Humans Aren’t as Special as We Once Thought | Other species exhibit capabilities that were once thought to be exclusive to Homo sapiens
Other species exhibit capabilities that were once thought to be exclusive to Homo sapiens
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The ones who think humans hold exclusive domain over cognition and emotion are the ones who don’t pay attention to other animals/living things.
To assume we’re somehow magically separate or different from the very ecosystem we come from and exist in is a special level of hubris.
Religious folks that think God just made us and put us in his lovely garden to fuck around and ruin everything. They've convinced themselves we are Divine, not just some animals that got smart and figured out how to do things. Everything has gone wrong since and it's only getting worse by the day.
That’s beaten into Christian thinking - “humans are special.” Just an easy way to justify evil towards other creatures and our environment. Christianity is mostly conscience easing for the evil of humanity. Most of MAGA is Christian.
That’s true of every religion, not just Christianity.
Paganism?
You mean the vague as fuck whatever you want it to be religion that has practices in egoism? Yeah, them too.
We have more in common with almost everything in the universe than most people notice—but especially other animals. As Moby once sang, “we are all made of stars.”
Reminds me of a scene depicted in The Expanse series (I highly recommend it). An evil scientist argues with a potential recruit and it goes somewhat like this:
If you were to develop medicine for horses what would you test on? Rats?
Why would I do that? Rats and horses are very different.
Right, we have a responsibility to minimize harm. Testing medicine for horses on rats would be inefficient and unnecessary. Now, what if you were to develop medicine for humans instead?
In the authors notes one of them mentioned that not being able to "solve" this argument is why they stopped pursuing a career in biology.
If we could recreate and model humans down to the molecular or atomic level, it might seem barbaric to test medicines on other beings. However, we do not have that level of accuracy in our simulations for the entire human body, nor we do we have close to processing power either.
Also, the point your making doesn't even translate that well. The reason why we can test medicine on animals is exactly because we are quite similar. We have organs that are similar enough to do rudimentary tests.
If we didn't have animal testing, there would be way more dead humans out there. Yes, we do a fantastic job at killing/hurting them ourselves be it indirectly with things like pollution, neglect, and negligence, as well as directly like murder, war (also murder), rape, and so on. But, how many volunteers do you think we'd find to test our things on before even reaching our current phase 1 testing? Would you be willing to give up the life of another human for the sake of another animal? Would you be OK with doing so if it were a human close to you? Would you golunteer yourself?
We are all very good at caring a lot about things that don't directly impact us. Alt-right types are very quick to be anti-trans, devout Christians against abortion and stemcell therapy, and vegans against animal products. However if the trans person is you (or your child), the person requiring aborting to save the mother being yourself, your wife, or your child, the animal being the difference between your survival or your death, then suddenly things get real really quickly. Animal testing is the same. Sure, unethical testing and rearing without a care for animal welfare is a problem, but if a few thousand mice had to die to save your mother, would you reject the medicine out of principle and also want to prevent any other such medicines being researched in the same manner? Or would you accept it and then scream "no animal testing!!!!1!1!"? Or would you suddenly be OK with animal testing?
My point wasn't how animal testing is bad and shouldn't be done, it's just something from a book that stuck with me.
The person making that argument turns out to be a villain, doing some pretty messed up things. Also, the argument does not convince the other person, they are just uncomfortable and don't know what to answer.
