What if we just kept taking the smartest dolphins we find and kept breeding them until we kept getting progressively smarter dolphins? Can humans artificially speed up the process of evolution this way, atleast for intelligence?
Even if a dolphin was super smart though I don't see how they could actually build anything significant without hand like appendages. The human hand is part of the reason why we are so succesful.
What if we just kept taking the smartest dolphins we find and kept breeding them until we kept getting progressively smarter dolphins? Can humans artificially speed up the process of evolution this way, atleast for intelligence?
Even if a dolphin was super smart though I don't see how they could actually build anything significant without hand like appendages. The human hand is part of the reason why we are so succesful.
I'm not sure what this has to do with the thread, but, yea, I don't see why we couldn't: we did it for dogs. Problem is, breeding for an arbitrary trait, like intelligence, renders the species unfit for natural competition since secondary, detrimental traits are disregarded. You might end up with a super-smart dolphin breed with one short flipper that could only swim in circles, or bad teeth. Things that would have been bred out generations ago if nature had its way. Hands are a nice, versatile tool that humans developed, which allowed us to leverage our intelligence into evolutionary advantage.
(The taboo against hunting and eating other human beings is evolutionary. We developed it because if we didn't, we'd probably have wiped eachother out, or there would be much less of us. Maybe Homo erectus didn't develop that aversion, and maybe that's why Homo sapien rose to power instead.)
But an explanation for why we feel that something is bad is different from the philosophical reason why we shouldn't do something.
If humans had evolved a defense against prions, we'd probably be all talking about how not practicing cannibalism is morally wrong, because it is indulging in waste and not satisfactorily disposing of a corpse.
I would argue that the philosophical reason is irrelevant. Philosophy doesn't give truths. It gives rationalizations for what you already believe. Although I'm getting dangerously close to being off topic or summoning Podly here.
What does that even mean?
It means that we have evolutionary/psychological reasons for almost every moral precept we find truth in. We have an aversion against throwing people off cliffs, but less so for flipping a switch that causes a train to run over someone. We have taboos against cannibalism, but not against eating non-human animals. Philosophy feels like it's more about using 'reason' to justify or rationalize those beliefs or feelings, rather than about finding some kind of objective truth.
A) Humans are just another animal. If this is the case, then it's sort of hard to argue that eating other non-human animals is immoral given that other animals do it all the time. You think a lion would decide not to eat a pig because the pig is smart? And I think in this case that eating other humans becomes verboten more by way of social contract than by absolute moral code.
The highlighted portion of this argument is an appeal to nature fallacy. The vast majority of species participating in a given activity doesn't have any bearing on it's objective moral value (consider, for example, that many species practice infanticide - and very few species appear to impose any sort of punitive sanctions against violent behavior).
Humans are plainly just another branch of the primate species. This fact is not some excuse to hide behind for acting with malice & cruelty. Big cats, while certainly smart, do not have second order reasoning or the faculties of abstraction necessary to understand that what they are doing might be considered cruel; moreover, a lion or tiger has no alternative for keeping itself alive other than hunting and killing prey. It doesn't have the teeth or digestive system for handling a vegetable diet.
We don't have either excuse. We're omnivores who do understand that factory farming is cruel and have a choice about our diets.
Kevin R Brown on
' As always when their class interests are at stake, the capitalists can dispense with noble sentiments like the right to free speech or the struggle against tyranny.'
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
Humans are a special case, and not Just Another Animal. If humans are a special case, and are expected to have greater moral responsibilities than any other animal, then that sort of places them on another level. We cease to be the equal of other animals and start to be their objective superiors. And if we're their objective superiors, then there's a strong argument that what to do with them is pretty much up to us, up to and including harvesting them for food. Though this still doesn't preclude the notion that we should refrain from abject abuse.
I think that my life is objectively more valuable than an infant's, but I don't think that means that I get to eat them.
I'd be surprised if chickens didn't start showing love for conveyor belts and lazer-beak-scalding in a few generations, if they haven't already. Unless of course, unhappy chickens are more profitable or make tastier eggs. You can get pretty dramatic changes in only a handful of decades if you select hard enough.
This is incredibly stupid sentiment.
First, the central nervous system is a grizzled heavyweight of evolutionary construction; it's been honed over millions of years to warn an organism against damage in the form of pain. Saying that this mechanism would change over the course of just a few generations for any reason is ridiculous.
