You might be asking, why a pig? I don't know, but forever ago I wrote software for a cardiovascular imaging lab and pigs were their primary test subjects. I was like, "why pigs?" and the PI was like, "Imaging-wise, pig hearts aren't too different from humans. Plus, we can give them a heart attack in the scanner and not go to jail. Some labs use dogs. I just can't do that."
Pigs are really common in biomedical testing. They are physically a similar size and weight to humans. They also reach maturity in about 6 months. Much cheaper to raise than primates, and more likely to get approval for testing. My friends in biomed grad school named one of theirs cyber pig because it has about 30 different experiments ran on it before it was killed, and afterwards it was portioned out for further tests.
Weird how this is said without a shred of sympathy or concern for an intelligent, helpless creature. Weirder how it can be said without a sympathetic or concerned response. I hope we can someday move beyond seeing animals as a mere resource.
From what I heard, the pig lived a relativity good life. It was well cared for by the large animal veterinary school on campus. Had more space and better food than any factory raised pig. All experiments passed an ethics review. The pig was anesthetized before any procedure. The number of experiments may sound barbaric on the surface, but it was to reduce the overall number of pigs used in trials.
Modern medicine would not be possible without animal trials. Lab-on-a-chips may reduce the need in the future, but animals will still be required for device testing that needs an entire structure, not just a few cells. Different people may weigh the ethical dilemma differently, but when it's your loved dying due a heart defect I am willing to bet you will still choose a treatment tested on animals.
Thanks for your clarification. It's good to read that the pig was well cared and experiments passed ethics reviews. To be fair your original comment was lacking this information, hence when I first read it felt (unintentionally as we can see now) a bit cold-hearted to me as well.
Honestly, I felt that the ethics board part was implied. In western universities it's very hard to do animal testing. No one just strolls down to Pets Mart and picks up some mice. The Animal Welfare Act governs animal testing in the United States, and school risk funding if they don't follow the law. To be honest, I don't know the ins and outs of the specific programs. I just know they had to present and get their protocol (experiment) approved. It was a serious thing to present, not a rubber stamp process. If you want more details, I found this doc from my school. Purdue does biomedical testing and is also a premiere large animal veterinary school.
I know University of Calgary had a bio professor who got in hot water for abusing animals (essentially: he encouraged his student to not anaesthetize animals before surgery to fudge numbers). So there are definitely grad students who will happily torture animals if it can help their career.
Not sure where it came from, but there is a popular notion that scientists are somehow more moral than everyone else. Obviously that's not true. A lot of terrible things were made and many terrible acts committed by scientists. They can be just as depraved as the rest of us.
The two things you mention are not necessarily in opposition:
The average scientist could be much more moral than the average human, and you could still get the occasional mad man; just need a large enough population of scientists.
lol that's it? If they said something like "how you feel about it is inconsequential" I would accept it as a pragmatic/stoic way to look at it. There is no way a life in a lab can be even remotely good, well cared or not, but it's hard to compare when a typical life of a pig ends with being slaughtered, only to end up expired pieces of meat most of the times.
How do you think a life of a pig would end if it wasn't being slaughtered? Most likely it would be half-eaten alive by a predator and the rest left to rot or be taken by scavengers. The same thing will happen now (the expired pieces of meat will mostly become food for insect larvae) except it's a human doing the slaughtering and the animal is killed before being eaten.
This line of argument also supports the extermination of all living beings because it prevents all future suffering. Think about that before you use it.
I see it a bit different. Using your own sentence structure:
"The line of argument supports the prevention of the existence of an undefined number of living beings to max. the quality of life of other existing living beings."
The argument doesn't seem to me as simple as you are portraying it and I don't see where you got the extermination part from.
> the life of such pig would not even begin, which is a good thing
The comment I was responding to said nothing about increasing the quality of life of any living beings. It only asserted that non-existence is a good thing. I made the assumption that they came to that conclusion based on the reasoning that a pig that does not exist cannot suffer. I made the extension that you can also prevent suffering by immediately ending a life. Yes, there is a distinction between failing to breed another generation and immediately killing all members of the current generation but the end result is the same.
> It only asserted that non-existence is a good thing
this phrasing is really disingenuous. What I said was non-existence in case of farm pigs is a good thing. Try to make less sweeping over-generalized statements, especially when responding to people who aren't doing that
> I made the extension that you can also prevent suffering by immediately ending a life
oh cool thought, did you just bring that up to argue with yourself? Because no one said anything like that prior.
No, because I never claimed that preventing suffering is the only goal. Just add one more goal which is potentially experiencing pleasure then you can justify most lives, well except that of those pigs
In which case it becomes an optimization problem where you have to find the optimal number of living beings to exterminate in order to provide the maximal amount of pleasure for those remaining. Not any better.
> find the optimal number of living beings to exterminate
you are conflating birth control with "exterminate", not the same thing. Birth control has its roles, does it not?
> in order to provide the maximal amount of pleasure for those remaining.
I never said that, pleasure is an example, society is optimized for way more variables that suffering and pleasure.
In the context of farm animals, it looks like the only purpose for the pigs to exist is to be food, then when the food is over-produced and wasted, then you have to question why have that many of them born into a miserable life then die pointlessly.
> Not any better
just say it like that, no explanation? What is not good? Optimization?
Morality doesn’t exist. It arises from the emotional responses of those with the power to prevent actions they disagree with or perpetuate ones they do agree with. Social contract theory.
Wishing you had never been born is one thing, wishing someone/something else had never been born is not a response of empathy but rather personal guilt.
Empathy does not result in anyone trying to end suffering of another being but the own personal suffering they have through the empathetic connection, and thus they seek to end the suffering of others only because it causes them to suffer.
This is not even a question, being born into a life of slavery and ultimately being slaughtered is worse than not being born. Think about it, you are born into a prison and given no chance to even develop a proper consciousness. This is very different than a fully aware human getting locked up in a prison.
However since the individual being born is not making the choice, it falls to the individual or group benefitting from the individual being born into the circumstance you described. Universal morality is a form of anthropomorphization, or projecting human characteristics onto an amoral natural world.
I love it when people are so argumentative about such a simple thing. We are talking about birth control, there is no individual exists to make any choice.
> Projecting human characteristics onto an amoral natural world.
this is not a bad thing comparing to the alternative which is assuming that animals are too dumb to be sympathize with
Also, we are saving human lives. With success in this procedure, we could be saving your/our loved ones.
From the article:
“This is a truly remarkable breakthrough,” [the patient] said in a statement. “As a heart transplant recipient, myself with a genetic heart disorder, I am thrilled by this news and the hope it gives to my family and other patients who will eventually be saved by this breakthrough.”
Well the grandparent responded to a comment observing no sympathy being shown, with a comment that showed no sympathy, instead with reasoning for why it's worthwhile, and downplaying any suffering. I am not saying dexwiz was encouraging/promoting suffering of pigs, but they were ignoring the original call to express sympathy to these animals.
It's not for show. As I said it was weird IMO that no concern for the pig was expressed. Given their capacity for suffering I would hope that people genuinely feel concern, which is not an invitation for hollow expressions of pity. Just doing that wouldn't make a lack of concern any less strange to me.
But dexwiz apparently enquired, or was at least aware that it seemed to have a reasonably good life. I guess that addressed my comment.
Only because technically we have no obligation of any kind to feel anything for anything.
But if a human was being experimented without their informed choice we would have a moral obligation to try to inform them, free them, to enquire about their welfare. What's the basis for thinking it be so different for other animals?
And if you're thinking 'but we can't obtain their informed choice' maybe we have our answer.
As for the loved one argument, probably. But that wouldn't necessarily make me right. In fact my proximity to the situation would probably make any objective evaluation of what's right or wrong impossible. That would effectively remove my credibility as a reasonable interlocutor when discussing the ethics at all, like a cop in a ticking time-bomb scenario isn't the best person to call on to craft torture policy.
It wasn't my intention to judge (I don't know your position on anything) it just stood out to me. Animals often aren't treated with much respect or concern, especially ones suffering for our benefit. That's not a comment on you.
Weird that these statements are made (and I don't mean by you, it's a trope to make them by people in general in discussions like this, I'm not picking you out) that it somehow justifies, or ameliorates, the awfulness of experimenting then dissecting (as someone said) a helpless intelligent creature.
I think these statements justify animal trials and using it to benefit humans definitely. But it doesn't justify or make better that it's still an awful thing to do to an animal and for the animal I think. It's weird right like where they get the blood of some sort of poor little sea creature that's got a blue copper containing blood it's just awful.
I really think we need to revise and reform a lot of how industry interacts with and especially commoditizes animals. I'm not saying we need to be vegans at all but I think there's so much room for improving how we talk think and act about this stuff. To make I guess what is probably an obvious point but I think the reasonableness of that point is not obvious but I think it can be a reasonable and obvious point without really attacking anybody and that non-threatening nature of that reasonable and obvious point I think is what is important about what I'm saying. It's possible. Less this comment be dismissed as some sort of low effort outrage--my heart's beating 50 beats a minute right now I'm not upset. I just think we can improve things there massively but that doesn't make anybody a monster.
If you can accept humans can eat helpless intelligent creatures, then the fact we perform ethics-reviewed anesthetised procedures and later dissect the same animals really shouldn't keep you up at night.
Why are you so focused on the western context for animal experiments? I'm sure it's more comforting to think about ethics boards and well run universities. But there are exemptions for militaries and other loopholes for smaller creatures, regular stories of abuse in labs, to say nothing of ghastly experiments done in China, which doesn't have ANY national or regional protection laws, among other countries.
The post was about human consideration of animals as a resource generally.
It's not much of an argument saying that since eating animals is a thing, (the comfortably narrowly selected example of) other things we do with them is no cause for questions.
Not that someone (as in anyone, as in "no one can understand"), just that particular someone, owing to their criticism saying, "Given you think X, you should also think Y" indicates they don't understand what I think.
> "reduce",
As in take what I say or think, and misinterpret it, reduce it down to something that seems to not make sense.
> or "invalidate" another's morals
Yeah, because someone else's misunderstanding and misinterpretation doesn't touch and certainly doesn't invalidate my actual moral sensitivity. So whatever that is, this person's criticism did not affect that and is not about that. Even tho it presents itself as being so...which is deceptive...
So much on the internet is making a point out of a misinterpretation of what other's are saying. So it's vital to reframe and point that out...otherwise you end up arguing on terms which you didn't set, which are self-serving to the (accidental? sometimes) provocateur/trix and which aren't anything to do with what you're saying. It's easy to get dragged off your point into a logically coherent cul-de-sac which has nothing to do with your stance but somehow, because you didn't point out the deceptive reframing, you are arguing it as if it does have to do with your stance. I think a lot of damage gets done that way. It's important to avoid it.
So..in that spirit...what was your misinterpreted reframing (whether deliberate or accidental)....?
Basically this: You are saying that I am suggesting that we cannot invalidate another's morals, while saying you think that's exactly what I'm doing.
Actually I'm not saying we cannot invalidate/understand other's morals--I'm saying if you don't understand (or if you do misinterpret <=> "reduce") my point of view, whatever you say about it doesn't, and can't, invalidate it. I doubt you'd disagree with that: e.g. An argument that claims to square the circle without grasping the problem, does not succeed, despite the true believer's fervent insistence.
But I'm also not making some general point in that response about "No One Can Invalidate Any One's Morals". That's a reductive/misinterpretation an (evil / deliberate / accidental) reframing. I'm talking about me, specifically. Me personally.
So all I'm is protecting my moral sensitivity, which I like very much, thank you, from random invalid criticism--which if I was to let them get to me, would really hurt. Why would you want to get in the way of that, or try to contradict me? Like...you'd like to see me hurt? That's not very good.
Think about it: So, I'm just supposed to think--oh, I spent my life developing my moral sensitivity, through all my experiences, and reflections upon those, and some random comes along on the internet--and proved that I'm wrong: so I was wrong about everything that happened in my life, I failed to properly grasp my experiences, I came to the wrong conclusions. I've been wrong about everything. Man that would be painful! And really upsetting, and imbalancing. Why would you want someone to go through that? You really think, that's what I deserve? Just imagine everything you thought you understood, was founded on a lie--a lie ensured, basically by your own self-deceptive, self-serving stupidity. And some random on the internet made you realize that! Well, I would think that way--if I thought they actually clearly saw what I think, and understood it, and presented it faithfully. But they didn't.
Can you grasp how incredibly painful it would be to go through that? So all I'm doing is not making that much of what people say on the internet. But being clear about how I'm doing it, and why. Does that make sense?
I mean someone could hit on exactly the thread that unravels my fragile sense of self...if that's what I had. But I think my sense of self is more robust than that, forged by fires of many different difficult and joyous experiences. But it's still possible for me to be deceiving myself, and I'm still open to hearing that and having my mind and heart opened by some random, and seeing their point of view. That empathy is exactly why I need a strong defense as well--if I was to take on everything that people said about what I said, as if they were right...just because I could see and feel how they thought that way...it would be too much. Just because they have a view, doesn't mean it's right...and actually it would be stupid of me to act like other people were always right. And this time, this guy wasn't. Sometimes people are tho...But normally people who are so insightful as to be able to pull on the thread that unravels you...know what they are doing (because it's no mean skill) and they deliver it with compassion. So a good first level filter (which isn't always accurate), is: does this person show any real understanding of me, or compassion? If the answer is no--odds are they have no idea what they are talking about about you.
But sometimes, people do get it right. And show me something I would rather not face about myself. And when that happens I just go to pieces and then try to pick up the pieces...To incorporate that new truth into my being. I rework everything to better face the world and reality the way it is. Luckily, it doesn't happen all that often. Which makes sense because I've always been like this: I spent the time, doing me, and reflecting on many things, and someone else is not just going to come along and see all that and get it, and say, "Oh, you know in this life long personal project of yourself being you, I saw a spot you missed. Here" But sometimes they do. But mostly...they are people who know you very well, and who deliver it with compassion. But most of those evolutions just come from myself, looking at the world and evolving in line with it. Because I know me best, and can take care of me best. As is the case for basically everyone. But we also all have blindspots and so being open to learn from others, to empathize with their view, being able to be wrong...is a requirement for ending up being right. I'm sure you'd agree. It's like the true spirit of the scientific method applied to personal development...
But being right about me, doesn't make me right about others...But being perceptive and insightful makes me more likely to be right...But even so, none of that really matters here, because I'm not trying to tug on a thread that unravels someone...I'm not speaking about anyone in particular in the quotes you give, just about the trope talking points, and zeitgeist discourse "current thinking" about this topic. So when I am talking like I understand it, I'm not contradicting myself because I wasn't saying, "no one can understand anyone else". And I think I'm leaving the barn doors wide open, I don't think I'm reducing or misinterpreting anything there, mainly because I'm being so general. Am I invalidating the moral sensitivity, of hypothetical people who I don't mention as individuals (but rather address as the collective 'we', of which I am a part) by saying 'improving how we talk think and act about'...Invalidating? I'd say more encouraging a correction. Does that mean I'm saying it's wrong? Well, it's not as right as a way we can do it better. But I'm specifically saying, that point can be made, without turning anyone into a monster. And it's important to do that...So my point is very much not about "making wrong" or "invalidating". What's important is we can make it better.
Like, that's a real nuance, a real distinction that's valid. Think about it: If I say you make your relationship with your wife-to-be, better, if I acknowledge how I've seen you do that over the last 6 months to 1 year, and you also agreed that you had made it better, am I saying what you did before was "wrong"? I mean, it might have been, but I'm not saying that...I'm just saying we can make it better. That's really important--to be open to getting better. Because if you're not open to that, and if you're sure you're already "as good as can be", or already "learned everything there is to learn", then that puts you at risk of being a real arrogant, self-righteous person who's convinced they're always right, and then does all sorts of harm to others, because they can always fake justify it as "well I know everything, I'm right". But really maybe they're just afraid to be wrong...which makes sense...because being wrong is hard. But you got to do it sometimes otherwise you won't end up being right.
Thank you for your comment. But it wasn't really important...you didn't really get what I said, and you tried to reduce it to this contradiction. What was the point of that? Really just want to hurt me? I hope you can see that there's a lot more going on, than your reductive view of it. Why did I take the time to explain it? Because I feel sad thinking you will keeping doing this, I want you to be better, then other people will be happier. But also I want to be heard, I don't want to be misinterpreted, misrepresented.
I guess you took what I said as contradicting your point of view. Maybe it makes you feel better to think that people who advocated for better treatment of animals, are full of contradictions, and therefore stupid, and therefore not what you need to listen to. So when I replied with something pushing back, invalidating the critical dismissal, you weren't satisfied. I hadn't fit the "animal advocates are contradictory" model that you wanted to see. So you tried to prove that by misinterpreting what I said into some contradiction that you invented. Maybe it's more a general theme for you, that about animals specifically, you think everyone is bunk and full of contradictions, so there's no way that anyone can tell off anyone else about anything. Because everyone has to work out their own way. Well, actually, apart from suggesting that you're a teenager or early 20-something (I'm not being derisive, just has that rebellious, forge your own identity streak, but if you're older, that's really cool, you maintained that youthful mindset)--you and me very much agree with that. I guess I'm just further down the road with that than you are. When you do yourself for long enough, and come up with your own perspective, eventually you probably settle into developing a set of morals: like you go from-> everything in the world relative, and nothing has moral authority, really, (beside individual feelings, being a personal compass, if that's your take, as it was mine), to, well these things are good, and these things are bad (but it doesn't have to be b&w, it can be grey). It's really pretty natural as you get more experience, to see those patterns, and realize these things work and these other things don't. You'll probably find that condescending...but how can a claim of more experience, necessary almost by more time, be anything but condescending? So what do you expect...talking with people who put more time into something than you have so far. You can choose to emphasize how you feel it's condescending, or you can get something out of it. Or you can do both...but it might be less efficient. Good luck! :)
If you think that humans make terrible things to animals, you should check what they do to other humans. There are "beautiful, human" stories about a certain Dr. Mengele, or Unit 731 or Guantanamo...
