What Value Has Life?
What is the level of stupidity below which life has no ethical or moral value? How do you value a housefly or an ant? Religion posits the view that human have souls and no other species is so valuable in the eyes of god to be worth more. It is immaterial that souls cannot be held in your hand or adequately defined with scientific accuracy. We are close cousins of Chimpanzees and Great Apes, but we don't assign to them souls and therefore they have no great worth which would keep them safe from experimentation and death at the whims of humans. They can be deemed mere chattel. African-Americans were also declared chattel once and still are in some places. So are women.
What about dumb fish, like tuna and dolphins or whales which science recognizes has a greater brain ratio to body mass than many other animals and appears to be somewhat intelligent using some measure of our choice to determine their placement on the scale of animal to human intelligence.
So did you ever grieve for the squirrel you ran over on the way to the supermarket? Or the deer which took out your headlights when you killed it? How about the horses which go lame and have to be put down because they are no good anymore for racing or riding for your pleasure. Does anyone grieve?
Hinduism grants some value to a fly and a cow
but how about a virus or a
marigold?
How do you value someone's pet dog? You know that companion animal which gives so much joy to the old folks who live down the block from you but is left behind during the flood because nobody cares enough that those old folks will be heartbroken when their pet dies and the animal, a sentient being will also suffer.
Who are we to feel so superior that we can kill off whole species for our pleasure or food or to squeeze them out of their habitat so we can live in the valley in the shadow of the mountains or by the stream where they once took liquid sustenance, which we now pollute with runoff from our factories and our septic tanks or golf courses where we pour our poisons to kill weeds and wild life.
Are animals superior to humans? Of course not because humans are animals; just a different species. And we share almost 99% of our genes with our closest cousins, the Chimpanzees.
Are you feeling superior now?
Hank Roth
Chimps More Evolved Than Humans
By Jeanna Bryner, LiveScience Staff Writer
17 April 2007
Since the human-chimp split about 6 million years ago, chimpanzee genes can be said to have evolved more than human genes, a new study suggests.
The results, detailed online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, contradict the conventional wisdom that humans are the result of a high degree of genetic selection, evidenced by our relatively large brains, cognitive abilities and bi-pedalism.
Jianzhi Zhang of the University of Michigan and his colleagues analyzed strings of DNA from nearly 14,000 protein-coding genes shared by chimps and humans. They looked for differences gene by gene and whether they caused changes in the generated proteins.
Genes act as instructions that organisms use to make proteins and thus are integral to carrying out biological functions, such as transporting oxygen to the body's cells. Different versions of the same gene are called alleles.
Changes in DNA that affect the making of proteins are considered functional changes, while "silent" changes do not affect the proteins. "If we see an excess of functional changes (compared to silent changes) the inference is these functional changes occurred because they were positively selected, because they were useful in some way to the organism," said study team member Margaret Bakewell, also of UM.
Bakewell, Zhang and a colleague found that substantially more genes in chimps evolved in ways that were beneficial than was the case with human genes.
The results could be due to the fact that over the long term humans have had a smaller effective population size compared with chimps.
"Although there are now many more humans than chimps, in the past, human populations were much smaller, and may have been fragmented into even smaller groups," Bakewell told LiveScience. So random events would play a more dominant role than natural selection in humans.
Here is why: Under the process of natural selection, gene variants that are beneficial get selected for and become more common in a population over time. But genetic drift, a random process in which chance "decides" which alleles survive, also occurs. In smaller populations, a fortuitous break for one or two alleles can have a disproportionately greater impact on the overall genes of that population compared with a larger one.
Chance events could also explain why the scientists found more gene variants that were either neutral and had no functional impact or negative changes that are involved in diseases.
There is still much to learn, the scientists say, about human and chimp evolution. "There are possibly a lot of differences between human and chimps that we don't know about, [perhaps] because there are differences in chimps that nobody has studied; a lot of studies tend to focus on humans," Bakewell said.
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What is the ethical or moral value of Life?
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