes that can speak will not advance the cause of non-intelligent apes who can't speak, it will just create a new species of apes with a catastrophic uphill civil rights struggle ahead of them (if you think there's racism in the world today, wait till the chimps start demanding the right to vote, work, etc).
Yes, but that's merely shifting the discussion, we could have that same discussion today without chimps that demand the vote in Proper English.
> Which probably helps explain why we have not pursued that avenue of science particularly much: why do such a thing? > It'd be ethically unconscionable, to set out to create another intelligent species who will be condemned to decades, if not centuries, of abuse, for no other reason than because maybe we can? Only a monster would set out to do such a thing.
I'll look up the study, back in a few minutes.
edit: ok, that went quick:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v462/n7270/full/nature0...
Enjoy.
Based on the abstract, I see this as an attempt to mess with one gene that's hypothesised to be language-related, not as a deliberate programme to try and engineer intelligent chimps... So I'm afraid my point still stands. Your rebuttal is not convincing - it just addresses one gene. As you said, intelligence is a complex thing. To give this a "good try" I'd expect a programme that lasts at least a decade and has as its deliberate objective "genetically engineer intelligent apes"... I hope that such a programme does not exist!
But, as both of us have pointed out - humans don't even recognise other humans as fully human, let alone recognising the rights of an enhanced species... That's the real killer for this line of argument, not the possibility or lack thereof of bio-engineering intelligent chimps!