The weird thing was, the parties from the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese Army, responsible for atrocious experiments on humans, were pardoned by the allies in exchange for their findings and research results.
The Allies never pardoned Mengele. He escaped capture and execution due to a combination of bureaucratic bungling (he was captured by the US in 1945, and while in custody his name was added to a list of wanted major war criminals, but somehow the list never made it to the POW camp authorities until after they'd already released him), then the US government somehow forming the false belief that he had already died, then the obstacles Mossad encountered trying to track him down in early 1960s Argentina, then Mossad deciding that the security threat posed by the Arab states (in the years leading up to the Six Day War) was a higher priority, and that by the time (1985) that public pressure had built to the point that the Israeli, West German and US governments were motivated to make a serious effort to find him, he had already died (while vacationing under a false name in Brazil in 1979).
He escaped justice through ineptitude, lack of political will and competing priorities, luck, and the assistance of the Nazi underground, not due to any active decision to forgive his monstrous deeds.
It's also a better life than what most animals have in the wild. The wild isn't some fairytale happy place; it's a place of hunger, fear, brutality, pain and disease.
It reminds me of the old saying: "they overexaggerated the aggressiveness of European wolves, they're only dangerous when hungry". Ok, so did European wolves just go to the shop to buy food when hungry?
so by your logic as per statement #1: do you think an iron age peasant, who undoubtably would have had a more brutal life than us, would have swapped their freedom and way of life for being kept in a cage, being experimented on by technology they would find to be terrifying dark magic that could kill them at any moment (see above commenter's mention of the pigs having heart attacks), all for some basic but guaranteed food each day?
It's really strange to me how these topics lately have tendency to devolve info infantile exchanges like the one above, where the first statement only serves to demonstrate author's emotional bona fides and the second validate and assuages it by offering a platitude. This is how one would interact with a child.
People forget about how hard it is to get through ethics reviews for animal testing. I remember a PI telling me that it was easier to run psych experiments on undergrads compared to rats or mice.
It's not weird at all. Biologically speaking, we are designed to eat meat. Our bodies produce all of the enzymes, such as protease and lipase, necessary for the breakdown and absorption of meat.
The weird thing is how we developed sympathy and concern for such things. Human civilizations' current abundance of resources allows us the luxury to develop moral "philosophies" and become "vegetarians" effectively masking our more savage nature.
Make no mistake, You are biologically designed to kill and eat flesh. And if you can kill it and eat it, of course you can experiment on it.
Cats are "biologically designed to kill and eat flesh" but have you ever seen
what cats do to the animals they capture for food? On the other hand, humans
don't, as a rule torture our food and we usually kill our food before we eat it.
Not all meat-eating animals have the same kind of behaviour toward their prey.
Humans are "biologically designed" to love other animals and care for them.
Not in an Elmyra Duff kind of way, but in the way that has allowed us to tame
and domesticate the wild ancestors of the animals we still live with. In the
same way that our animals have a docile and calm nature that allows them to be
domesticated, we have a caring and loving nature that allows us to domesticate
them. We are not lions. A lion could not domesticate a flock of sheep. It would
just fall on the sheep and slaughter them, on the first day. Without our love
for animals, which is just as ingrained into us as our love of eating their
flesh, we wouldn't be who we are today, our civilisation wouldn't be what it is
today, our bodies and brains wouldn't be what they are today.
Those animals have given us so much, and they will continue to give us even
more. The least we can do is to treat them with respect and ensure they have a
dignified life and a dignified death.
> A lion could not domesticate a flock of sheep. It would just fall on the sheep and slaughter them, on the first day.
What a simplistic view of lions. I agree that lions don't really have the capacity to domesticate a flock of sheep, but to suggest that they're mindless killing machines that would meaninglessly mass slaughter sheep the first chance they got is weird. They're complicated creatures with rich emotional lives, and I've personally seen them plenty of times pass up opportunities to kill because there was no point. Interestingly, there's also lots of youtube footage of lions and other big cats attempting to care for other animals (albeit typically ineptly).
A local rancher lost a number of sheep to a mountain lion that apparently enjoyed surplus killing. After the first spree, the cat was captured, collared, and relocated but it came back and took out 11 more sheep plus an alpaca, after which it was culled by the state. Big cats are certainly interesting creatures, but it would be foolish to assume a given cat would care for something, eat it, or kill it for sport. They are all possible outcomes, and depending upon one's perception of cat psychology is a good way to get Roy Horn'ed and end up in a wheelchair.
It seems my views are not simplistic enough to not warrant a snotty response from someone who knows so much better. Oh, what tortured lives we simple folk must live...
> Human civilizations' current abundance of resources allows us the luxury to develop moral "philosophies"
You've got it backwards; Human's current abundance is the creation of human cooperation, which doesn't really work without some sort of ethical framework. Philosophy enables us to achieve more, it is not the result of our achievement.
In order to achieve the leisure time you need to develop these philosophies you need civilization first. Otherwise you'd be too worried about hunting and gathering to even find the time to think about these things.
A very Complex civilization requires what you talk about, but make no mistake; civilization itself came first.
That depends how you define civilisation. Margaret Mead said it started the moment people went from abandoning to caring for each other in spite of catastrophic injuries that would have required very long periods of recovery.
Someone made the decision to care for another, much less functional person at their own significant expense. Was a philosophical principle behind that or just enlightened self interest? Maybe we have an innate capacity for empathy. Other animals appear to as well.
Chasing an animal down, killing it, and eating it is in my opinion a significantly different activity than subjecting it to thirty likely-invasive procedures over the course of its life and then continuing to perform experiments on its dead body. Not saying it's more or less morally questionable, but significantly different.
Evolutionary biology is overused as justification for human behavior. We were not "designed" to eat meat because we were not designed. We evolved the capacity to eat meat just as we evolved a capacity for sympathy/empathy. Other animals have also been shown to "befriend"/care for/grieve over animals of different species, so our own capacity to sympathize for animals should be no surprise.
>Evolutionary biology is overused as justification for human behavior.
Let me get one thing straight. I am not justifying anything. My angle is, what's the point? Don't justify anything at all. We're evil for killing, so be it. I am looking at it from a completely dispassionate angle. I do not need to somehow merge and mutate my moral framework to make it work with the existing reality.
>We were not "designed" to eat meat because we were not designed.
Ok we were "designed" by natural selection to eat meat. I am not making a theological argument.
> Chasing an animal down, killing it, and eating it is in my opinion a significantly different activity than subjecting it to thirty likely-invasive procedures over the course of its life and then continuing to perform experiments on its dead body. Not saying it's more or less morally questionable, but significantly different.
In the wild, carnivores devour the flesh of their prey while it is alive and awake. Possibly more significant if not equal in being morally questionable.
>Other animals have also been shown to "befriend"/care for/grieve over animals of different species, so our own capacity to sympathize for animals should be no surprise.
No it is not. But what is surprising is that this empathy is the dominant behavior to our own evolutionary detriment (however mild). Empathy evolved to aid in survival of our genome, but when empathy evolves to the point where we are unable experiment on animals to assist in helping our own species... that is something unnatural.
I think we're on the same page in believing that there's not an inherent morality to these behaviors. I'm not accusing of you to try to justify some morally evil act.
The comment you originally replied to said this:
> Weird how this is said without a shred of sympathy or concern for an intelligent, helpless creature
To which you replied:
> It's not weird at all. Biologically speaking, we are designed to eat meat.
> The weird thing is how we developed sympathy and concern for such things.
What I was responding to was the claim that because we evolved the capacity to eat meat, we should naturally be dispassionate to the killing of animals. What I'm saying is that since we evolved both the capacity for carnivory and sympathy, that our capacity for eating animals does not make our sympathy for animals at all unnatural.
It's not unnatural for us to want to kill animals for our survival. But it's also not unnatural for us to care about and feel sympathy towards animals. I feel that you've been using our capacity for meat-eating to deem vegetarianism, sympathy towards animals, etc. as against our nature.
With that, the point of my differentiating between the act of hunting and eating animals versus experimenting with them and their dead bodies is comparable to the difference in severity of humans fighting each other versus torturing each other. Humans clearly have the capacity for both, and yet one typically elicits a higher negative reaction in people than the other. Our ability to empathize with all sorts of pain falls along such an axis.
Edit:
To your last point, if people naturally develop an empathy towards animals so strong that it overrides their own sense of self-preservation, why is that unnatural? Is a human giving their life to save other humans unnatural? That's exactly why I keep repeating that there is no "design" - or if you'd prefer, "intent". There is no rule in nature that says species are supposed to prioritize the survival of their own, and so deviating from that nonexistent rule is not unnatural. If experimenting on animals is absolutely necessary to humanity's survival and humanity one day refuses, it will simply die out like millions of species before it. Going extinct isn't unnatural either.
I've never talked about "rules" or "intent" the way you put it.
I am simply saying how else do you describe the hand. The hand is for grasping things the rock is not. How to I ascribe this difference without using the word design or purpose because clearly the hand is much much more efficient at grasping things.
Sure you can use the hand for things it was not "designed" for like hand stands and walking while hand standing and if there was selection pressure your hands can evolve to be less hand like. But in doing such things you are departing from a "design."
Let me put it in a way that won't distract you. Your hand is efficient at grasping things by doing hand stands you are using it in ways that are not efficient. You are departing from the efficiency zone. There is merit in ONLY using the hammer on a nail rather than a screw driver even when the hammer was evolved with Zero actual "design" or "intent" and can one day evolve into something different.
Get it? So the same thing applies to not eating meat. By not doing so, someone is departing from the "efficiency zone." See how awkward it is to use "efficiency zone" in place of "design"?
I'd rather operate in my efficiency zone rather than push the boundaries of it just so that my progeny 1 million years later can walk on their hands. But that's just my personal take. My argument itself has no agenda other than to say that by not eating meat you are willfully departing from the efficiency zone. By being compassionate about the pig you are doing the same. And using the word "design" is just an EASIER way to express this departure from the "efficiency zone".
I appreciate that explanation. While awkward, I believe "efficiency zone" is a much clearer term to use, or at least it was worthwhile clarifying that that's what you meant.
While I understand what you're saying, I still don't think that ultimately matters when talking about what humans should or shouldn't be doing, what we're supposed to or not supposed to be doing, considering:
1. Human nature is not particularly efficient, and neither is evolution, at least on the surface. Peacocks' feathers are not particularly efficient features for them to develop. Yes, avoiding meat may seem harder than not avoiding meat, but the same could be said for following a religion, or organizing into a governing body, or adhering to some social norm, and yet humans have naturally done those for probably their entire existence. They do so because they at least perceive a benefit for them even if some might disagree on that benefit.
2. The human digestive system is not mono-faceted. It evolved to be multi-use and flexible. You are not using a hammer incorrectly by refraining from using the claw side because you've decided your problem can be solved perfectly fine with the hammer face. You are not using a TV incorrectly if you never visit channel 19 because you don't want to watch whatever is on channel 19.
I stand by my point. The fact that you can efficiently do something doesn't mean you're "supposed to" do that thing. It just gives you the option.
"suppose to" is another loaded and ambiguous word. You can smoke and inject your self with heroin everyday. It's not efficient and it doesn't mean you're not "suppose to" do it.
But there is something off with doing these things and I don't want to get into the pedantics of it all. Not eating meat is in the same general area without the social stigma of being a drug abuser.
> Other animals have also been shown to "befriend"/care for/grieve over animals of different species, so our own capacity to sympathize for animals should be no surprise.
This part is actually true. Some animals do befriend, cooperate with or grieve over animals of different species. Not all animals are bugs and spiders.
> Empathy evolved to aid in survival of our genome, but when empathy evolves to the point where we are unable experiment on animals to assist in helping our own species... that is something unnatural.
Evolution is not a god. Things evolve because it happens, not for fixed purpose. If we genetically evolve to be "unable experiment on animals to assist in helping our own species", then that evolution is as natural as anything else.
Yep, I've seen a few people chucking around phrases like "designed by nature" which are both wrong and confusing. "Design" implies intent before the fact, which is not the case.
We, as a species, are not "finished" in any way or "more evolved" than other species. There is no destination evolution as such.
We have plenty of traits that are not useful but also not a hindrance and so they remain.
On the subject of cooperation between species I'm always fascinated by inter-tree species communication. You might think that trees in a forest are all individually fighting each other for resources but it's more complex than that.
>Yep, I've seen a few people chucking around phrases like "designed by nature" which are both wrong and confusing.
That's me chucking that phrase and I am telling you there's good reasoning for it. Think about it. How do I differentiate between the human hand and a rock? Do I say:
The human hand is a low entropy configuration of atoms that is very efficient at grasping things while the rock is a high entropy configuration of atoms that is not efficient at grasping things.
OR do I say...
The human hand is designed to grasp things the rock is not.
See. One sentence just rolls off the tongue better but I guess I have to get into the technicalities otherwise people are confused.
Either way, People like to get into linguistic debates on the definition of a word without realizing that it's a trap. Nothing profound is actually being discussed when we're just talking about how to properly use the word "design." Think about it... you're just debating about the proper definition of a vocabulary word.
Granted I'll tell you it's an effective trap. People get into these debates without realizing how pointless it all is. The famous debate is "What is life?" Well if you want to argue about that you have to realize that the word "life" is loaded and ambiguously defined. Attempting this argument is simply trying to demarcate the complex boundaries of the word. It's simply an attempt to add more bullet points and rules to an overly complex vocabulary word.
How about we stop arguing about vocabulary.
>We, as a species, are not "finished" in any way or "more evolved" than other species. There is no destination evolution as such.
Where did this come from? I don't see anyone making that argument. Sure we can as a species can start ingesting gasoline and likely with enough time and natural selection we could involve into a gasoline eating species.
This does not change the fact that there is meaning to the sentence: "Humans are not designed to eat gasoline." Guess the intent of my usage of that sentence without getting pedantic and try to express and convey the same intent without the use of the word "design" or "purpose."
Never said such a thing. However we can influence macro features through something called artificial selection. In this sense we design something through the same mechanism used as natural selection. The difference is, the hand that guides is artificial rather then natural but the outcome is the same: a design, a machine with a specific purpose. Man... this is just pedantry. I'm not here to discuss the definition of a unimportant word.
The word is important, because you use it to cast judgement on one kind of evolutionary path. In your comment, it is wrong, because it is not "as originally designed".
You would say that a species advanced enough to throw quantum computing at theoretical math problems would be able to develop and act in ways that are not dictated by the laws of evolution.
After all we manage successfully to abstain from actual reproduction in much of the developed world to a degree that makes our societies shrink. Not exactly fit, from an evolutionary point of view.
I think a more accurate phrasing is that we're "designed" by natural section to _optionally_ eat meat. Large numbers of people like many Hindus, Mahayana Buddhists, and now vegans don't eat meat and can live healthily. By the way, most meat-eaters utilise fire when processing the meat - something that was invented - rather similarly to how Vitamin B12 supplements have been invented and now help vegans.
Re. empathy - I very much doubt it's to our detriment when one of the main threats to our survival is lack of empathy leading to extinction-causing wars - something that may have already destroyed previous intelligent civilisations around the universe. Even with medical experiments on animals - if they were much reduced I think this would likely lead to more effort & subsequent innovations in replacement technologies like cell cultures & simulations - which could lead to faster medical breakthroughs than if we continue on the current animal-testing business-as-usual trajectory.
Human beings are also designed for aggression towards each other, yet we generally try to control those parts of our 'savage nature' in modern society.
Torturing defenseless animals is not an inescapable facet of human nature. It's something we choose to do and be OK with.
> Human beings are also designed for aggression towards each other, yet we generally try to control those parts of our 'savage nature' in modern society.
Yes, we've developed quite sophisticated organizations to coordinate the violence, and then developed quite sophisticated weapons to carry it out.
This sounds true at face but do we have any evidence that violence per capita is lower here now than it is in a tighter but less organized clan society of yesteryear where any violence you would perpetrate would either be against your own extended family or outside aggressors (and modern society or at least US is already very brutal to outside nations).
>Human beings are also designed for aggression towards each other, yet we generally try to control those parts of our 'savage nature' in modern society.
No. There is no evolutionary benefit for raw aggression. Raw aggression appears during times of limited resources where aggression contributes to survival. Humans as all living things, are designed to survive and use any means to achieve it.
Given minimal resources we all will revert to our primal natures.
>Torturing defenseless animals is not an inescapable facet of human nature. It's something we choose to do and be OK with.
Nothing is inescapable. You are designed by nature to live out a certain lifetime yet you can escape your nature by killing yourself. This does not change your fundamental nature. We are more prone to follow our nature then to ignore it.
> There is no evolutionary benefit for raw aggression. Raw aggression appears during times of limited resources where aggression contributes to survival.
Those sentences seem to contradict each other very directly.
The benefit doesn't just exist for no reason. It only exists because of limited resources. When resources are not limited we don't display aggressive behavior.
We are not living in a time of limited resources therefore it is actually evolutionary detrimental for us to be aggressive. It's not a coincidence that our popular culture de-emasculates itself bit by bit every decade. It's because we live in plentiful times and our behavior (which is conditioned through natural selection) reflects this.
I agree with this take. Chimps kill and eat smaller monkeys all the time. If you watch any nature documentary you can see how ruthless animals are as it's all a survival game after all.
I'm no biologist but the empathy / sympathy part also seems to be an evolved trait. It should bring stability to a social group and reduce injuries due to needless in-fighting which effectively ensures better survival as a group.
"It should bring stability to a social group and reduce injuries due to needless in-fighting which effectively ensures better survival as a group."
That's probably how it started, but the definition of social group expanded as we came to realise how arbitrary and culturally determined social group boundaries are. Once we account for those biases, and start to see all animals as just trying to survive in the world, it's a natural progression to extend that empathy to them too.
Including all living creatures isn't quite useful in terms of survival chances.