Second, selection does not occur in factory farms based on how well the chickens respond to being tormented. Chickens are not measured for their ability to produce chicks that react with less pain / greater appreciation for their surrounding machinery and then bred.
Third, even if it were that chickens were selected for based on how well or not well they reacted to having their beaks singed off, it's highly dubious that you would ever end up with a chicken that appreciated the process. Selection isn't magically without limitation - there are always trade-offs and impossibilities (you will never, for example, be able to breed a mammal with a strong immune system that can perform reptile-like regeneration. These are mutually exclusive traits).
EDIT: As an example, let's say you wanted to breed a flying German Shepherd, and had many millions of years at your disposal to make this happen. There is little doubt that, assuming you found an effective selection method, you could wind-up with a flying animal. There is tremendous doubt that, by the time you were done breeding such an animal, it would at all resemble anything like a German Shepherd.
Kevin R Brown on
' As always when their class interests are at stake, the capitalists can dispense with noble sentiments like the right to free speech or the struggle against tyranny.'
(The taboo against hunting and eating other human beings is evolutionary. We developed it because if we didn't, we'd probably have wiped eachother out, or there would be much less of us. Maybe Homo erectus didn't develop that aversion, and maybe that's why Homo sapien rose to power instead.)
But an explanation for why we feel that something is bad is different from the philosophical reason why we shouldn't do something.
If humans had evolved a defense against prions, we'd probably be all talking about how not practicing cannibalism is morally wrong, because it is indulging in waste and not satisfactorily disposing of a corpse.
I would argue that the philosophical reason is irrelevant. Philosophy doesn't give truths. It gives rationalizations for what you already believe. Although I'm getting dangerously close to being off topic or summoning Podly here.
What does that even mean?
It means that we have evolutionary/psychological reasons for almost every moral precept we find truth in. We have an aversion against throwing people off cliffs, but less so for flipping a switch that causes a train to run over someone. We have taboos against cannibalism, but not against eating non-human animals. Philosophy feels like it's more about using 'reason' to justify or rationalize those beliefs or feelings, rather than about finding some kind of objective truth.
If that were true then people like Peter Singer would not exist.
Humans are a special case, and not Just Another Animal. If humans are a special case, and are expected to have greater moral responsibilities than any other animal, then that sort of places them on another level. We cease to be the equal of other animals and start to be their objective superiors. And if we're their objective superiors, then there's a strong argument that what to do with them is pretty much up to us, up to and including harvesting them for food. Though this still doesn't preclude the notion that we should refrain from abject abuse.
I think that my life is objectively more valuable than an infant's, but I don't think that means that I get to eat them.
I would wager that's mostly because there are a lot of people who would disagree with you on principle.
In general, a consensus on relative worth is typically at the center of questions like "is it OK for me to eat that thing".
One thing I don't think has been considered here is as follows: We're considering giving dolphins rights based on values held by human society. What no one here has yet considered is 'what do dolphins value, and do they even remotely correspond to what humans value?' That is just about impossible to determine without being able to communicate with dolphins, which tends to make this line of debate a very short one. But it's probably one of the best ways to consider how we should act in this case. Just because an animal is smart does not mean it's like us; dolphins evolved under vastly different environmental pressures, and I'm willing to bet most of what a dolphin values is vastly different from anything humans do.
It'll be really exciting if we ever figure out a wireless way to interface with the motor cortex. We'd then be able to give dolphins optional access to robotics so we could see what they do when given the ability to control appendages with opposable thumbs.
It'll be really exciting if we ever figure out a wireless way to interface with the motor cortex. We'd then be able to give dolphins optional access to robotics so we could see what they do when given the ability to control appendages with opposable thumbs.
Enslave humanity.
Then grow fat and lazy watching mexican dolphin soap operas.
It'll be really exciting if we ever figure out a wireless way to interface with the motor cortex. We'd then be able to give dolphins optional access to robotics so we could see what they do when given the ability to control appendages with opposable thumbs.
I'm not sure I like this idea. If I've learned anything from this thread, it's that dolphins are assholes. And I already knew they 9/10 dolphins approve of RAEP as a hobby.
