Aren't we being a little narrow here, concerning ourselves
with only the genotype? I'd say the phenotype is as important,
if not vastly more important then the genotype. After all, you
could theoretically use chemicals to interfere with genetic
expression and transform a clump of cells with a human genetic
payload, and get it to manifest as, say, an ape.
A better thought experiment might be, if you swap a
gorilla's and a human's brain, and over time, the alien cells die
and are replaced by native cells, which one is truly human.
~Maru, who thinks that the criterion should be sentience, not any
physical paramaters.
> From: Richard Baker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Subject: Re: Abortion Re: The Magic Ingredient?
> To: Killer Bs Discussion <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Content-Type: text/plain
>
> I said:
>
> > This may well be so, and yet for any pair of species A and B
> there
> > are paths in gene space that have the property that one end
> of the
> > path is in the cluster for species A, the other end of the
> path is
> > in cluster B, and every point along the path gives the genome
> of a
> > viable organism (given a suitable environment in which
> > morphogenesis can occur). (This is true because any pair of
> species
> > have a common ancestor if one looks far enough back in time,
> so one
> > can head from species A towards a genome from the ancestral
> species
> > C, and from there towards species B.)
>
> I should note that this isn't the situation I described in my
> original
> thought experiment, because the genomes of the ancestral forms
> will in
> general not be combinations of various parts of modern genomes.
> This
> means that, for example, that there might not be viable
> organisms with
> a genome that is half human and half chimp. Getting around this
> issue
> was assumed to be part of the fiendish process involved by my
> scientist. I don't think this affects my argument at all
> though, but if
> it does one can construct a similar series along the path
> through gene
> space described above.
>
> Rich
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