Thinking about this topic, we could also philosophize the whole "torture" aspect. Presumably it means physical pain to an animal which many feel uneasy about. But if you think about it, pain, as signals to the brain are also evolved mechanisms in order to survive. Pain is a crude signal indicating that the life of that animal is in danger but they are not perfect indicators.
If pain signals were more accurate they would activate the moment an animal approaches a human with a shotgun similar to how you feel pain touching boiling water. But the pain mechanism hasn't become that sophisticated yet. So even the pain is an arbitrary crude mechanism so real "torture" would be loss of habitat for example but animals won't feel that as pain.
That is like saying biologically speaking, 65% of the world’s population isn’t designed to drink milk, because they don’t produce the enzyme lactase. Yes, it is true. No, it does not mean anything on its own.
Those same moral philosophies stop us from killing each other for sport, even though it is in our “savage nature”.
Meat consumption is ultimately driven by consumer choice, and consumers will choose what they want to eat
No, humans are omnivores, not carnivores. Our bodies are designed to function on a wide variety of food including fresh produce. To each their own, but consuming meat is a choice, not a necessity.
A swiss army knife is designed to be used in many different ways. Just because you don't use all the ways doesn't mean it's not designed for it.
You are an omnivore and you are designed to eat meat. Additionally, you are not designed to eat cellulose which is a huge component of what it means to be a herbivore. You are designed to eat meat, and designed to eat certain types of veggies. Who's to say that the veggie part is just the back up mechanism?
Either way you ARE designed to eat veggies and MEAT, you can choose to eat veggies and deny half your nature, yes.. that is your choice.
I already said this in a different comment, but the difference is that we were not designed while a Swiss army knife was. Design implies intent— it implies that something was developed for a purpose, that it's supposed to be used in a certain way.
Whether or not I use the corkscrew on my Swiss army knife doesn't change the fact that someone built the corkscrew for the purpose of opening corked bottles.
The enzymes/features humans possess that enable us to consume meat were selected for because at some point in the history of our species they enabled our ancestors to survive while others without the related genes did not.
This can change at any point, for any species. If we are no longer in an environment where eating meat confers a significant survival advantage then the fact that we evolved to be able to eat meat has absolutely no bearing on whether or not we should.
> Design implies intent— it implies that something was developed for a purpose, that it's _supposed_ to be used in a certain way.
You could say "design" by natural selection which is MY primary intent.
What is the appropriate word if not design? Your hands have a purpose even if they were not "designed." The purpose in this case is to grasp things. The purpose of the human body is then to eat meat and vegetables.
The word design flows better than purpose. Take the two sentences:
The human body was not designed to consume arsenic.
The purpose of the human body is not to eat arsenic.
See? Anyway let's not get too pedantic about this. I'm sure you get my intent despite the creationist technicality that the word "design" implies... I am clearly not implying THAT.
I don't think you're a creationist - this is just a very common distinction in thinking about evolution that results in all sorts of illogical fallacies.
This is my exact point: Your hands have no purpose. They evolved in a way that aided in survival. If someone is born mutated with their fingers fused together and then suddenly the entire earth floods and they find their solid hands help them swim better - were their hands evolved for the purpose of swimming? Were they designed? Is that human then "supposed to" swim?
We're finding microorganisms that can consume plastic. Does that mean they evolved for the purpose of eating plastic, a substance not typically found in nature?
In my worldview, no, they weren't. They can consume plastic, but that has no bearing on their purpose, and they aren't leaving part of their purpose unfulfilled if they don't eat plastic and instead eat other substances they evolved to be able to eat.
Your scenario with mutated hands ignores that evolution is about selection, not just single mutations. If hands evolved over a period of millions of years to be able to push water better, you could indeed say they evolved for the purpose of swimming. This is similar to saying that an eye’s purpose is to see, or a heart’s purpose is to pump blood, which are hardly controversial statements.
A purpose doesn’t have to imply concious design, intent, or immutablity.
You're making assumptions and taking the conversation in a pedantic direction.
I am aware of the nature of natural selection and how it builds complexity over time through various selection pressures not all of which are constantly aligned with end result. And although wings were initially little nubs not "designed" for flying you could say that wings are they are now are "designed" for flying.
"Design" and "purpose" as I've said many times throughout this thread is a word that flows better. It is a linguistic choice and you are taking the argument in a direction thinking I don't understand some trivial point about natural selection.
I’m not really sure why you bothered to reply, my comment had nothing to do with you. I was just pointing out the flaws in the scenario the parent comment presented.
Thats an interesting point but I think I'd have to disagree - purpose is very much constrained to concious design. Those traits were selected not for the purpose of swimming but merely due to the pressure of selection itself. In your example of flippers, the selection pressure is likely on mobility but the purpose of a limb is not mobility in and of itself. Would that make a flipper purposeless if moving over land?
>purpose is very much constrained to concious design.
Not true. Natural selection can produce the same results as artificial selection. They are both effectively the same process where in one scenario the guiding hand is human and the other scenario nature is the guiding hand.
If both nature and artificial selection evolved a mechanism that is very specifically and efficiently able to do one thing and one thing only does it mean that the thing evolved has no purpose? No it doesn't.
Either way we're getting into a linguistic and philosophical argument on the meaning of the word "purpose." These are traps. Ultimately we begin arguing about the definition of an ambiguous word thinking that the argument is profound. It's like all those arguments about "What is life." Pointless, "life" is the word that is loaded and ambiguous; any debate of that nature is simply an argument about the intricacies of a vocabulary word.
This is pedantic. Everybody knows about evolution and natural selection and the intricacies behind the process, it's old news.
Energy flows into and out of a system in a way where the configuration of particles begins arranging itself in lower and lower entropy formulations. The net entropy of the universe remains forever increasing but within this system it begins lowering. One of these low entropy formulation begins self replication imperfectly thereby introducing memory and mutation into the system allowing complexity to build on itself thereby producing particle configurations of immense low entropy and complexity.
Is there any "intent" in the description above? No. But you must consider the factor below:
Clearly your hands weren't designed with an intelligent intent. Yet there is something different about your hand then there is a rock. What is the word used to describe this difference? "Design" flows better, that's it, no need to get into "illogical fallacies."
>We're finding microorganisms that can consume plastic. Does that mean they evolved for the purpose of eating plastic, a substance not typically found in nature?
>In my worldview, no, they weren't. They can consume plastic, but that has no bearing on their purpose,
I don't know if you can see this, but your argument here is not profound. You are making a linguistic argument. You are arguing for the definition of the word "Purpose" or "Design." We BOTH know EXACTLY what is going on with natural selection and "design" is simply an easier way to express a point that your hand is a lower entropy configuration of atoms that is clearly very efficient at grasping things. But my previous sentence is an inefficient way of saying it. I could just say your hand is designed for the purpose of grasping things and the rock is not.
I think this point is very hard to argue against. Natural selection has no intent, mutation is random and its consequences are thus flukes as to whether they work or not to support an organisms survival. Very well explained @_nothing!
They described a scenario where someone was born with mutated hands that happened to be useful for swimming after the earth floods. There’s no selection or evolution there.
I guess. But I spend most of the day sitting in a chair typing things on a keyboard. So there is a lot of flexibility.
And I believe that more or less the only thing that sets us apart from animals is that we can reflect on our own actions. We choose. And that also comes with responsibility for our choices.
To argue that something is OK just because it "is in our nature" doesn't cut it for
creatures with the ability to discuss this on HN. Is my personal belief.
>And I believe that more or less the only thing that sets us apart from animals is that we can reflect on our own actions. We choose. And that also comes with responsibility for our choices.
Many Animals can choose too.
>To argue that something is OK just because it "is in our nature" doesn't cut it for creatures with the ability to discuss this on HN. Is my personal belief.
I'm not arguing for anything to be OK. I'm saying the argument in itself is pointless. You should note that your "morality" is not a choice. It is a behavioral trait evolved through millions of years of evolution and is trait shared to varying degrees among all humans across all cultures.
Thou shall not steal, Thou shall not kill, Thou shall not lie... etc. Your moral framework is a biological module hardwired into your mind to make you think in a certain way that aids with survival. But it was made for a more prehistoric time where humans had little understanding of the physical world and lived in limited tribal bands of hunters and gatherers.
The complexity of the world today exposes the archaic aspects of the moral module in our brain. We were not designed to feel sorry for the pig as it poses no evolutionary benefit yet we do as a side effect because pig experimentation simply didn't exist in ancient times so there was no selection pressure to make our moral module evolve in a way that will logically account for the pig.
This discussion does not exist because you are "above" your base evolutionary nature. It exists for two reasons: Your moral brain is designed for a more harsher simpler environment; and resources in our society are plentiful.
Once resources become stretched and limited, your brain will begin overriding your moral module. Almost starving to death? You will kill a pig without hesitation with your bare hands if that was the case. Survival is the name of the game in the end.
Not necessarily. We have evolved features that are beneficial to us as well as those that just happened and wasn’t too detrimental nor useful. We are not the “perfect creature”.
It is no longer thought to be a rudimentary organ but let me use it as an example: our appendix could very well serve no purpose, but it was not too detrimental (we didn’t get appendicitis in great enough numbers) so it remained.
While being able to digest meat is likely beneficial (though actually it is very easy to consume meat, especially cooked one compared to raw vegetables — just look at a cow’s digestive track), it doesn’t mean that we are made for that. A horse will gladly eat a small chicken for extra protein if it wanders to it (look up on YouTube)
>Not necessarily. We have evolved features that are beneficial to us as well as those that just happened and wasn’t too detrimental nor useful. We are not the “perfect creature”.
Nobody made an argument for being the perfect creature. I made an argument for the fact we were designed to eat meat and veggies.
>While being able to digest meat is likely beneficial (though actually it is very easy to consume meat, especially cooked one compared to raw vegetables — just look at a cow’s digestive track), it doesn’t mean that we are made for that.
You have enzymes in your body or arrangement of atoms that are targeted towards specifically digesting and breaking down meat. Sure you can put ethanol in a car designed for gasoline but my point remains the same, we were designed to eat meat.
If you want to get pedantic here I can reword it into a stuffy/wordy sentence and avoid utilizing the word "design.":
We have evolved for millions of years to have bodies that happen to be extremely efficient at digesting and breaking down meat.
>GP never said "to eat meat exclusively" or "to eat only meat".
I never said that either. It seems you are artificially injecting extra words into my statements. My phrase "to eat meat" effectively addresses all your technicalities. That is my intent and my meaning.
There are people who do carnivory diet, eating 100% meat and organs for a while. They are mostly okay, some have their health better than their previous diet. Human body is awesome in our flexibility in seeking niches.
No I acknowledge both. So how am I denying my nature. Just FYI, I have no skin in this game. Call me evil call me denying my own nature, I'm just looking at this all as if I was a psychopath (I'm not).
> The weird thing is how we developed sympathy and concern for such things
stupid comment of the year. We kill and eat animals, we sympathize with animals being killed, like where is the contradiction? How about sympathize with animals being killed unnecessarily? (I'm no longer talking about experimenting, just killing in general)
How about we kill other human beings in wars, in capital punishment, does that elude having sympathy for them?
> Human civilizations' current abundance of resources allows us the luxury to...
You call me stupid and yet you're stupid enough to think that I care about anything else you have to say after you call me stupid? Why even bother wasting your breath?
You are also designed not to harm your fellow beings.
That may sound like a contradiction, but it's just the "fellow beings" parts that is culturally or individually changed. There have been soldiers who went to war who couldn't shoot their enemies, even though they might even have "wanted" to. Compassion seems to be a very fundamental building block of the Human mind.
Rape exists independently of the desire to make women pregnant. Quite frankly, bringing it up here as something that humans were “designed” to do and then arguing that we repress ourselves in various ways by not perpetuating rape (or being vegetarian) does not really help your point.
That would not be a counter argument, as OP seems to labor on the simplified assumption that sexual desire has evolved to ensure procreation, and then it doesn't really matter if you intend to father offspring or just to fulfill that desire.
But it's not that easy, because sexual desire in Humans (and many animal species) is way more complicated than ensuring conception.
And more importantly, rape is more complicated than sexual desire. It often isn't about the sex. And I agree that the referring to biological urges when talking about rape is somehow releasing the perpetrator of some of the guilt. It is always also a lack of judgement, empathy, self control and so on. Nothing except very rare brain disorders can make someone a rapist unless he chooses to be.
None of that is true. There are stories over stories of Humans refusing to do harm to other Humans even if it means their death. Conditioning Humans to kill other Humans often involves dehumanizing the enemy in order to circumvent that built-in safety measure. Not everybody can just defuse that switch when he needs to.
You are ASSuming I am male and heterosexual. You are assuming homosexuality has somehow not evolved naturally or does not play a part in the natural repertoire of Human social structure (spoiler alert: it does, even in terms of procreation).
You do not understand sexual desire, which is not about reproduction, even though reproduction can be a side effect (and usually isn't, even without contraception). You do not understand rape and sexual assault which often is not about sex or sexual pleasure.
>None of that is true. There are stories over stories of Humans refusing to do harm to other Humans even if it means their death.
These people won't exist given enough time and selection pressure. It's the only logical outcome. Additionally given the nature of natural selection it can be said many many of these people don't exist at all. The majority of the world will not do this unless it has some evolutionary benefit.
And that benefit only exists among our genetic progeny. Parents will sacrifice themselves for their kids because of the evolutionary benefit.
>You are ASSuming I am male and heterosexual. You are assuming homosexuality has somehow not evolved naturally or does not play a part in the natural repertoire of Human social structure (spoiler alert: it does, even in terms of procreation).
You're the ASS here. You can make an argument without throwing an insult. First off I made no assumption about you personally. I also never stated anything about homosexuality.
You know what I am? I'm black, I'm trans and lesbian. You're assuming that I'm white, male and straight out of nowhere. Oh how the woke world will destroy you for making such baseless assumptions. Man who cares.
>You are assuming homosexuality has somehow not evolved naturally or does not play a part in the natural repertoire of Human social structure
I never said I assumed such a thing. I made no statement about this. You made the statement that it DOES play a natural part. I've heard of these arguments. What evidence do you have to support this? I am not talking about logical arguments that illustrate the possibility that homosexuality is an evolved trait. But empirical statistical evidence that show unmistakably that it is an evolved trait.
The arguments I hear as it stands sounds a bit convoluted and only shows that homosexuality being an evolved trait is only a theoretical possibility.
>You do not understand sexual desire, which is not about reproduction, even though reproduction can be a side effect
Ok this is just BS. When did I say sexual desire is only about reproduction? We're done here.
This has only been true for about the past 50 years, when vitamin B12 was synthesized. There's no plant source for the vitamin. And I'm not even sure the vegans call a vegan diet "easy".
No. Lack of meat leads to vitamin B12 deficiency which gives you all sorts of neurological issues. Pretty damn horrible ones.
> The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics warns of the risk of vitamin B12 deficiencies in vegetarians and vegans. Vitamin B12 is found naturally only in animal products. A lack of vitamin B12 can lead to anemia and blindness. It can also cause muscle weakness, tingling, and numbness.
We might not die, we will just get severely disabled. It pretty much mimics MS.
Algae has plenty of B12. Also, this is a vitamin deficiency, compared to obligate carnivores like cat that can’t digest plants. It is a significant difference between the two.
> The usual dietary sources of vitamin B(12) are animal foods, meat, milk, egg, fish, and shellfish. As the intrinsic factor-mediated intestinal absorption system is estimated to be saturated at about 1.5-2.0 microg per meal under physiologic conditions, vitamin B(12) bioavailability significantly decreases with increasing intake of vitamin B(12) per meal. The bioavailability of vitamin B(12) in healthy humans from fish meat, sheep meat, and chicken meat averaged 42%, 56%-89%, and 61%-66%, respectively. Vitamin B(12) in eggs seems to be poorly absorbed (< 9%) relative to other animal food products. In the Dietary Reference Intakes in the United States and Japan, it is assumed that 50% of dietary vitamin B(12) is absorbed by healthy adults with normal gastro-intestinal function. Some plant foods, dried green and purple lavers (nori) contain substantial amounts of vitamin B(12), although other edible algae contained none or only traces of vitamin B(12). Most of the edible blue-green algae (cyanobacteria) used for human supplements predominantly contain pseudovitamin B(12), which is inactive in humans. The edible cyanobacteria are not suitable for use as vitamin B(12) sources, especially in vegans. Fortified breakfast cereals are a particularly valuable source of vitamin B(12) for vegans and elderly people. Production of some vitamin B(12)-enriched vegetables is also being devised.[1]
So it seems like that despite them containing substantial amounts of vitamin B12, they are not suitable for use as vitamin B12 sources because they predominantly contain pseudovitamin B12 which is inactive in humans. They recommend fortified breakfast cereals for vegans.
What you said about cats inability to digest plants is of no significance here. Vitamin deficiency - especially this particular one - is life-threatening. We need it. We can definitely have plants, and we may need plants as well, but we do need to eat something that contains substantial amounts of non-pseudovitamin B12, which is meat. Of course you can just be a vegan and supplement vitamin B12, but...
I think for things like this, being dispassionate is a coping mechanism. If you engage the sympathy part of your brain, you won’t be able to do it. If you don’t do it, then humans die instead.
And since humans, who are also the beneficiaries of this, are in the position to decide if the tradeoff is acceptable - the fact that they so often do is a morally problematic.
It doesn't mean we have to change everything and start dying to save pigs' lives. But we should debate it. And if it's morally wrong can we at least call it what it is.
Ask the beneficiaries of a process if they this it's good, and the usually say it is. Doesn't mean they are right.
A thought experiment I always like to posit is: what if we were the animal that needed to be tested on for the benefit of medical research that could safe a lot of the members of an alien species that is much more intelligent than us. Would that by extension also be justified? I eat meat by the way so I'm not trying to supplant my ethical views on you.
Fwiw a lot of people would argue that sacrificing one human for the benefit of many more is worthwhile. Not something to celebrate, but an acceptable tradeoff.
I don't see that as really an ethical question... from their perspective, probably yes. From our perspective, we'd probably be trying to kill the aliens.
