--- In [email protected], "hugheshugo" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I find the confidence scientists have that we really are just DNA > expression and can perform experiments without damaging anything > quite comforting, to others it's sign we have no respect for the > sanctity of life. Different eyes see different things. A good > question for the religious would be; If people cannot actually prove > their POV should they be allowed to have a say in decisions that > affect the rest of us? > > I think the church is more concerned with damaging any newly arrived > souls, if you believe in that I guess an animal-human hybrid would be > horrific to contemplate. I don't believe in souls as something > external but as our ongoing idea of who/what we are. But it gives me > the creeps when I think what would happen if they do a Dr Moreau let > them survive more than a few days and grow.
Good questions all, and I'll let others deal with them. I'm going to a motocross race and hobnob with bikers today, so I am clearly not worthy to ponder them. :-) What I will point out, for your possible entertainment, is how science fiction has presaged your concerns above and some of the things you've been rapping so well about the last few days, and how long ago. Jules Verne wrote "The Mysterious Island," which deals with these concerns about genetic modification, in 1874. You mentioned telescopes in one of your raps. Do you know how the moons of Mars got their names? >From Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, first published in London in 1726: "They spend the greatest part of their lives in observing the celestial bodies, which they do by the assistance of glasses far excelling ours in goodness. For although their largest telescopes do not exceed three feet, they magnify much more than those of an hundred yards with us, and at the same time show the stars with greater clearness. This advantage hath enabled them to extend their discoveries much further than our astronomers in Europe; for they have made a catalogue of ten thousand fixed stars, whereas the largest of ours do not contain above one third part of that number. They have likewise discovered two lesser stars, or satellites, which revolve about Mars, whereof the innermost is distant from the centre of the primary planet exactly three of the diameters, and the outermost five; the former revolves in the space of ten hours [modern estimate: 7 hr. 39 min.], and the latter in twenty one and an half [modern estimate: 30 hr. 18 min.]; so that the squares of their periodical times are very near in the same proportion with the cubes of their distance from the centre of Mars, which evidently shows them to be governed by the same law of gravitation that influences the other heavenly bodies." Swift named the moons Phobos and Deimos. When they were finally discovered by the American astronomer Asaph Hall in 1877, 151 years after Swift's descrip- tion, he used Swift's names for them. Swift described them 50 years before any telescope had been invented powerful enough to see them. Go figure, eh?
