David Horton: Cowed by facts. One of those human-animal hybrids reared its head again the other day and said 'Moooo'. A team of scientists in the UK, at Newcastle University, have been given permission, as part of their stem cell research program, to create embryos by fusing human DNA with cow eggs.
The reason for doing it? Purely practical - human eggs are as scarce as hen's teeth, cows eggs as common as, well, hen's eggs. So if you are doing research to try to make the life of humans not quite as nasty, brutish and short as it can be for many, it makes sense to use cow eggs in experiments to see how best to develop stem cells, and to investigate disease development. No big deal, you would think, just a recipe for egg cooking that says: replace the bit that eventually makes an egg a cow, the nucleus, with a nucleus that eventually makes an egg a human; let the non-nuclear part of the egg nourish the human nucleus until it has divided a few times; remove from oven, after a few days, when done.
But instantly came the usual outrage. Never understood it before, but this time it was clear - 'you may begin to undermine the whole distinction between humans and animals' said a bioethicist, and 'if that happens, it might also undermine human dignity and human rights'. The problem then, is that the fact that you can do the process - substituting a nucleus of one species for the nucleus of another, and having the resulting egg continue on its merry way, oblivious to 'human dignity', shows yet again just how close humans are to other mammals.
And we can't let people understand that, can we, otherwise they might begin to see that evolution isn't a theory but a statement of the obvious. And the links between all life forms, not just mammals, was accentuated when a study of bees showed that the DNA coding for their biological clock was very similar to that of mammals. A study of the DNA of bees also confirmed their evolutionary history, being derived from an African origin (just like humans!) and a very old fossil bee, the oldest yet found, showed close links to wasps, from which bees evolved. Yet another non-missing link.
But keeping such facts away from people is par for the evangelical course, and more recently we have had the extraordinary demands from evangelicals that the National Museum of Kenya remove its display of human evolution. Hiding the ancestral human fossils from Kenya away is yet another example of closing your eyes to the reality of life on Earth, occupying a faith-based planet instead of a reality-based one. Taking some of the evidence for the reality of the links between humans and animals (are the hominid fossils human or animal, that is the question, and where do you draw the line? You can't of course, and that is the problem that evangelists, fighting all over again the war they lost in 1859, can't recognize) and hiding it from children and child-like adults, is a sign of people whose world is crumbling. How much evidence can you hide before the whole theory of religion comes tumbling down?
On the other hand there are still people who believe that there were WMD, and links with Al Quaeda, in Iraq. The evidence against that faith is hidden by politicians as strongly as the evangelicals are trying to hide the evidence of evolution.
 [The Huffington Post | Full Blog Feed]
2:03:25 PM 
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