Is this so much worse than killing pig and salivating its meat and devouring it? Think about it, you are killing a living animal for your one meal when you had all the options in the world. Many people are not even eating it fully and simpply just tossing it away literally in a trash. As usual, I am sure a lot of people will run to Bible to justify this.
I mean, plenty of people also have a problem with that. I'm not sure a discussion on the ethics of a thing should end just because a similar thing is more widespread.
It seems a little ridiculous to worry about animals being used for life-saving medical research when most Americans are eating meat every single day, to be honest. Sure, one could consistently oppose both, but from a sheer sense of proportion, why is _this_ the thing to worry about?
As for what constitutes torture is arguable. To me, doing surgery with anesthesia don’t automatically fall into that category (though of course it can — eg. the famous experiment of putting a second dog’s head to another one’s torso was torture in my opinion).
The day that every statement of unfortunate fact has to be prefaced by an expression of emotional disapproval...
that is the day I officially give up on our already laughable species.
No one should have to explicitly state their disapproval of something unpleasant -- it can go without saying.
And I, for one, prefer to get facts and information without a person's opinion on the matter -- nothing could be less important to me than a given individual's emotional perspective on a matter.
It's of no interest to me how other people feel about something in forming my own judgements, and there's a high probability that their "feelings" will be poorly justified/based on misunderstanding/entirely insincere/etc.
I care about the data, and I'll form my own opinion on it.
The last thing I need to know about the subject of the pig used for many experiments...
is that some random person online who shared the information with me...
It's not about appearances. Referring to the data of how many usable organs came out of a prisoner, without any mention of their emotional state or state of health would be weird. With the obvious knowledge that a pig is capable of experiencing fear, depression and pain, why is it any less weird to not give any consideration to a pig?
An empty gesture of sympathy while feeling no concern wouldn't make that any less weird. It would just add dishonesty to the existing shitty state of affairs.
I believe that the GP poster was intentionally using emotionally-charged language in order to try to push that position, or alternatively to make an excuse to bring it up in the thread without otherwise having a reason to do so.
I know someone who worked with mice but switched fields, he explained he could no longer do it because even though they are heavily inbred for research, each one had a different personality when in his hands and killing all of them took too much of a mental toll after years of work.
I don’t think it’s weird at all. If a million people were to die of COVID tomorrow, I wouldn’t really care emotionally. They all had their own life narratives, emotions and intelligence. Yet it wouldn’t phase me one bit. Perhaps intellectually I would have some compassion for them, and would hope they didn’t suffer.
On the other hand, if a close relative or friend dies, I would mourn them immensely. Similarly, if I had a pet pig I would mourn that individual pig a lot. But a lab pig that’s used for experiments not so much.
Isn't this normal? We didn't evolve to feel much compassion in the abstract for people outside of our group, especially not if there aren't visual or auditory cues that they're suffering.
Why should he? If he didn't knew anyone of the dead, i can totaly relate to this. I, for me personally speaking, would see it as factual BAD would a million people die tomorrow of Covid, but i wouldn't mourn anyone if i didn't know him personally.
Perhaps i am a psychopath, but even an event like 9/11 left me just with the feeling of "oh, i think this is not good" instead of the shock or anything like my peers expressed...
I think there was a highly advanced cow/pig thing at the restaurant end the universe who very much wanted people to eat him. Ford wouldn't have considered it wrong as he was pragmatic.
And had some alien told Arthur he was a barbarian for eating meat, he would have quipped something back like, "look, it's all shandies and licorice until the locusts arrive and then it's a rather short trip to the butchery to find out whose aunt goes best with brown sauce.'
Zaphod though.. he might have seen it your way, "That pig was a cool cat, man." Trillian was pragmatic like Ford.
Marvin would definitely been sympathetic on the surface, but insufferably narcissistic underneath. " You think you've got it bad? A brain the size of a planet but they wouldnt eat me if I cooked and served myself with mint jelly. Life. Don't talk to me about life".
Thank you for saying that. I'm still shocked how deep such "mental illusions" can go. But it's also dangerous thing to say, because it triggers "internal contradiction" error in most people and you get to experience people's justifications and/or attacks as a form of defense. One of those things that are invisible now but will be shocking from historical perspective.
I find such a remark weird given that "you" are serving such "helpless" creatures at your favorite restaurant. I think it's the ultimate hypocrisy. Not to mention that we have a situation where helpless creatures are sacrificed for the science/common good of human beings and the other situation where they are murdered for the taste of their meat & bones.
I'm pretty sure you've enjoyed meat before going vegan. Now you enjoy lecturing others.
As far as the language used is concerned humans get the same "cement brick" treatment in scientific papers. How would it help using a compassionate language? It would be just a distraction from the subject.
Okay, let's go with your human comparison, wouldn't it also be weird if a human was subjected to 30 experiments before being killed, all described without any reference to the state of the person's health or mentality? Would that not make you pause and reflect on how inhuman it is, or how so we can be?
Humans can make informed choices when studied by science, and when they aren't society strongly disapproves - registering that disapproval by criticising the lack of compassion given - and expressed.
Both food, or medical, is a use of a resource that is created by and for humans. The pig wouldn't have been born had their purpose for food, or medical use, not been there.
it's not like humans are capturing wild pigs and using them. I would say that wild animals deserves the right to exist and not hunted (unless they're threatening human interests), but the same cannot be said for bred animals.
The distinction between wild animals and reared ones is that they existed independently of humans, where as animals reared by humans would not have existed otherwise.
I hold the same distinction to fishing - i do not like wild fish, but farmed fishes (note: farmed, not fishes caught from the wild, then fattened) are ok (esp. in an enclosed, hydroponic system). Unfortunately, most "farmed" fishes refer to caught fish that is fattened...
Anything that humans create, live or dead, is fair game to be used for any purpose deemed desirable by the creator. The right to live doesn't exist for those organisms. But wild animals that exist without any human intervention should have that right to live.
> Anything that humans create, live or dead, is fair game to be used for any purpose deemed desirable by the creator.
Does that same distinction apply to human children?
The objection to animal testing or consumption isn't about the source of the animals, it's about the ethical treatment of them. The potential suffering/emotional responses from the animal are the same regardless of the source.
I'm more sympathetic to the exact opposite argument: it's more humane to take wild game than farmed. At least then they've lived a life relatively free of suffering, to the extent nature allows. That seems preferable to me vs. the typical feedlot life.
> Does that same distinction apply to human children?
it would if it weren't for the universal application of human rights today. And it did apply in the past - a slave's children are also slaves. I'm sure one day humans will move past this idea, but it is not today.
it isn't OK because it is a human (whether created in vitro, or born al natural) - humans are granted human rights (by other humans, out of self-interest i might add) which ostensibly prevent such things from happening to them. That is why slavery is against human rights.
my thoughts exactly, these animals are even smarter than dogs and according to some studies smarter than 3-year old children, which makes this even sadder.
We have one as a pet in the family and they're so chill.
Sorry, "pigs are smarter than dogs" is gonna need a Citation Needed. I don't doubt some pigs are smarter than some dogs, and maybe they are comparable on average, but I'd put money on any of the working breed dogs over pigs.
("smarter" being general intelligence, reasoning, working memory, and inference. There might be some specific tasks pigs excel at, but that is different than measuring "smarts")
Smarter isn't that morally relevant. Their capacity to suffer is. Maybe smart is a proxy for that, but I highly doubt it's a good one, given that our prefrontal cortex was a modular attachment to a system capable of suffering which evolved a long time ago.
I think it's good that you can have empathy for the animal but you could also sympathize with the people (inc children) that may someday have such a heart as their only option.
Everybody wants to move beyond animals, a lot of research is being done on Organs on a Chip etc, but until then, we have animals. See them like the nuclear powerplants that we use instead of coal, until we can finally move to fully renewable energy.
Sometime I ask myself, how many mice or pigs would I kill to save my child? And my answer is: As many as it takes.
Personally I'd probably be the same. But this scenario would probably demolish my objectivity so completely that I would no longer be remotely able to pick right from wrong. If my kid was abused I would probably want cruel and unusual punishment instituted, if my kid was groomed online I would probably want to abolish all encryption or privacy laws standing in the way of finding the person doing it, etc.
That said, I still think it would be reasonable to want to know that they weren't in any agony. And there would probably be a point where I would think something is deeply wrong if a hundred intelligent creatures all suffered terribly just so that one person can live.
But in the end I'd probably go along with it, think we have way too much power for one species and donate or do everything I could to try make it right, and fail.
I've always found this particular schism really strange. People will be passionately protective of one type of animal while being perfectly happy for another as-far-as-I-can-see-equivalent animal to be factory farmed and fried for breakfast. There's a lot of interesting mental calisthenics that goes on in mammal brains to allow our social, empathic behaviours to coexist with predator behaviours.
If this happens, I hope it happens decades after we switch to factory produced meat.
There is a multiple orders of magnitude more benefit from using animals for medical research and medical care than from using them as food. I realize our psychology makes us empathize with whatever case we have in front of us right now, but when it comes to orders of magnitude difference and human lives, I'd much prefer we better control our empathy.
Pragmatically, sure but then every species using HN shares our bias. Doing right would mean trying to transcend it. But am not sure we have to suppress our empathy just because we're being pragmatic.
I hope so too, but let's start with the highest impact interventions like stopping the gassing of pigs with CO2 which causes immense pain at an extremely large scale.
It's upsetting in an absolute sense that we experiment on pigs like this, but at least that was only 1 pig and the benefits of that would be much more than if it was just used for food.
Sadly I think if or when pig heart transplants are successful in humans, pigs will be commoditized even further, if that is even possible. Poor creatures :(
Not a reason to stop this research in my opinion but I agree with the comment I’m responding to - wish people could care for the animals we treat as test subjects, seems somewhat cruel to not do so
"In 2020.. Total commercial hog slaughter was 131.563 million head" - US FDA Report. I appreciate your sentiment, but if you would like to direct effort toward this cause, perhaps the food industry would be a better starting point.
I agree with the sentiment, but you don’t have to attribute human characteristics to animals in order to make the case that this and much else of our contemporary relationship with nature is inhumane (meaning: against human nature).
I assume the experiments were approved by some ethics board so that they weren't just for fun. Experiments on animals are justified if we think we can save human lives with that knowledge.
So it's hard wired, a bias or a bias that's hard wired? Or is simply maintaining convenient sources of protein a habit we have for food security and convenience? If so then we can achieve that without causing needless suffering.
But hey, eat whatever you like. Let's just not lie to ourselves to avoid ending an unnecessary habit.
Looking at this thread what I find strange is how we try to justify things to ourselves. How we come up with these frameworks to justify our behavior is the strange thing to me.
On one hand we have the vegans who deny their very biological nature in order to fulfill the precept: "thou shall not kill." Vegans don't eat meat eat even though the human body is clearly a machine designed to eat meat. Why deny nature?
On the other hand we have carnivores who try to justify the fact that they are clearly killing another living creature that has feelings, emotions and intelligence not too far away from humans. How can you justify the mass slaughter and experimentation on pigs but not on humans? Experiments on the Jews during the holocaust could very much save more lives than testing these things on pigs as pigs are but a crude model of the human body.
Personally, I don't try to reconcile my morality. I know there's a moral part of my brain evolved to make sense of the prehistoric world where pigs didn't have feelings and the only people that mattered were those that were in my tribe. It's only in modern times that we now live in a global tribe where science and resources allow us to worry about the emotions of a pig. So what am I? I'm an evil motherfucker who eats the flesh of an innocent pig who didn't have to die...
Either way we're just humans on a ball of dust encircling a tiny spark that's going to go super nova anyway. Who cares. Math is suppose to make sense. Morality is not.
> Vegans don't eat meat eat even though the human body is clearly a machine designed to eat meat. Why deny nature?
It was not designed, and neither did it evolve into a machine designed to eat meat. Those would be cats who are obligate carnivores. We are omnivores (as is pretty much everything — digesting meat is much much easier than digesting plants).
> Either way we're just humans on a ball of dust encircling a tiny spark that's going to go super nova anyway. Who cares. Math is suppose to make sense. Morality is not.
You can justify just about anything with that perspective.
I'm not sure why you think that's relevant. (Note - I am not OP.)
Being hypocritical is an indictment at the speaker, not of the speech. The most hypocritical person to ever live may well be completely right about their most hypocritical belief. It's just not relevant to the the validity of the idea.
So why do people constantly try to use it as a counterargument?
It seems especially prevalent in these sorts of discussions, and for some reason it's often used as you did here. You have no idea if they are vegan or not, but somehow the mere suggestion that a single person might not be is seen as some kind of refutation of the importance of animal rights in general.
GP is make a moral judgement on what I (and many others) believe and my lifestyle. The implication is my beliefs on medical animal testing and my lifestyle of eating animals is wrong.
While it's perfectly fine for GP to make this judgement, I'm not fine with them applying this standard to others while excusing themselves. Why is it wrong for me to ensure they are being consistent when making moral judgements on others?
> hypocritical belief. It's just not relevant to the the validity of the idea.
I disagree with your premise. GP is not merely talking about the validity of an idea, but again, is making a moral claim about what is right and wrong. In which case, hypocrisy diminishes one's right to make their moral claim.
> seen as some kind of refutation of the importance of animal rights in general.
Quite a straw man there. So being in favor of medical animal testing means I don't think animals rights in general are important?
Is intelligence really a good reason to discriminate though? Isn't that what *ists used to say about other groups of people? Do we experiment on people with learning disorders? (Well I think they used to but they stopped)
Bit of a tangent: I read the article to my wife and she mentioned that there is an episode of Grey's Anatomy where they wanted to perform a transplant of a pig's bowels but the Jewish (or Muslim?) lady refused. Interesting how one might choose to their faith over their life.
I was once stuck in line in a Subway behind two Muslim men having an argument. One of them was insisting that he couldn’t have turkey ham because eating ham was against his faith, and the other one was trying to explain that ham was forbidden because it was pork and that turkey ham was fine because it wasn’t pork. His mate just kept repeating “it’s still ham though, innit?” There were halal signs up, that wasn’t the problem.
A television episode can be an inaccurate portrayal of religious law while still portraying what real religious people actually believe. Not every religious person is smart and well-informed about all the technicalities of their religion.
All of the “well actually” when it comes to religious laws misses the reality of the situation imo. Well educated religious scholars will debate religious laws and frequently fail to achieve consensus on much. Ordinary religious practitioners will simply adopt whichever interpretation they identify with. There are no truly correct interpretations of any religion, and for any religion there are as many different interpretations of what it means as there are people interpreting it. Even in Judaism, which is really quite homogeneous as far as most religions go.
“[The] prohibition against touching pigs applied only when Jews were on their way to Jerusalem to observe the three pilgrimage festivals”, “Even on the way to Jerusalem, Jews were only prohibited from touching the flesh, that is, the meat of a pig. According to halacha (Jewish law) the skin of an animal does not transmit impurities”.
“Beyond that, there’s a very important tenet of Judaism called pikuach nefesh, or, saving a life. [Most Jewish laws] can and in fact should be violated in order to save a person’s life”.
This used to come up in the context of insulin as well -- now it's all produced from genetically engineered microbes, but porcine insulin used to be widely used.
Both Jewish and Muslim scholars were very clear that if you need insulin and porcine is the only option, not only is it permitted to use it but it is required and failing to do so is a grave sin.
Jehovah's Witnesses refuse blood transfusions all the time on religious grounds. It might seem silly to you or me, but, to them, it would be sacrificing their eternal life for their limited life on Earth.
> Interesting how one might choose to their faith over their life.
The belief in the right to a predictably long life is a new idea barely a few centuries old at most. Not that I'm personally complaining, but the statement did make me think, the value of living longer for everyone is not self-evident (at least from where I am standing), and the presumption that it is seems in itself dogmatic.
Actually, I could suggest a few non-faith approaches to rationalize the benefit of early death
> [T]he value of living longer for everyone is not self-evident (at least from where I am standing), and the presumption that it is seems in itself dogmatic.
I'd want to question why I'm doing it. For example do I have kids I need to stick around to support? Or am I just going to be discharged to mostly play video games, alone? Because I don't see a need to extend that life.
Then I'd want to think about what it symbolizes. Is it really so irrational to just let my body die when my God-given guts fail instead of depending on the hands of man to possibly convert my body into an abomination just to keep me alive here longer?
I read in a book about a monk refusing to get a pacemaker, saying "Imagine, God is calling me up to Heaven because it's my time, and this machine holds me down here on earth!" and while I may not be a monk, his decision seemed fairly wise to me. So I already have an example of a devout faithful man eschewing a life extending operation that involved no replacement of human with animal parts.
Conversely, there's this well-worn pseudo-parable:
A fellow was stuck on his rooftop in a flood. He was praying to God for help.
Soon a man in a rowboat came by and the fellow shouted to the man on the roof, “Jump in, I can save you.”
The stranded fellow shouted back, “No, it’s OK, I’m praying to God and he is going to save me.” So the rowboat went on.
Then a motorboat came by. “The fellow in the motorboat shouted, “Jump in, I can save you.”
To this the stranded man said, “No thanks, I’m praying to God and he is going to save me. I have faith.” So the motorboat went on.
Then a helicopter came by and the pilot shouted down, “Grab this rope and I will lift you to safety.”
To this the stranded man again replied, “No thanks, I’m praying to God and he is going to save me. I have faith.” So the helicopter reluctantly flew away.
Soon the water rose above the rooftop and the man drowned. He went to Heaven. He finally got his chance to discuss this whole situation with God, at which point he exclaimed, “I had faith in you but you didn’t save me, you let me drown. I don’t understand why!”
To this God replied, “I sent you a rowboat and a motorboat and a helicopter, what more did you expect?”
I've heard this one, yes. From my experience of learning about the God that I pray to, I highly doubt He's sending me commenters asking me one liners about seat belts and dialysis to convince me that the monk I admire was wrong, and that I should change my mindset to become more like the atheists I'm surrounded by.
