Be Excellent To Each Other

Oh noes!



Oh heavens. Well, at least the ever vigilant church is here to protect us from those kerazee scientists who are just desperate to cross anything with anything else. Anything - whatever's lying to hand at the time.

A scientist's ideal world, yesterday:



"What do you mean it wouldn't be able to decide which way to walk? It's a snake attached to a lion, you fool! This is Man's pinnacle of creation!"



Alright, but suppose we do let MaliA and his colleagues boink some LadyChimps in the name of scientific research, what's the problem here? What's the downside of humanzees? Surely they'd make vastly superior monkey butlers than pure cloned monkeys would? Sadly, Dr MacKeller seems to have missed that particular enormous upside to this hypothetical strand of genetic research, and instead:



So that sounds as if we'd have to pay our monkey butlers a fair wage; at least if they had sufficient awareness to feel bad about having topped up the whiskey decanter with piss. Which seems something of a catch-22 to me, from an employer's point of view - our Humanzee MonkeyButler 3000 is free if it's a well behaved MonkeyButler with insufficient imagination to smear faeces around the house, but the moment it becomes sufficiently be-conscience'ed to feel a twinge of remorse for wiping its arse on the curtains, but does it anyway, you've got to pay the little mutant wretch. Honestly.

However, I don't think Dr MacKeller has been farsighted enough in his use of his Hysterio-Futuro-Scope, as he doesn't seem at all concerned about the exploitation of these humanzees to replace the checkout staff in Woolworths, or to be kept as sex slaves for Extreme Furries, or any of the million and one other things that a halfway inventive imagination could come up with when given the wonderful blank canvas of a future with frickin' Humanzees in it. No.

So what's Dr MacKeller worried about then, I hear you ask? Well, read on little chimp-loving heathens.



Damn those scientists who want to use this loophole that no one has noticed to carry out entirely hypothetical research to find a way to provide more organs for those godless heathens who have been DESTINED BY THE WILL OF GOD to miss out on a donor from our horrendously small donor list (kept small by the WILL OF GOD as punishment for our sins, I expect). The fuckers.


I really don't get this. The Reg says "But the "humanzee" notion is certainly a great way for MacKellar to cast stem-cell scientists - or indeed anyone who ever dares mess with a human embryo for any reason whatsoever - as evil, perverse lunatics". Which is pretty clearly what he's doing.

So he's out to paint scientists as mad nutjobs just desperate to tinker with anything and everything (including, probably, Little Johnny behind the bike sheds too, the scum), but when he has to come up with a motivation, does he say "because they're insane! They can't be trusted! Left to themselves these madmen would find a way to sever your very soul from your body and harness it to power their UNIX box, just because they can!!!111!!1!!"? No. He says it would be to make more organs. Which would be used in medical procedures to save lives.

The bastards, eh?

The other thing that gets me with this is the frothing obsession of the religious establishment with (i) what goes on in people's bedrooms and (ii) the human reproductive system. To the exclusion of all else.

Any time you get some religious talking head on the radio or the tellybox it's to denounce something to do with stem cell research and embryos; abortion; gay marriage; children having any education at all as to what they need to know to have safe sex lives; the immunisation of girls against HPV because it encourages them to be slags (I got very close to killing someone over this); or just the very existence of homosexuals.

Because, surprise surprise, he has managed to link TEH GHEYS OH NOES!!11!! into the whole genetic research field too:



God, those weak willed gheys, eh? If only the populace of Sodom had had a bit more will power, they would have been able to quit smoking, control their tempers and stop bumming each other. If only they'd have known.

So this is what the Church spends its time railing against. Things that don't effect anyone except those concerned. A good use of your life, there, Dr MacKeller. Instead of spending your time like the most excellent Dr Sentamu, Archbishop of York, cutting up his dog collar on AM to protest against Mugabe, or protesting and lobbying the Government about poverty or the unequal treatment of women in the workplace (ha) or the abominably bad treatment of families with disabled children, or any one of a host of issues which have wide ranging effects far, far, far beyond the Christian establishment's crusade against genetic research and a person's right to do what they like with their own bodies.

Sob.

BETEO Today:

~ "Silly ninnies! Stupid church!"

LATER:



EVEN LATER:



Humanity's sole survivor ~ "Damn you! Damn you all to hell!"

The idea of people fucking chimps to see what would happen ain't a new one in scientific circles, so to speak.

High level religious types making outspoken commentary always amuses me. Who are they talking to? Anyone who isn't religious is pretty much always going to ignore what they say because it was said by a man with a dog collar, those who are of a different flavoured religion even more so. And those that are strongly religious are likely to agree with it whatever it is he's actually saying, because he's a highly placed member of their religion, and therefore God probably told him what to say.

So, they're either preaching to the converted, which is a waste of time, or they're preaching to the derisory, which is a waste of time, or they're preaching to normal religious types, who'd probably rather they didn't bother.

A google image search for 'humanzee' comes up with this :



I sincerely hope the scientists carry on the research.

Slightly worried FTFY?

I've been arguing about religion and science with the witless all week, and am all but argued out. Plus I agree with you anyway (by arse, it's good to be able to say that on a forum. Seriously, every single place on the internet that isn't closely related to former AP staff is just awful).

But I will mention that this bit made me chuckle lots.

How are we forming these humanzees? I'm fairly confident in saying that it can't be very simple to do, simply because it's precicely the sort of thing people would do.

I want to be a bioethicist; I appear to be more qualified than this man is but have no means of actually becoming one. It frustrates me how this seems to amount to little more than "I'm scared". Well, perhaps he's right to be, but this all seems extremely fanciful and speculative, and based on about a billion assumptions on things we can't possibly know.

EDIT: I actually believe that there's now pretty compelling evidence that chimpanzees are in fact self-aware. I feel this is something a bioethicist should be aware of; his fear of animality and his implied conception of the subject is a bit worrying, given his profession.

Am I the only one who nervously opened this thread, in case it was about Modz?

Ook.