Rowboats, helicopters etc. in a flood, prima facia, seem to be more in character as a deliverance from a natural disaster. My interpretation of that parable is that this man has a vainglorious hope to be saved via an undeniable miracle of mystical, luminous teleportation so he can point to it and go "Look, see! I was right all along".
> Rowboats, helicopters etc. in a flood, prima facia, seem to be more in character as a deliverance from a natural disaster.
Sure. But how we define "abomination" comes down to what we're used to.
Is taking a cheap statin that will improve your length of life subverting God's will?
If we're saying something is resource intensive and you don't give much back to the world in comparison to the resources used to prolong your life, that's an economic / purely utilitarian argument.
>how we define "abomination" comes down to what we're used to.
If a person believes scripture is only a cultural document and not divine revelation then that would be the definition of abomination. I have to personally disagree with that assessment.
>Is taking a cheap statin that will improve your length of life subverting God's will?
It could be, depending on what it means in the bigger picture. I believe we know very little of God's will in any given moment because of how fallen we are. We benefit from being humble and willing to submit to it, using our provided minds well but never allowing them to be the final authority.
>that's an economic / purely utilitarian argument
I place economics and utilitarianism as a subordinate agent to the higher principles. A utilitarian framework is one of many that can help me see a stronger meaning in letting someone else have the resources, and accepting death if it appears to be the due time for it anyways.
> > how we define "abomination" comes down to what we're used to.
> If a person believes scripture is only a cultural document and not divine revelation then that would be the definition of abomination. I have to personally disagree with that assessment.
That's not what I claimed. But to claim something is "abomination" based on your own personal recoil from it isn't very useful as a moral framework.
> and accepting death if it appears to be the due time for it anyways.
What's the "due time", though? Biblical figures lived for hundreds of years, supposedly. And it takes extraordinary efforts to have as low of an infant mortality rate as we do.
Surely the heroics in the NICU are how we move the time of death from what would happen on its own the most, and some of the more expensive medical care given. Hey, many of those babies will never repay to society the resources they consume.
What you seem to be saying is that it comes down to some mix between a reflexive judgment and cold utilitarianism.
>But to claim something is "abomination" based on your own personal recoil from it isn't very useful as a moral framework.
I said that something could possibly be an abomination, that being a human being with pig guts installed in place of their human guts. Is that my own personal recoil? I don't know 100% it seems to me that there's room to discuss how a "chimeric" transplant could symbolically be that. My entire purpose for mentioning it as such was ultimately to point to how a non materialist viewpoint _could_ point away from taking the operation even where strict religious dietary laws are not at play.
>What's the "due time", though?
Determined on a very personal level, not something I can prescribe here and now. I've done my best in these comments to point to the sort of meanings that may help me decide that for myself, but the responders don't seem to be terribly pleased with them.
>What you seem to be saying is that it comes down to some mix between a reflexive judgment and cold utilitarianism.
No, those are just some of the tools I have, the ones accessible to me right now.
> I don't know 100% it seems to me that there's room to discuss how a "chimeric" transplant could symbolically be that.
Anything that tampers with nature taking its course on its own could be an abomination. Like putting blood from another being into an infant and hooking them up to crazy machines and causing pain to the infant to save their life.
Of course, any failure to save someone's life which is readily saved could also be an abomination.
It all comes down to what one weighs as important.
> even where strict religious dietary laws are not at play.
Most strict dietary laws would allow one to eat the item, or have it put into your body, to survive. The systems with these doctrines largely have exceptions for literally millennia, because we understand that people being able to choose to live trumps artificial restrictions. (Indeed, some reach further to say that extending ones life in violation of these laws is not just permissible, but a duty).
> Determined on a very personal level, not something I can prescribe here and now.
It's fair to say "eh, I've had a good run-- why go further?" I've argued as such here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29432560 One's religious views are even a reasonable way to weigh things.
But I do think that once you reach beyond, to say that readily available care that has become routinely used to extend life (like a pacemaker) might be far outside of God's will and that this is a reasonable reason to reject it in itself-- and we can hardly ask God what He wants-- I think the argument becomes dubious.
That is, dying in infancy was the norm throughout human history. The interventions we have tamper with that outcome more than anything else. And at this point implanting a pacemaker is an outpatient procedure and on the low-scale of the medical intervention ladder.
>But the second that you claim that medical choices that someone else might reasonably choose to make are an "abomination"-- you're framing things in a way that people will reasonably interpret as judgment and wanting to prohibit-- or at least denigrate-- those choices by others.
You've made a good point about how some of the other posters are feeling. I have difficulty coming up with another word I could have used to communicate what I meant that could have had a different effect. Even without using a strong word, people can be eager and are sometimes trained to perceive the slightest denigration against their choices. Given that my faith is generally seen in the present context with a high degree of disdain and contempt, I've grown pretty callous to needing to endure being treated with uncivility, particularly online, in order to speak. The only remedy for it I find is to cultivate a forgiveness of other people for their speech, even if I feel a need to challenge their speech's contents.
>But I do think that once you reach beyond, to say that readily available care that has become routinely used to extend life (like a pacemaker) might be far outside of God's will and that this is a reasonable reason to reject it in itself-- and we can hardly ask God what He wants-- I think the argument becomes dubious.
I believe that monk made the right decision for himself, and for someone else it may be correct to get the pacemaker, maybe they aren't personally ready to go, maybe they have an opportunity to take care of others. Understanding exactly what is and is not God's will in a general way, and also in particular situations requires a level of intense participation I'm not able to just go out and do right here and now. I can see what you mean, to say it seems dubious. If I were saying we could never know, it would be equivalent to saying "we're all blind, and feeling with our hands is wrong, you've got to just do nothing forever or you'll die". I do think an understanding of His will is accessible to us on a step by step basis, where we can see in front of ourselves only a few "meters", and cannot rationally construct entire argument chains that give us a perfect road map for 37 moves into the future.
>Most strict dietary laws would allow one to eat the item, or have it put into your body, to survive. The systems with these doctrines largely have exceptions for literally millennia, because we understand that people being able to choose to live trumps artificial restrictions. (Indeed, some reach further to say that extending ones life in violation of these laws is not just permissible, but a duty).
Yes, other comment chains in this section do a very good job explaining this.
>You've made a good point about how some of the other posters are feeling. I have difficulty coming up with another word I could have used to communicate what I meant that could have had a different effect. Even without using a strong word, people can be eager and are sometimes trained to perceive the slightest denigration against their choices.
I don't think it's that hard.
"I can agree with the spirit in which the monk made his choice. Personally, going so far as to include parts from another species in a key location in my body: that would make me really strongly consider that my intended lifespan is at its end" --- or whatever thinks you capture the meaning better.
People still might want to argue with you about it, for various reasons. But it lacks that visceral judgment.
In turn, you've received a lot of thoughtful replies and a few pieces of visceral judgment in return (delusional, etc). I don't know if you'd have gotten the harsher judgments if you'd avoided the charged language yourself.
> Given that my faith is generally seen in the present context with a high degree of disdain and contempt, I've grown pretty callous to needing to endure being treated with uncivility, particularly online, in order to speak. The only remedy for it I find is to cultivate a forgiveness of other people for their speech, even if I feel a need to challenge their speech's contents.
I don't believe I've been uncivil-- and I don't see anything too untoward here. Some other people are out of line with the "delusional" comment.
But, you're the one taking the hard moral stance and using language that invalidates other choice.
> where we can see in front of ourselves only a few "meters"
Well, if we can only see in front of ourselves slightly, perhaps it's time to be a little more forgiving that other people may see it completely differently from you.
It may be less difficult for you. I don't think it would be out of line to say you have been an exemplar of the civility the HN rules promote.
"Do as thou wilt" itself is an absolutist codification. Somebody, somewhere, has made an invalid choice at some time in their life. I'd like to be optimistic and say also that at some point, just about every single person out there has said or done something very valid and good, and when they do it acts as a pointer towards what is good and edifies. From my own experience, the sinking feeling of realizing some of my own choices were invalid lead me to some self improvements that I'm really grateful for... So I'm convicted that avoiding the "bad feel" of invalidation would have been an unwise compass.
Still, it's a real hazard to come on too strong. Maybe I'll be able to take what you've said on board to develop a more effective way to communicate perspectives, or maybe it's an inevitable diatribe circus - time will have to tell.
> but the responders don't seem to be terribly pleased with them.
Just to augment my previous response, and clarify this specific thing:
You may not be attempting to apply your morality and your moral judgments to others.
But the second that you claim that medical choices that someone else might reasonably choose to make are an "abomination"-- you're framing things in a way that people will reasonably interpret as judgment and wanting to prohibit-- or at least denigrate-- those choices by others.
I've heard this one, but then and now, what did God expect, if He didn't send any event to the man which would make him think that 1,2,3 was the salvation. He knows everything in advance, doesn't He?
I think the message is that one should use one's own agency, and not expect a hand-delivered message from God on what to do in each circumstance, in addition to whatever opportunity at deliverance one receives.
Or, viewed another way... If an obvious opportunity at reasonable safety is there, what gives one the right to demand that God show up to perform a dramatic miracle?
Do you feel the same way about other life saving technologies such as seat belts and motorcycle helmets? What about hitting the anti lock breaks when a semi pulls out in front of you? The same philosophy can be applied to other life saving / extending measures such as adjustments to diet, or taking high blood pressure medicine.
No. None of those safety implements you describe are things that alter the structure of my body, they are applied to augment the safety of existing pieces of external technology. So if they symbolize something negative, it would have to be along the lines of "constraining worldly authority" which could be argued to be a natural precaution, or an overprotective tyrannical overreach, but the nature of it is not the same as the operation. I do not share this materialist/gnostic mindset which tends to make a person consider matter to be essentially all the same in meaning, with a dead universe acted upon at a libertine perogative through a window of the human mind.
Everything has become for me a layered network of symbolic meaning. The diet is about resisting gluttonous impulses and building up my body via natural means towards an ideal intended by the Creator. High blood pressure medicine may be an enactment of an archetype of a good doctor, or not, depending on how the medicine itself interacts with this network of meanings.
Lol...the structure of your body is "contaminated"/changed all the time. You are living in an continuously changing ecosystem. The clothes you've been wearing all this time changed your body structure. You are pretty much a byproduct/result of the ecosystem. I'm sorry to disappoint you but your faith is a "change" as well given by people around you. The key(word )that you've been looking for is "delusional". Find its meaning and it will set you free the way the creator intended
Come now, do you think the gut flora that naturally interacts with my body, etc. and lives and dies (death being explainable as a consequence of the fall anyways) is on the same order of meaning to me as the changes enacted by God-image bearing man? It's not comparable to me.
The change brought about in my faith is a divine change given by the Divine Persons from outside this temporal universe who love me! Yes! A salvific change! To those who cannot see this light, it understandably does look like a delusion, and I don't blame them for seeing it that way, that's part of their own personal life.
Can we please not have discussions like this here. I'm just a regular user, but I think most of us will agree. It may have a first-hand educational effect sometimes, but it rarely stays positive.
This advice only "stands", for apostasy and betrayal of the people I love in my community, and of the martyrs and saints who underwent beatings and who gave their lives for God being tortured to death in the colosseum. To give up and let their view, consumed with love for God and each other die in me... All because I couldn't endure a little hostility from some unknown people on the internet who thought I was silly for seeing as much meaning in things as I do.
You built just a narrative that makes you comfortable with your life. It's not like the "saints" were the only ones tortured at the colosseum but as usually people remember and care only about the ones sharing the same beliefs(i.e pack mentality).
People are bing killed and tortured today as well for various reasons(i.e "god" doesn't like their orientation or behaviour). See also Rohingya genocide. Do something for these people and I'm sure that your life will be more worthy by any ethical standard than if you don't eat pork or whatever dietary/religious convictions you follow. Maybe you even become a "saint" for them.
You don't need historical events to build a way of life. History is happening right now.
That's a subtle antichrist attitude, falling in line with Judas' anger at Christ being given expensive ointment, saying it could have been sold and the proceeds distributed to the poor. It is to try to use good principles to spite the very Truth that the good principles are derived from in the first place. Moral actions need to point towards that transcendent - that's why I need to follow my religious convictions first, and any aid given to those in need along the way are good works oriented properly. There is no aimless good, no worthy history made independent of the identity of Truth. That's why I am so encouraged by the martyrs of the colosseum, of course, and the end effects of their actions was that the colosseum eventually got shut down and no criminals or gladiators were tortured there anymore, as you correctly said. Believer and nonbeliever alike can be raised up by the efforts of those of faith, and we don't have to live in scorn for each other.
This discussion goes nowhere. From now on I will refrain myself from having discussions on religious themes with religious people. It's like talking with a support chatbot.
BREAKING NEWS: discussion goes nowhere useful when you open by outright telling a person their worldview is deluded, and end on insulting their heroes and family.
If I've at all discouraged you from treating other people like this in the future at the cost of a few piddly little hacker news upvote points, I take this as a massive victory all around. It's a win for you too cause you might be a little calmer in future.
I have had Lasik eye surgery to alter defects in my vision. So that might be an abomination? I also had a colostomy after fighting cancer, so my stoma might be an abomination? That about the knee surgery that repaired a torn meniscus?
God's will is not so forceful as to supernaturally reach into the world and kill someone clinging to life, even if by evil means. If it were, and He reached down and destroyed the device every single time, you'd be likely to rebel all the more, calling Him a tyrant! No, this monk was truly no fool, he must have been a wise, simple old man who lived his life humbly doing his best to love those around him.
If you mean that it is literally too weak to accomplish this, then this doesn’t fit typical conceptions of deities.
If you mean that it’s more of a preference than something he is insisting upon, then if a person chooses to extend their lifespan it isn’t going against your god’s will.
Eh, this is a pretty fundamental piece of theology. There doesn't seem to be a God that is meddling in everyday choices and outcomes. At least, really bad things seem to be happening that one hopes aren't God's will.
So, pretty much everyone who thinks about this and has a faith has to come up with some compromise. E.g. that there is a deity that has permitted humans free will to make their own decisions and that various bad things happen as a result of that free will / those choices.
I think it's on my end. I think I failed to make a crucial distinction between "will" and "allow" here. God does allow us to do things that go against His will. He is not too weak, but chooses not to use all His power to force us to do stuff in our lives because He wants a relationship. He has a preference which, while it may not always be easy to see, is borne out of love and is ultimately better for us than what we might insist upon.
If you developed end-stage renal disease requiring hemodialysis, are you planning on dying, or are you okay with extending your life by ~10 years with dialysis?
Do I have people who really need me to stick around and support them in some important way? How old/aged am I already? What is my priest advising I do? How much does it cost, can that money do something more meaningful in the lives of others?
I'm not simply anti-medicine for the sake of being anti-medicine. Rather, medicine is itself a powerful tool that needs to fit into the teleology of my worldview. One that I could misuse if I am not considerate of what its use does and why I'm using it.
Few (if any) Jews believe in eternal damnation. Generally speaking, Judaism places very little emphasis on the afterlife, and there's no widely-held doctrine about it. To the extent there's a shared belief at all, it's that everybody goes to a place called Sheol, without differentiation by merit.
That's so strange that Christianity and Judaism can have such divergent views on the afterlife. I guess it never occurred to me (as a former Christian) that Christian views on the afterlife are totally derived from the new testament.
There's a good case to be made that modern evangelical views on the afterlife aren't even based on the NT.
Annihilationism (cessation of existence, "the second death", "fear him who can destroy body and soul", etc) is much closer to what's in the NT than the widely-accepted Infernalism (eternal torture in hell).
That's how it reads to me, anyway, after decades of reading the Bible.
I think it’s also that. The fact that someone would hold to such a dumb belief even in the face of death is strange. The (usual) human instinct is to survive, and I would argue it’s strange to not.
To me it looks like some kind of natural selection. I wonder what would these folks do if a deadly pandemic would hit us and the only cure would be to use some pork "formula" injection.
From what I remember most of the experiments where more material based like healing a bone, or replacing a joint, or some sort of implant. So you could have things interfere, but it wasn’t like drug trials which would effect the entire body.
Orthopedic surgeons break bones all the time. It sounds cruel, but when done in a medical context, it's not so strange. It was a surgical procedure, it's not like someone dropped a rock on an awake pig.
You can’t really. You test in naive animals when critical, but repeating an experiment or needing a quick binary read-out, you can use non-naive successfully.
If they reach maturity in 6 months only then might it make sense to create humanized pigs (with crucial genes replaced by human DNA) that are cultivated specifically for their organs? Fairly cruel I know, but these pigs would be treated better than pigs cultivated for meat, that's for sure.
Pigs that were genetically engineered to produce organs for human transplants (pigoons) take over the world after a global pandemic (deliberately) kills all people, except a tribe (immune) of genetically engineered primitive humanoids (Crakers) who are peaceful, gentle, and herbivorous.
Are pigs used in biomedical testing ever butchered for their meat?
Seems like we kill a lot of pigs every year anyways. Would be neat if we could get multiple birds from one stone - for experiments where there isn't a risk of making the meat dangerous at least.
I doubt it. All disposed of according to hazardous waste rules. Also, large study animals are so important that most tissues and bits are studied during necropsy in close details with retained material kept frozen for years.
Actually, I heard an NPR story over the holidays about a tick borne disease that causes a meat allergy, and how pigs raised for another purpose then became suitable for butchering to eat their meat for people with that disease... So it happens in at least one case.
“ In 2020 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved genetic modification of pigs so they do not produce alpha-gal sugars. Pigs developed with the trademarked name GalSafe may be able to be eaten safely by people with alpha-gal allergy.[44] They may also produce alpha-gal-safe drugs,[45] and their organs can also be used for xenotransplantation.”
It depends! One of my kids is a biochemist wrapping up his degree this semester in a vet-med lab (send job opportunities!). He's done one study with pigs, where they were developing new enteric vaccines. At the conclusion of the study there's nothing wrong with the pigs --- they're just hyper-vaccinated --- but without a place to send them, all they can do is euthanize. He spent a week or two trying to re-home the pigs, but he's at UIUC and there is no pig shortage in the area. You could have taken those pigs for free and ultimately butchered them.
Euthanizing research pigs seems especially difficult. I'm really into butchery --- invested in a butcher in the area --- and would happily attend a slaughter. But the circumstances attending euthanizing research pigs are tricky; the pigs are all in a common area, and they're social animals and know something's up when you put one of them down. It messed with the boy.
> But the circumstances attending euthanizing research pigs are tricky; the pigs are all in a common area, and they're social animals and know something's up when you put one of them down.
Interesting. I wonder if people have experimented with more humane slaughtering practices like giving the pigs a bunch of booze/opiates so they can have a big pig party, then slaughtering once they've had their fun and passed out. Seems like it could be much more humane. Give em a last hoorah.
Certainly would be easier, but would the pigs prefer it? I'm more curious about the thought experiment of what would be the kindest to the pigs (that still results in their slaughter).
It's not particularly difficult. The method depends on jurisdiction and what is going to be done with the remains. If you need those for further testing, for example.
Without looking it up, I would guess the go-to method usually would be anesthesia followed by an overdose of narcotics or a special euthanasia agent. It's just that a "Mini pig" of 70kg or more will require higher volumes of all of that compared to to a mouse or even a beagle. Of course, when using pharmaceuticals you can't use the meat.
In the EU it is also very dependent on what kind of medications the pigs received during the testing. Only if all of those have been explicitly allowed for meat production can the meat be used at all. Here in Germany the researchers would include the "what do I do afterwards with them" in the planning. So in some cases, like for experiments on feeding or maybe vaccines (if no infections are attempted) then they may actually plan to bring them into the food chain.
Right; it depends on the circumstances. There are things you can do to a pig that make them unavailable for other uses, but I can say with some authority that there is medical research you can do on a pig that leaves it available. Also, the pigs the boy was working with hadn't been euthanized yet (avoiding euthanizing them was the point of finding someone to take them).
Well, if they were "euthanized" with narcotics, there are good reasons not to eat them... Or even to give them out to the public for drug addicts to get at.
I think an effectively anesthetic dose of narcotics would be low enough, once distributed through the body, that it wouldn't be major issue. Liver, kidneys and GI might have higher concentrations, but I'd imagine pork shoulder would have significantly below 1/100th of a recreational dose per serving size.
Nitrous oxide asphyxiation could be quite pleasant for the pig, and there would be little risk to anyone eating the tissue.
I wonder how long will it extend the life of a human after transplanted with Pig's heart. 5 years? Then I guess after every x years, they need new transplant? Though better than death, it is a painful stress.
you recover somewhat, just in time to have another surgery and another lengthy recovery period...not sure whether it is a good life, or a peaceful death is better.
There's a lot of assumptions going on here. Domesticated pigs can live up to 23 years. We'd also need to know if heart failure is a leading cause of death in pigs, if it's not then the heart could be viable long past that age. There are a lot of completely unknown factors like how a xenotransplant will fare in the host body over a long period of time. That's open ended if there are no rejection issues due to gene editing. Also, the person in the article clearly doesn't share your view on death and there are a large number of people out there that agree with him. Their chance at a longer life shouldn't be curtailed by other people's preconceptions.
truly disgustingly cruel how humans treat other sentient beings as irrelevant and inanimate. as a species, we kinda are underperforming the compassion we are capable of, except in self serving situations.
Other than expenses, they develop much more slowly. As per another commenter a 6 months old pig is practically adult, while it is much longer for most primates.
Primates typically need to be raised in very large colonies to be healthy, and to be able to take from the colony without damaging it, there need to be many many primates (some colonies are in the hundreds).
The Rhesus monkey is a popular one for biomedical testing for a variety of reasons.
You could breed "primates" in all sorts of numbers if you wanted. Especially the smaller species. Some fit in your hand. That's really not the issue.
The issue is that they have very complex social and behavioral demands, and yes, more so than pigs or dogs. It is easy to make a colony of dogs in a laboratory live a very happy life. I've seen it, and I can't see a big difference between a companion dog and a lab dog much of the time. They are just as friendly and outgoing and play all the time. With monkeys that's a lot more difficult...
Which is why research in primates is a lot more restricted and more heavily regulated. You need (more) specialized facilities. You also can't handle them as easily because they will bite, poop or hit (the bigger ones) you.
Down voted because this is absolutely not true. No western research facility uses wild primates this way. They are bred in captivity for a number of reasons, both practical, ethical, and environmental.
I am be responsible for purposefully creating a famine in India killing 3 million people and still be quoted as a badass in the future - Winston S. Churchill
Time and time again it has been proved and backed by research that it was indeed purposefully created. I don't understand why people aren't able to swallow that Churchill was responsible for the devastating famine. Its the same everywhere, even in r/history subreddit people just straight away deny Churchill was responsible for the famine. I understand that he is hailed as a hero for WW2 but he definitely has 3 million Indian's blood in his hand.
Let's not hijack the thread with politics. I will say this, there was no motive for it to be "purposefully created" - that is nonsense, try and think about it objectively for a second. It's far more nuanced than that. The issue here is the motivation for your post, do you interject any mention of Gandhi with critiques of his character / behaviour?
Churchill was well known for genuinely hating indian people. Also Great Britain kind of had a habit of either creating, or worsening food shortages for political reasons. For example, the British parliament refused to stop grain exports from Ireland during the potato famine, or provide free grain to hungry people, because they thought that the Irish were lazy and giving them free things would make them lazier (sound familiar?)
I was only recently acquainted with the idea that there are many people on the internet who become very angry that some people eat dog meat, but do not with say cow meat or pig meat. — I find this rather strange and do not understand this.
It's all cognitive dissonance in the end. People are quite happy to have illogical and inconsistent beliefs because it lets them remain entirely ethical in their heads.
They will even become hostile when you challenge this because you are threatening the foundation of their ethics and mental health.
Otoh, relating to something is based on itself. It's a choice, not an obligation. In one ethical framework you're right, it's irrational to treat dogs better than pigs. In another, both lives are unimportant, but one picks dogs one level up for their utility. Inanimate objects also "experience" that. When you're sawing a plank, it's woodwork. When you're sawing a hammer, it's disrespect to the tool.
I’m pretty confident if someone filmed themselves sawing a hammer in half and filmed eating a dog. I know which one of these would receive hate and probably be taken off YouTube.
I didn't intend to make these look comparable, in part due to the fact that these two cultural sets are different in size and vocality. If the point of this comparison is to provide a non-selection based counter argument, it pretty much cannot.
Dogs are carnivores. It is incredibly inefficient to raise dogs for meat, because you have to feed them meat to do so.
This pretty obviously isn't what people are principally reacting too, but it is massively understated when people get into "why do we eat A and not B?"
This doesn't seem to explain the reaction to even the smallest amount. I don't believe for a second that even 1% of the anger is because the consumer has wasted resources on their food. Or people would be furious about beef when chicken is massively more efficient.
Perhaps it plays a part on conditioning folks through generations on what is viewed as livestock. Dogs for a long time are not, except perhaps in China, which has only started looking into reclassifying dogs from "livestock" to "pets"
Please let's not pretend to ignore that some species are more "human like" than others.
- Plants are less "human like" than insects
- Insects are less "human like" than sharks
- Sharks are less "human like" than pigs
- Pigs are less "human like" than dogs
- Dogs are less "human like" than primates
- Primates are less "human like" than humans
Pretending that this is is irrelevant doesn't help discourse.
And yes of course this sorting is subjective, some people may find pigs and cows "just as" "human like" as dogs - but most people won't.
Since dogs have been specifically bred to be very close to humans (being companions, living in the home, etc.) whereas pigs and cows have been bred to be eaten, this shouldn't be surprising.
> And yes of course this sorting is subjective, some people may find pigs and cows "just as" "human like" as dogs - but most people won't.
I honestly find it a very strange idea to say dogs are more human like than pigs.
Have you ever socialized with a pig? It is immediately clear to me that they display intelligence and emotional awareness of a far higher level than dogs. With pigs, it almost feels as though they are mute humans, trying to communicate in some way but being unable to do so due to an inability to speak, similar to dolphins and nonhuman apes. — They are also inquisitive creatures that inspect their environment and seem to apply some level of cognition to it that I never saw in dogs.
It's typically a North American - or sometimes Western European problem. As people become more lonely, they rely more on their companion pets. But ignore the obvious contradiction that they eat pigs, chickens or cows each day.
I'm not sure anyone else really worries about it from what I've seen, having traveled around.
Dog = carnivore domesticated as ally(superior smell/high speed etc)
Cow = herbivore domesticated for milk/meat
Eating dogs is terribly inefficient since they are carnivores. Seems fairly obvious that hunter gathers wouldn't have typically done this, and that it is a recent thing in regions that had famines & excess stray dogs.
Inefficiency wouldn't matter for hunter-gatherers, as they're not the ones that feed the animal (they hunt, don't farm). Also pretty sure that dog-eating isn't a recent things, I don't see why people "back then" wouldn't eat stray dogs in periods of low resource.
More importantly, inefficiency most definitely isn't the reason for which people on the internet "become very angry" at the idea of eating dog.
It most certainly would matter for hunter gatherers. They hunt and they would be hunting the same prey as the dogs. They are feeding the dogs by giving up some of their potential prey as food whether thats by giving it to the dogs after they kill it or allowing the dogs to kill it and eat it instead of them.
I also remember reading about a criminal defence attorney who did not handle cases involving sex crimes.
Apparently he was fine with defending murder suspects, but not suspects charged with even street groping. Or Gerard Spong's statement of being willing to defend anyone charged with anything, except Dési Bouterse; there are certainly worse military dictators on the planet.
Yeah we're not really physically different from humans who thought sacrificing people to the sun was the sensible thing to do... we've got an infinite amount of things to believe
An attorney? I've had a hard time finding any attorney (not in US) for my grand-uncle who groped an underage girl on the street. Almost everyone refused, despite my request was only to get any information about the case^ and where it may possibly go, not the actual defense. The person who agreed to help said they wouldn't do it too, but they were asked by people they couldn't say no to. (Uncle ended up in an asylum deemed mentally unfit, freeing my family from making hard decisions about his action.)
^ e.g. checking whether that could be a setup, a misunderstanding or an overreaction to an innocent/unconscious action; it wasn't any of that.
How very strange. — In many jurisdictions defence attorneys do not have a right to refuse any case they are competent in and timewise available for, something I approve of.
In my country, default defense attorneys work ~together with a prosecution side, they basically fill in process-required papers and read the characterization aloud, that's it. No one of them would help me to understand the situation until it's potentially too late, in case of some sort of fabrication or pressure, which I suspected. They wouldn't refuse, they are just useless. I had to look for a lawyer on the "market" side of it, who brought me right to the investigation office head. Through that I learned the facts and future options to discuss them with my family. Yes, they hesitate to take these cases without even trying to hear details, but are happy to defense murderers. It's unfair legal-wise, because many such allegations recently became unfair and tv-popular, so no one is insured from it.
Regrettably, the situation is more complex than simply having personal moral qualms about representing an alleged sexual assailant. In a jurisdiction without a shield law, the attorney rules of professional conduct may effectively require you to argue that the victim was asking for it.
I think dog meat anger is mostly the result of Yulin Dog Meat Festival in China. [1]
It's completely unregulated and the animals (dogs, cats etc) would often be tortured and killed by amateurs because properly killing an animal is harder than it looks.
Dogs are also not eaten for meat or taste and mostly done for superstition.
I haven't read that article yet, but from what I know, dog meat is eaten all over China all of the time, just not very much of it. But it is mostly a thing poorer people do, indeed for the superstition that it somehow warms the body or something.
And then the northerners say it is only done in the south and vice versa. And I've personally seen a veterinary student from china get very angry every time someone mentioned Chinese eating dogs...
> "Imaging-wise, pig hearts aren't too different from humans. Plus, we can give them a heart attack in the scanner and not go to jail. Some labs use dogs. I just can't do that."
I wonder if they'd feel differently if they thought about how pigs are more intelligent than dogs.
Basically all of society is about conveniently ignoring ethics in illogical ways because it provides immense inconvenience and reward. I'm sure they could convince themselves that giving a pig a heart attack is just as evil as giving one to a dog, but then they wouldn't be able to perform studies which will save millions of lives in the future.
Because, as George Orwell said: "The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to say which was which.".
It's a social construct like any, a partition or compartmentalization we put up to allow us to behave certain ways. Some cultures have different outlooks, some individuals have different outlooks.
I think the only logic to glean here, is that we're able to get more resources out of a cow, so it was useful for us to compartmentalize and abstract away farming them as different somehow, so we did.
Neither of any of the above. All of these animals are used and killed for research all the time.
The issue for many of them is the personal connection and memories individuals have developed with one species or the other. Then it does matter more if it is a pig or a dog that you are doing harm to. For that matter I have known researchers who are excessively fond of pigs, chicken or cows ...
There are important advantages to pigs over non-human primates.
Originally, research was centered around non-human primates (NHPs). But it didn't work out all. Sure, they're a bit closer to us genetically, but we still reject their tissues, so we would need to genetically engineer them. Humans are also much bigger than the non-human primates we can grow in the lab with ease and that have a fast enough reproductive cycle to make genetic engineering work out. So the organs would all be undersized. Ease of breeding is a big issue too, litter sizes for NPHs are very small compared to pigs.
It gets even worse though. Because NHPs are so close to us, they easily catch infections from us. So they're much more likely to catch diseases from us and to give us their diseases.
There are also ethical concerns with primates being so close to us, which don't exist with pigs given that they're primarily food animals.
It took around a dozen or so genetic changes to knock out markers that allow our immune system to recognize that pig organs are foreign. In particular, primates (including us) are sort of strange in that Alpha-gal, a sugar that's all over all other animal bodies, doesn't exist in us and our immune system violently rejects anything that contains it. Understanding this took a long time, but then we eventually figured out how to prevent pigs from expressing Alpha-gal.
That's basically the story here. Figure out why rejection is happening, knock it out, repeat. There are also many forms of rejection and it happens differently in different tissues. But, we're getting there.
> SOREN: Which brings me back to that little part of the article that piqued my interest in the beginning, because the pig that they got the kidney from to do this was a very special pig. Normally, pigs and other mammals that aren't primates have a sugar in their body that our bodies don't have, and so we don't like it or see it as foreign. And that's why usually an organ from another animal would get rejected. But this pig had been genetically modified. It had had the gene that makes that sugar removed, so it didn't have that sugar. Which is part of the reason this worked. And that sugar just so happens to be called "alpha-gal."
Yes, they can. That was the focus of the RadioLab update on the Alpha Gal pigs. The person that loved meat before getting the allergy had moved on to a non-meat life. And when the company started marketing alpha gal safe meat, that person was the inspiration and the person was not happy about it.
Yes – they also discussed this pretty extensively in the RadioLab segment.
In the second segment (linked by GP), they first re-played the previous segment (also linked by GP) about alpha-gal allergy. They then revealed that the company behind the alpha-gal safe pigs (which are being grown for medial research purposes) heard the previous one about the alpha-gal allergy, and after hearing it decided to seek FDA approval for alpha-gal safe pigs in the food market (which they received).
"More than 95% of human anti-pig antibodies are directed against 3 pig carbohydrates: Gal 1 to 3αGal (≈80%–90%), Neu5Gc (≈5%–15%), and β4Gal (1%–5%)"
"To reduce anti-pig antibody binding to the xenograft, the 3 principal carbohydrate antigen targets have each been successfully removed from pigs by gene knockout (KO) (Figure 3)"
People have co-evolved with dogs as companions for a long time. And many people have fond memories of dogs and experience with them as part of a family. This is not generally true of pigs even if their hearts are closer to ours. Even as someone who doesn't like dogs, I find the idea of harming one (even with a good reason) worse than harming a pig.
Pigs are more intelligent and equally social. Humane society says they're as smart as 3 year old children. [1] Apparently tests show they've got about the same problem solving skills as chimps.
My sister has a pet pig (a 150+-lb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_Pot-bellied); it lives in the house with everybody else and forages in the backyard. I can't say I'd ever thought of keeping a pig as a pet, but it's a perfectly fine creature, gentle when it's not being provoking, and intelligent and quite communicative.
I can't see it being "man's best friend" (dogs have a bunch of special abilities that pigs don't) but both pigs and goats play an important enough role to call them "man's best helpers"
Pigs don’t pull sleds. They don’t hunt. They don’t play with children. They can’t manoeuvre a flock of sheep. They won’t even try to ward off a bear. They’re bad at sniffing truffles, because they eat them. They won’t run ahead of a fire engine, clearing the way. And they most certainly won’t cuddle up in camp.
Dogs are extremely versatile and have helped humans over thousands of years. Pigs, on the other hand, are tasty.
I didn't say there was any logic or deep meaning to it, just that someone being willing to sacrifice pigs but not dogs for scientific research doesn't surprise me at all. In mine, even vegetarians generally find the idea of those in others eating dogs (more so than pigs et al.) abhorrent.
Why does intelligence get to be the barometer for this? To me, pigs are essentially big rodents that also happen to be quite delicious. When I eat pork I don’t care how the pig’s intellectual potential will never be realized. I get a side of eggs and go on with my day.
What else would matter? Ethical dilemmas stem from the sentience of a given being. Killing a cell is not really morally questionable, since it is just a (very) complex machinery. While we are ourselves also an even more complex machinery on a physical level, we have certain emerging properties that are not found in cells, but are found in dogs, pigs, etc.
So one can very well claim that torturing beings that can feel pain is wrong.
> So one can very well claim that torturing beings that can feel pain is wrong.
That’s fine and all except we don’t live in a morality version of the matrix. Philosophical arguments hardly effect human behaviors at large.
> Killing a cell is not really morally questionable
Perhaps. But once the cell is fertilized there’s a large population of prolifers that beg to differ yet there is objective no intelligence at this stage of life.
Humans are not so rational as I think you’d like them to be. They also just are rather uncaring hence while this argument/PETA and so on don’t usually change anyone’s feeling towards the issue.
Canine (dog) hearts are also very similar to human hearts. Historically, they were the predominant large animal model for cardiovascular diseases and many landmark studies used them. For some disease models a canine heart resembles an "old human heart" better than a pig heart.
The public sentiment is much more favorable for using pig hearts opposed to dog hearts. It's not nice having to explain that you kill dogs for your research.
oh, the heart attacks weren't accidental. They imaged the pig real time while inducing a heart attack to see how the muscle deformed. I never did ask what they did with the dead pigs, but they did have special carts to wheel them around the hospital. People didn't like seeing sedated pigs in the hospital so they had a cart with high sides and they'd throw a sheet over it.
Not gloating. I genuinely enjoy eating pork and meat in general. It's the most nutritious food a human can eat in my humble opinion. I hold no shame in eating and enjoying meat.
If I was a scientist and a piggie died as part of an experiment or whatever. I would do my best to eat the piggie and not let any part of it end up in the trash and going to waste.
pigs are also used for vaccine testing. Maybe because their immune system is similar to humans. I wonder if man-bear-pig could happen if pigs would develop bigger more folded brains.
I could be wrong but I believe those valves are harvested for their cartilagenous (non-alive) components, their cells stripped, the valves throughly cleaned, and implanted in place. This is not quite the same as implanting an organ with live cells autonomously producing potential antigens on a daily basis
Artificial valves last roughly 10 years, typically. Sometimes more. You have to take antibiotics at the slightest sign of any infection, to avoid infectious settlement of the valve.
A family member got a "tissue engineered" valve a few years ago, so the cells (from a human valve, salvaged from the recipient of a heart transplant) were removed, and can be colonized by body cells, very mild to non-existent rejection. This seems to be a permanent solution.
The tissue component of bioprosthetic valves is treated ex vivo in such a way as to greatly reduce the immune reactivity. It's practically not a consideration.
Mechanical prosthetic heart values are generally favoured only in older patients where re-operation is not likely to be required. The reason being that bioprosthetic valves have a more limited long-term durability. So why not always use mechanical valves? Their clotting risk is considerably higher and so they require higher intensity anticoagulant therapy - along with all of the attendant complications of that...
Mech valves are actually favored in younger patients, since they don't become calcified, like bioprosthetic valves. However, they do require life long anticoagulation with warfarin, which is dangerous to live with.
Nope, the ball and disc valves were where they started and they had any issues including wear, blood clots and strokes. You could also hear many of them outside the patients body.
My father got a brand new cow valve a few months ago. He had to choose between that, a pig one and a mechanical one, each one is better for each specific case from what I understand. But yeah, crazy stuff.
I'd argue that in islam pretty much all of these restrictions are not applicable when it's for medical reasons. Alcohol is explicitly allowed in such cases (I think it was used to relieve pain in surgeries) , and even pork is okay to eat if you can't find anything else. Another example would be Ramadan fasting, which is not necessary if you are ill or when you are travelin.
Overall, almost any restriction in islam is very flexible when it's a matter of life or death, or if it's a medical necessity/recommendation. So, a pig valve is arguably not any different from a cow valve when it's so clearly not for regular consumption.
You can rationalize all you want, but you can't reason religious people out of things they didn't reason themselves into. If these people can be convinced that they shouldn't be doing thing XYZ on the order of an omnipotent being that nobody has ever seen, chances seem to be even between them accepting exceptions from this order and them rejecting these exceptions. After all, you see other people rejecting/ignoring other parts of their own religion all the time.
It's not rationalization, I know some religions have a pretty rigid structure that you need to rationalize your way around when it comes to medical exceptions to religious rules but... Islam is not one of them. Maybe some folk belief might be a source of hesitation in this case but in islam the jurisprudence is very clear and no scholar would really argue otherwise. Just to give an example, even ISIS allowed alcohol to be used for medical reasons if prescribed by a doctor! I'm Muslim and have a pretty good grasp of the beliefs of the different islamic branches/sects/schools and I've rarely came across an example of restrictions not being waived for medical reasons, though it's very possible I've missed some examples.
But you're still arguing about perfectly following a set of arbitrary rules. The very fact that they're arbitrary means you'll get people who'll make up arbitrary religious rules for themselves (and they will perfectly follow those) and the "beliefs of the different islamic branches/sects/schools" will be no more relevant for the beliefs of an individual than a codified national language is for some people's idiolects.
They are not arbitrary though. Historic, perhaps. E.g. pork was disallowed as far as I know due to the spread of diseases from bad conservation techniques at the time.
But that's one of the differences between faith and knowledge, namely justification. You'd be correct to claim that it's non-arbitrary if you happen to know that this justification was how it was arrived at. Randomly arriving even at a correct belief without justification would not AFAIK constitute knowledge.
IMHO this is human arrogance. It's the belief that as a human you are able to know and justify anything and everything with science and rationale, which is mostly wrong if you look at history.
I wish you were right. We got scolded for using donors’ breast milk for our newborn because donors might have eaten pork. SMH.
EDIT: I understand where you are coming from. I follow the most liberal and rational interpretation of Islam. But feel like we are very small minority.
That is very weird. Was it from the family or from an imam? I know breast milk has a few rules around it in islam, but it mostly boils down to sharing breast milk creating a form kinship between the babies sharing the milk. As in, you become in a way sister/brother with the other baby.
But I agree that many Muslims have a...lot of folk beliefs and take a lot of mental shortcuts that lead to reductive interpretations of the religion. In those cases, bringing up good Islamic jurisprudence usually works.
It was family elders. They are pretty serious about religion, attend Islamic lectures etc. And they were mostly concerned about pork consumption of donors. No one mentioned anything about forming milk kinship.
With all due respect, the worst people you can ask for religious advice would be family elder, imams in local mosques. In that order. Find someone who actually studied the religion not just someone who memorized a book.
I can't say for sure, but going from my interpretation of what seems to be the (sunni) scholarly consensus, it really shouldn't matter. Pork is not allowed to be eaten for a few reasons, none of them are relevant for cardiac valves especially considering you don't ever "consume" the pork. Pork is only allowed if you don't have another alternative when it comes to feeding yourself,but since I don't think it's restricted at all for most other uses, there's no need to even have to chose an alternative if possible. Though there is definitely a cultural repulsion towards anything related to Pork in Islamic countries so I'd definitely expect alternatives to be more popular based on that repulsion/taboo even if it's not haram
I'm not sure why you are being downvoted. I know several Jews that I very much suspect would have a visceral reaction and not want the pig-based option, regardless of whether that's really what Jewish law requires.
I'll speak to Jews. There is no such restriction or even preference.
Not only is this not a problem, Israel does a lot of research on creating pigs that are compatible with humans. Jews have no issue with pig heart valves. In general, the idea is that in Judaism human life is critical. You do what it takes to save lives. Only after that do the rules matter.
You can live indefinitely with animal valves though they may need to be replaced every 15 years or so. It’a a fairly straightforward minimally invasive procedure though.
I, for one, would be really really nervous about having a major operation on a critical-for-my-life organ and then going home. I would definitely want some close observation even if it's 'just' for 12-24 hours.
A surgical aortic valve replacement (SAVR) for example will cost ~50K I believe? It will be covered by insurance if it is necessary.
There are also less invasive forms of valve replacement (transcatheter / percutaneous) which involve collapsing a synthetic valve around a balloon at the end of a catheter, inserting the assembly into a femoral artery, guiding the valve into the heart and into the open damaged valve, and then inflating the balloon and deploying the new valve inside of the damaged old valve. In SAVR the old valve is removed and the new one is sewn in. In transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR), the old valve is held open by the new valve.
Er, no, although that was a funny way for the parent to phrase it.
It might be more accurate to phrase it as "depending on your insurance, your insurance may pay for it if it's covered AND you _meet_the_criteria_ for the procedure."
For example: You may run into a situation where your doctor says "You know, it would be good to replace this now" and the insurance company says "Thank you for your professional opinion; our table says that we're not replacing it until criteria X is also satisfied"
Not OP, but my dad was offered either a mechanical or pig valve when he had a bypass surgery done. Both were covered by insurance, I don't know which cost more, but he hit his deductible either way.
The pig was modified to remove presentation of immunogenic sugars on the cell surface. Unfortunately, the recipient needs to be on immunosuppressants the rest of their life.
This rekindles discussions back in school about chimeras... in order for the organs to be immunocompatible, the donor needs to be partially human. What % is too human to harvest for organs?
I suppose it's still too soon to answer such questions, but apparently, 0% acceptable.
I don't think it's really measurable, because a meaningful "%" implies a relatively context-free, relatively uniformly distributed importance to genetic sequence.
The most immunogenic sugar is glycolylneuraminic acid. Humans are incapable of making this sugar so it's immediately recognizable as alien by the human immune system.
You could in theory disable production of this sugar with a single base pair mutation which (if that's how you did it) would make this .000001% sequence difference extremely important over almost any other sequence point.
As a side note it's a matter of speculation that the lack of this sugar is an evasion mechanism for species-jumping flu.
Edit: tick thing was wrong, I had misremembered! Thank you smart reader who has since deleted their comment calling me out.
I don't think it is all that uncommon for regular human-to-human transplant recipients to be on immunosuppressants for life. If I'm not mistaken, that's the case for all organ recipients, but there may be exceptions. I think the concept of "immunocompatibility" can refer to a spectrum of outcomes that we haven't gotten down even for transplants within our own species.
Yes all transplant patients receive immunosuppressants. The only transplant that wouldn't would be an allogenic stem cell transplants (uses the persons own stem cells), however these people typically don't have an immune system to begin with.
They’re not making the pig more human, they’re removing the markers of ‘foreign’ that would make it an immune target. So it’s a nice vanilla organ that minimally attracts the attention of the immune system.
> Three genes were turned off that might otherwise have triggered an immediate immune rejection – the recognition of a pig organ as coming from a different species. Six human genes were added to prevent blood from coagulating in the heart, improve molecular compatibility and reduce the risk of rejection.
> One final gene was turned off to keep the pig from growing too large.
So they actually did make the pig a tiny bit human.
Just removing some sugars can't possibly work, since the pig heart will lack correct MHC class I molecules, which will make it a target. So the patient will need permanent immune-suppression.
Plenty of transplant recipients from deceased or living human donors are on permanent immunosuppression. Depending on the organ and the person, day-to-day life can be almost completely normal. Source: I am a liver transplant recipient.
>how do you know that removing this one gene doesn't unlock consciousness?
i'm not the poster you're replying to, but for me the answer is this :
consciousness appears to me to be a constellation of traits rather than a trait itself that would be easily acquired with a genetic shift.
One could then say : 'What if the one we flip is the thing that finishes the constellation of traits that activates consciousness?' , and sadly I must confess that I believe that if that were to happen to an entity without sufficient communications methods that it would probably remain unknown and subject to whatever experiences whatever sensory organs it may have provides it, while we remain entirely unaware for some time.
Also, a point that I agree upon by the poster who replied to you with me ; we don't seem to hold conscious entities in very high regard -- only human ones.
A strange idea but theoretically possible. Although it wasn't one of the genes targeted in this study, humans are the only animals which have the Neu4Ac form of the sialic acid sugar, instead of Neu5Ac, and the brain is one of the regions that is most heavily sialiated in humans and could be one of the things that sets us apart.
Speaking of chimeras, there is a Greg Egan short story from his book "Axiomatic" about a human leopard chimera which is bred by an eccentric billionaire specifically to pose for a painting. The actual story is even crazier.
The concern, I think, that it's obviously unethical to grow a 100% human child and then harvest its heart, right? You're talking about a living, feeling, thinking person! Causing them to suffer or to die is morally wrong, conversely, their life and their right to life have precious, incalculable, sacred value. The thought of harvesting, murdering a human being for one of their organs is repulsive, harvesting them for food is cannibalism and a taboo of the highest order.
And yet many humans eat bacon for breakfast without a second thought. On the operating table, the human heart and pig heart would probably be indistinguishable to a layperson, so why is the one sacred and the other free for the taking?
This is an ethical concern which is so completely removed from reality that it borders on satire. This is why no one takes bioethicists seriously anymore.
Human organ recipients also need immunosuppressants forever, outside of rare cases. This particular case sounds like a very small modification to the source pig, not a pig carrying a human organ.
I mean I imagine there's research trying to do exactly that: you can identify beating heart cells very early on in embryos, and chimeric organisms are a thing. I imagine someone somewhere is trying to swap out those early cells with human heart cells to see if you can literally grow a pig with a human heart.
I think people will only accept 3d printed organs, pig and animal things are too controversial for some people.
I was listening to a podcast on the CBC about AI and consciousness, and the idea that humans are distinct from an animal (beastmachine, great name for a butcher shop btw) comes from Descartes, who we revere in philosophy (for fair reasons)..
I think we can't blame people for wanting to separate themselves from animals.
When I was a teenager there was a novel adapted for TV by the BBC called “Pig Heart Boy”. It explored the emotional impact of this type of procedure on a teenager and the response from the public, both good and bad. I don’t remember much about it but it looks like it won a BAFTA.
Yeah when I read the title of this article my first thought was 'isnt that a thing, why is it news'. Then I realised that its not very common and I was just thinking of the book/TV show!
If pigs (or any animal) broaden the compatibility to other organs, what are the ethical implications for raising them with the intention to harvest their organs, if any?
On one hand, we already raise pigs to kill and eat routinely, and (mostly) people don't care - is this any different than say, buying a pig heart at the market to eat?
On the other hand, it does somehow feel different to me, perhaps because sharing organs somehow humanizes the pigs by emphasizing our similarity? I'm not entirely sure from where my hesitation stems.
I'm curious if anyone else read this story with mixed reactions.
> On one hand, we already raise pigs to kill and eat routinely, and (mostly) people don't care - is this any different than say, buying a pig heart at the market to eat?
Yes, in that it's morally superior to eating meat. Eating meat is mostly a nutritional luxury, but needing functioning organs is not. I'm a meat eater, but I imagine there are a number of vegetarians who would be okay with this sort of organ harvesting process.
Of course, if we end up able to grow organs in a lab environment instead of inside an animal, that's probably better for all involved.
I've teetered on staying committed to veganism for ethical reasons, and have spent time on and off with vegan diets. I don't at all think (nor do I think most vegans think [see disclaimer]) that pigs are worthy of equal moral consideration as humans. I, along with most humans, think that pigs as well as other animals are worthy of some level of moral consideration. Most would be rightfully outraged at the torture of animals for fun, for instance.
Vegans take it a small step further, the moral consideration of a pig outweighs the pleasure provided to our taste buds by consuming their flesh. The prior two examples of consumption and torture, while vastly different, are also on a whole different level than raising pigs to save human lives. If you agree that pigs and humans are NOT morally equivalent (which is most people, including most vegans [see disclaimer],) then I think you are committed to the idea that it is imperative to raise and kill pigs to save human lives.
[Disclaimer: neither vegans or non-vegans are monoliths. There are countless ethical, religious, and practical frameworks one will employ to arrive at any particular ethical position.]
A bit off topic but you seem level-headed and I've been wondering about this for a while: what's your vegan "endgame"? The way I see it, the "vegan utopia" would get rid of all small family farms (even strictly milk/egg ones) -- where animals are given all the food they need, have access to good medical care, are sheltered from predators, and are able to reproduce and nurse offspring -- and replace all that with... a couple animals scrapping it out against the brutality of raw, unfiltered, natural selection? I wouldn't want that for myself, and I don't know of any vegans who have opted into that lifestyle either. So what gives? Why is the vegan "morally correct" thing to force onto animals the opposite of what we collectively opt into as humans? (Plenty of people say they want to "escape from it all" and go live in the woods, but to actually commit to that for any amount of time is... rare.)
Industrialized farming is worlds different from these idealistic "small family subsistence farms." The hypothetical world in which one might be able to raise animals ethically as a food source isn't the same one that can have massive businesses turning a profit from supplying animal meat to millions of people. I don't think a business could survive in a market economy while treating their animals humanely. The cost would simply be unimaginable.
Most people who oppose the torture of animals and are sufficiently educated with how industrialized farming works face either discomfort and cognitive dissonance to some degree, or feel inclined to make a change (whatever that may look like.)
As far as the difference between living in the wild and living in industrialized farms, I think allowing animals to live in the wild is vastly more ethical than the misery that awaits them on factory farms. Of course, the current generation of livestock should never be returned to the wild. The "end game" would be the cessation of breeding of these animals.
> I don't think a business could survive in a market economy while treating their animals humanely. The cost would simply be unimaginable.
It'd be quite easy to survive if there were enough people who cared about the well-being of animals and experienced sufficient economic stability to make consumption choices that don't necessarily maximize calories/dollar. Unfortunately those people tend to eschew animal product consumption all together, resulting in your (correct) analysis that the number of animals living in misery on factory farms is dramatically overtaking the number living at harmony on family farms.
I don't buy from factory farms, but any time I go to a local store or farmers market and see a good local cheese, I buy it. I've visited many of the farms personally and have never seen a situation where it didn't look like the animals were living their best life. To shut those farms down, kill off their bloodlines, and replace them with... a way smaller number of slightly different looking ruminants spending their whole existence feeling (rightfully) frightened for their life upon any external stimulus? It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And that's the "ideal" case, in reality it's far more likely that the farm will be bought up by some big commercial entity willing to cut more corners than that the good fertile accessible land will simply be yielded to the wild. [1]
Even "small" farms have a number of practices that the average person would find appalling if they became aware of them. There's a place for graphic descriptions of these activities intended to upset and dismay "non-vegans" but I don't think that place is a tech board. If you are curious as to what these practices are, looking up videos/practices related to modern dairy production that are popular even on small dairy farms or male chick culling might be a decent start, PETA also has plenty of resources available. (I'm sure there are some really tiny family-owned farms that don't employ these practices.)
Aside from this, farms, like all industries, follow the "tendency towards monopoly" where ever larger players will consolidate, merge, and buyout their competition to maximize their collective control of the market share. I think as long as there is a market for animal products, that market will be overwhelmingly captured by large industrialized farms. It's precisely the most upsetting practices on factory farms that keep costs low enough to make products accessible to working class Americans.
> The way I see it, the "vegan utopia" would get rid of all small family farms (even strictly milk/egg ones) -- where animals are given all the food they need, have access to good medical care, are sheltered from predators, and are able to reproduce and nurse offspring
This is, like, the most charitable interpretation possible of the current state of farming for meat.
Certainly large scale factory farms should be avoided at all costs. But animal husbandry is an ancient art that a good number of small family farms still practice. They're the ones I'm referring to here. Also note I'm specifically referring to egg/dairy production as opposed to meat production.
There are many ancient arts that got lost as time progresses. Not sure if we should fear changing our ways. I've drastically reduced my meat consumption in an effort to help with climate change. The end game for me is for, some time in future, meat consumption to be seen as something old fashioned that no one does anymore. Like wearing a top hat.
The only reason I'm not 100% vegan/vegetarian is because, since most people aren't, it restricts a lot the number of dishes you can eat. Specially when you go out in a restaurant. But, if more people would be vegetarians, I'm sure that would change.
> This is, like, the most charitable interpretation possible of the current state of farming for meat.
It is charitable to call it charitable. Almost all meat, eggs, and dairy comes from factory farming. The small farms that people like to tell themselves they eat from are a literal rounding error [0]. You only get that if you go to the actual small farm itself or eat out at a very expensive restaurant.
- If you buy a meat sandwich from the corner store...factory farming
- If you buy a burrito from a restaurant...factory farming
- If you buy eggs and cheese at a diner...factory farming
- If you buy milk from the grocery store...factory farming
You can tell yourself you only buy from small farms, but there is a 99% chance [0] you are eating factory farmed animal products. Sorry to break it to you.
> animals scrapping it out against the brutality of raw, unfiltered, natural selection
Farm animals are bred by humans, not taken from the wild, so you wouldn't be introducing any new animals to the wild, to "deal with brutality". You'd simply not bred new animals to live in farms.
Also, I think even small family farms practice male chick culling, so it's not really a great status quo.
Right, instead of a large biomass of generally happy “farmed” animals you have a small biomass of incredibly stressed “natural” animals. It’s not obvious to me that that’s as clear of a win as vegans would have me believe.
"I'm curious if anyone else read this story with mixed reactions."
Definitely.
There are the whole experimentation and vivisection angles that makes it potentially more abusive and agonising than slaughter, especially under the usual commercial incentives, weak jurisdictions etc. The headlines will inevitably come.
If they were raised for organs rather than meat for consumption, we'd likely treat them better. Not only because of the emotional causes, but because they'd probably be worth a lot of money so the investment would be greater to keeping them alive.
> Out of 13 such transplants performed by Keith Reemtsma, one kidney recipient lived for 9 months, returning to work as a schoolteacher. At autopsy, the chimpanzee kidneys appeared normal and showed no signs of acute or chronic rejection.
The pigs realize more than you'd think, their moms know when you're about to castrate the babies and they remember it, too.
When the slaughterhouse van comes along, they can feel something is wrong, this is, before the van is even visible. They might remember other pigs not coming back from the ride or something, but to kill another animal to save the human animal is not very nice.
To try to be nice is to rally against nature itself. If you strive to be nice then you are automatically at odds with the driving force of nature. You want to make the world a nice place? Then by definition there can be no losers and if there are no losers there is no evolution. If there is no evolution, there is no life, only a slow descent bck to maximum entropy. So the ultimate question is not "do you want to be nice?" but "do you prefer life over non life?". Is the pain of existence worth it? some say yes, some say no, both are valid opinions. Personally I say yes. But I wouldn't blame a person for being anti life and working actively to destroy it.
I get it if it's a vegan argument or something, but come on, we harvest pigs on an industrial scale. We can use their organs however we want because we are the apex predator, that's just life.
Genuine question: why is an artificial heart such a hard thing to make? At least from a lay-person's perspective, it's just some pumps and valves, which we've gotten pretty good at making.
Obviously I'm wrong about that because there really isn't a permanent artificial heart yet, but it's something I have wondered for awhile.
It has been done, as mentioned by other comments. My recollection is that aside from power & control, the hardest problem is clotting. The natural heart apparently causes the blood to flow in a way that there is no pooling or stagnation, whereas almost any fixed-shape chamber apparently has locations where the fluid will stagnate, and with blood, that will cause clots in a very short time. When those clots get loose, they can then go to the lungs and cause a pulmonary embolism, or to the brain and cause a stroke, both of which are very bad and often fatal. So, getting a mechanism that won't do that even once in years of continuous operation is ... nontrivial.
EDIT - this is what I recall reading, but I'm not a biomed, I'd like to see a more detailed description from someone in the field.
Layperson speculation: hard to power 24/7 without an external power source, it must connect seamlessly to the blood stream (can't have it disconnect from the aorta after five weeks), and the surfaces exposed to the blood must not cause blood clots (so careful at the seams).
They use a common medical technique called anastomosis. Basically they just sew the two arteries/vessels together with suture and the blood and tissue seals it as any other cut or nick in the body. Sometimes they use "bioglue" but its not strictly needed, just a timesaver.
And the pig tissue then connects with the human tissue and eventually heals to form a connected vessel? or it never grows together but it is sealed with a blood cloth?
So say I carve a wound onto my skin, and then put live skin with a sufficient tissue match onto it and connect the blood vessels so that the new live skin does not die; then the live skin graft and my own damaged skin will hen heal into each other and form a connected totality?
I didn't know that. Do all heart transplants come with pacemakers then?
Edit: looks like it's just some nerves, not all.
> Your transplanted heart will respond to activity a little differently. Your heart rate will not increase like it used to. And you will have a higher resting heart rate. This is because some of the nerves that control your heart were cut during your surgery.
My understanding -- which should be taken with two grains of salt, I'm a programmer not a doctor -- is that the pacemaker cells which actually go "beat now beat now beat now" are part of the heart itself, and transplanted with it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiac_pacemaker
The nerves from the rest of the body are needed to tell these cells "we need more oxygen, beat faster" or "sleepy time, beat slower".
I assume if they could reconnect the nerves to the new heart they would. There's no need to replace the pacemaker cells in the new heart with the old ones though.
In addition to soft flexible machinery being somewhat difficult to manufacture, you would also have to hook it up to the brain. Not exactly an easy feat.
Why would you need to hook it up to the brain? I am assuming to respond to signals, for example stressed -> beat faster? But what would happen if you didn't have this automatic response? Let's say the heartbeat could be controlled by an algorithm or an app - for example if you lie down, it slows down automatically or if you expect to do some exercise, you can turn it up.
As a result, they do not correctly respond to higher demand by beating faster, but this is a deficiency that is considered acceptable. Heart transplant recipients aren't routinely running marathons.
An open source app in and of itself would be a little scary, but I can't imagine the startup making your connected artificial heart posting an "incredible journey" blog.
Or having to learn from Hacker News that Google is dropping support for your organs.
Dr. Dhani Ram Baruah was a pioneer of pig heart transplants and tried this in 1997, and his patient lived for 7 days. However this was not received well and Dr Baruah was later arrested.
I was introduced into "pig bladder ground up into magical pixie dust" aka ACell (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACell) when it was used to treat my child's heart surgery incision. I was super surprised how well it worked and how quick, too!
I read about the "magical pixie dust" in a very old Time Magazine (that my dad had a subscription to). Since then, I have always dreamed of having the tip of my left thumb "regrown" using that or a similar technology. Glad to know that it is being used more commonly on nowadays.
That’s awesome! I couldn’t believe it when they first said it was made from pig bladder. We didn’t use all of it... I should’ve asked for the remainder and pit it in a takeout box and kept it for a rainy day
Not necessarily. Life expectancy is affected by the most mortal part of your species: it might be that pigs’ hearts are fine, but they’re prone to cancers after a certain age.
Then could they yeet the old one into the sausage grinder and transplant a fresh one. It could even be a nice 12 year ritual, pay 1 million dollars for the most expensive sausage you'll ever eat.
As a kidney dialysis patient who is 6 year in the waiting list, I know the wait times have been slowly creeping up. Any bridging solution to reduce need for dialysis or even better forms of dialysis would be welcome. Despite the anti rejection medication people tell me they feel way better when they get a functional kidney.
Firstly, I will resist the urge to quip about the culinary potential of the remainder of the pig or the moral implications of using animals for their organs (especially since we've already decided, at a societal level, that eating them is acceptable).
Secondly, this begs the question, "how many other high-risk, high-potential treatments deserve resources and experimentation?" Clearly, if this is successful, the potential for adding quality-adjusted-life-years to humans is enormous. Does this inform how we view other experimental treatment? Does this inform how cryonics is perceived more broadly (at its core, another experimental tool to extend life)?
Not meaning to be dissregarding, but literally everything works like that. We use almost everything (even at the expensw of comoletely consuming it (resources) or killing it (plants/animals)) to live ourselves. And it's pretty much the way of life even without humans. Now, all these don't mean we shouldn't be appreciative, and we definitely arent enough. But we should worship? I don't think so
Well, it is a play of words, perhaps not entirely appropriate, but point was made. Definitely not proposing to have the image of the Holy Mother replaced with one of a pig in holy places... Still, pigs are killed (is it okay to say 'give their lives'?) for food, for clothing, for medicine now, and in the future. It's not about pigs, really - but sheep also treated similarly (save for the medicine yet), while horses and chimps not so much. Dogs - as many pointed is difficult to imagine having dogs for food or waist-belts or ... heart donors.
Should we wrap up things with "it's about life to kill things to live", well, it'd be a dramatic over-simplification of what life is about. And it's not as much the way of "life without humans", because (afaik) no animal is known to mass produce or mass kill and definitely not using other animals fur/skins for clothing. What we can say is that humanity is very much accustomed to this perpetual exploitation, but it is a very long discussion before it can be justified as the 'way of life'.
Of course - this is my position, and not trying to impose it, just making a point really. Not trying to convince anyone to quit meat, or to not buy a nice purse.
This reminds me of the 1997 book Pig Heart Boy by Malorie Blackman. (Wikipedia says there's also a 1999 BBC television adaption, available on YouTube.)
Being an organ donor needs to be opt-out rather than opt-in.
If it absolutely must be opt-in, then opting in should be easy. In Oregon, it's just a matter of checking a box when you get a state ID or driver's license.
Yup, I'm a kidney dialysis patient waiting 6 years on the list. In theory I'm approaching the front of the list but they still need to make sure I get good compatibility so who knows. I've know people who have waited for 8-10 years!
I'm surprised no one here is talking about Michael Levin's morphogenesis research. It's absolutely fascinating and might someday obviate the need for transplants and prosthesis altogether. Here's one of his lectures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41b254BcMJM
Bioelectrics could explain why some cells (like Pancreas beta cells) will not grow in vitro. Recent work has produced gels that enable growing these cells. I expect that the gels provide the electrical fields that the cells expect.
I wonder why a pig heart rather than one from another primate? The article mentions a baboon heart in an earlier attempt at xenotransplantation with an infant. Is a pig’s heart as, or more, compatible or is it more a matter of availability?
At age 2, I was a candidate for a monkey heart transplant, as I had a perforated aortic valve and surgery on tissue with the consistency of wet-toilet paper in an infant had a very high mortality rate (the girl on the table before I went in had died). My parents declined the monkey transplant. Good thing. The intended recipients of multiple attempts at the monkey hearts, died. I eventually received a primitive mechanical implant, which I quickly outgrew. By the 80s I had another surgery to replace it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bj%C3%B6rk%E2%80%93Shiley_valv...). This had it's own dangers, as the strut would fail along 2 ends of a sizing graph (most people were at the larger size end). I sat safely on the bell curve. I kept that into my 30s which caused various problems with the aortic stem and thickening of the left ventricle.
Now I'm rocking the On-X, which is superior in innumerable ways.
Pigs are very anatomically similar to humans but due to being a food source there were probably also fewer ethical concerns compared to using primates.
It's really quite fascinating -- they aren't particularly close to us genetically, but because they're a similar sized mammal with an omnivore diet, you can teach their macro-biology from the same textbook.
Yep, back in high school we had a few days devoted to dissecting and documenting the anatomy of a fetal pig. It was really surprising how similar they actually were.
Because they're suitable enough (size, pump performance, etc) and also mass produce-able. The rest is for the same reason we don't eat Monkey bacon via mass farming of monkeys.
IANAD, but from what I remember back when trans-species heart transplant research started in the 80's, it was that pig heart tissue is most similar to human heart tissue.
Hopefully there is a D on HN who can explain better.
That’s why as soon as there is a reliable mechanical heart I am getting one.
Massive stroke and sudden cardiac arrest are one of the few ways you can just drop dead with no warning I’d love to reduce that risk by half with a fully artificial heart. Assuming of course it’s more reliable than a regular one.
Same with elective prosthetics there will come a time when bionic arms or legs infer a physical advantage.
To be fair, pigs generally seem much more relaxed animals than humans. Will happily eat pork too for that matter. I'd just find some nice mud to roll in.
I jumped onto Wikipedia to figure out why arrhytmia might be a problem, and it looks like "artificial heart pump" might stand for a VAD (Ventricular Assist Device), as in it pumps blood and it helps, but the original organ remains in circuit.
"The patient, David Bennett, 57, knew there was no guarantee the experiment would work but he was dying, ineligible for a human heart transplant and had no other option, his son told The Associated Press."
Not really. Patients are able to leave the hospital, go home and resume normal life. They need to charge and maintain batteries on their person, and maintain the driveline exit site but all in all they have less limitations than say someone on dialysis.
Of course current LVADs are better than being dead, but still significantly worse than having a healthy heart, or transplant.
Heartmate III is one of the best and here are some summary outcomes[1]:
2 year survival after LVAD implant is around ~75%
2 year chance of stroke is ~10%
2 year chance of major infection is 58%, and sepsis is 15%
2 year chance of right heart failure is 34%.
Quality of life post implant and depression are real concerns. Some smaller studies have shown 5 year suicide rates as high as 10% following LVAD implantation.
Don't get me wrong, they are a miracle of modern science and engineering, but have limitations. There are reasons why they are not a destination therapy for people eligible to receive transplants.
Indeed, well said. It's important to also note that 2 year survival rates after a heart transplant are similar, 75%-80% survival 2 years after a heart transplant.
I wonder if it's possible that a pig heart might actually be better than an artificial one? I don't know enough about the state of the art in either to even guess myself.
In Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space novels, there is a race of humanoid pigs called "hyperpigs", distant descendants of pigs that had been genetically-enhanced with human DNA to make their organs more compatible with humans for transplant.
An example of this is the Carmet artificial heart from France. It has mechanical bits but also is made of organic tissue that is incorporated into the mechanical device.
Liver is a fairly special case in that it is a sludge in a bag, a bit like kidneys and other filter organs. The subject here is a heart. There is absolutely no way that we're going to be 3d printing a heart in the foreseeable future.
Is this really "a medical first" as the article states? I would have sworn that I heard about pig hearts being transplanted into humans at least a decade ago... Anyone from the medical field can give some background? Or am I imagining things? :-)
From another article: “ In September, Montgomery moved the work forward by becoming the first to transplant a pig kidney into a person, but in that case, and a subsequent surgery in December, the person had been declared brain dead. Montgomery kept the body functioning via machine for more than two days each time, showing that the human immune system would not immediately reject a kidney from a gene-edited pig.”
Wow, that's intense! Does anyone know if pig's blood typing matches ours and if not how do they overcome that? Would be curious to see what kind of lifetime they get from this transplant. Amazing.
“The Maryland surgeons used a heart from a pig that had undergone gene-editing to remove a sugar in its cells that’s responsible for that hyper-fast organ rejection.”
If we keep improving the whole animal, refining its physiology, appearance, personality, behaviour, judgement, presentation skills, longevity and resilience, the USA will eventually have the opportunity to elect a leader who can heal and unite a divided nation.
Pigs are extremely close to humans genetically and physiologically, i mean look at those guys: omnivores, no fur (also in some wild races), smart af, this is often overlooked.
Maybe I'm missing something, but what's so sad about this situation versus the past? In the past, he would have just died, but "what things have come to" is that medical technology has advanced to the point where he has a shot of making it another few years.
I think perhaps the wording might have confused you (and now reading again I can see why.) I was merely expressing sadness at the situation, that the man found himself left with no other possibilities. Particularly the quote: "It was either die or do this transplant. I want to live. I know it’s a shot in the dark, but it’s my last choice." By "things have come to" I didn't mean in society, I meant in his life.
for some reason, i think of the gods that are half human, half animals. They lived forever!! If you can transplant a heart, then new kidneys and pancreas ... we will become sphynxes. Cant wait to see where this will take us in 20 years
How full is the tip jar for things Alex Jones was right about. If you grant him some room for hyperbole and exaggeration guy is a pretty good futurist. He brags about reading research papers all day long. Fascinating role as a court jester and modern day prophet.
This research has always been out in the open. My mom is one of the people who dedicated her life to it - it would be nice if it wasn't just used to scare people.
Actually, the idea that humans may be primate-pig hybrids is one of the more believable explanations for our extremely unusual skin which is more similar to aquatic mammals than primates.
How many times do we have to ask you to stop breaking the site guidelines? You're still doing it on a regular basis. I don't want to ban you but at some point what choice do we have?
> “If this works, there will be an endless supply of these organs for patients who are suffering,” said Dr. Muhammad Mohiuddin, scientific director of the Maryland university’s animal-to-human transplant program.
Which means we now think we have the right to kill as many pigs we want not only the eat them but to extract their organs to make humans live.
Is this really that different from just killing a random healthy human being to save other humans who need a transplant? We somehow think we are superior than any other animal in earth and have the right to do whatever.