One thing I don't think has been considered here is as follows: We're considering giving dolphins rights based on values held by human society. What no one here has yet considered is 'what do dolphins value, and do they even remotely correspond to what humans value?' That is just about impossible to determine without being able to communicate with dolphins, which tends to make this line of debate a very short one. But it's probably one of the best ways to consider how we should act in this case. Just because an animal is smart does not mean it's like us; dolphins evolved under vastly different environmental pressures, and I'm willing to bet most of what a dolphin values is vastly different from anything humans do.
To me, this simply means, "It's high time we decided to start communicating with dolphins (among other animals),"
As has been mentioned already, it's almost inconceivable that there would be one universal dolphin language at this point, but we ought to start somewhere. There may well be a vast wealth of ideas and brilliant minds that we are impoverishing our discourse of simply due to our communication bias with humans.
Kevin R Brown on
' As always when their class interests are at stake, the capitalists can dispense with noble sentiments like the right to free speech or the struggle against tyranny.'
I'm not sure I like this idea. If I've learned anything from this thread, it's that dolphins are assholes. And I already knew they 9/10 dolphins approve of RAEP as a hobby.
Which is why it would be interesting to have a conversation with a dolphin about this sort of issue. Maybe we know something the the dolphins don't (I imagine this would be the common outlook), in which case we may be able to improve their station - or, just maybe, dolphins know something that we don't, in which case we'll have enriched our own understanding just by opening one iddy biddy channel of discourse.
Kevin R Brown on
' As always when their class interests are at stake, the capitalists can dispense with noble sentiments like the right to free speech or the struggle against tyranny.'
Man, anyone who'd objectively rank a baby above a real person isn't ranking them objectively.
Come on, even from a purely practical standpoint there is a value in their full adult lifespan. An adult's worth to society starts to diminish after a certain age. From an ethical standpoint you could also say that childhood years are generally happier than adult ones and so that baby has more to lose.
I'm not sure I like this idea. If I've learned anything from this thread, it's that dolphins are assholes. And I already knew they 9/10 dolphins approve of RAEP as a hobby.
Which is why it would be interesting to have a conversation with a dolphin about this sort of issue. Maybe we know something the the dolphins don't (I imagine this would be the common outlook), in which case we may be able to improve their station - or, just maybe, dolphins know something that we don't, in which case we'll have enriched our own understanding just by opening one iddy biddy channel of discourse.
Also it would be an interesting exercise in the difficulties of communicating with alien lifeforms. I mean, if we meet intelligent aliens, they won't have one language (because we don't) they'll have thousands of dialects (like we do) and we'll be talking to something with a completely different biological outlook on the world.
I think trying to talk to dolphins would be fascinating xenolinguistics project to start answering questions about just how you would talk to alien intelligence.
And yes - I think that dolphins are a-ok with rape isn't an indightment of their morality so much as a reminder that humans, in the absence of a strong cultural structure, tend to conclude the same thing.
Dolphins are assholes because to not be an asshole means to have your personal desires squashed by societal pressures. No surprise there. Same reason all animals are assholes unless they're trained as house pets.
I'm not sure I like this idea. If I've learned anything from this thread, it's that dolphins are assholes. And I already knew they 9/10 dolphins approve of RAEP as a hobby.
Which is why it would be interesting to have a conversation with a dolphin about this sort of issue. Maybe we know something the the dolphins don't (I imagine this would be the common outlook), in which case we may be able to improve their station - or, just maybe, dolphins know something that we don't, in which case we'll have enriched our own understanding just by opening one iddy biddy channel of discourse.
Also it would be an interesting exercise in the difficulties of communicating with alien lifeforms. I mean, if we meet intelligent aliens, they won't have one language (because we don't) they'll have thousands of dialects (like we do) and we'll be talking to something with a completely different biological outlook on the world.
I think trying to talk to dolphins would be fascinating xenolinguistics project to start answering questions about just how you would talk to alien intelligence.
And yes - I think that dolphins are a-ok with rape isn't an indightment of their morality so much as a reminder that humans, in the absence of a strong cultural structure, tend to conclude the same thing.
But dolphins may very well have a "strong cultural structure." Just because humans organize themselves into hierarchical tribe-groups doesn't mean that dolphins function in the same way with pods. It's even not impossible that rape is part of that structure for dolphins. Again, there's no great way to determine that's true or false without being able to ask a dolphin directly.
EDIT: Dolphins, for all we know, could be very weird compared to humans in terms of morality.
Either way it would be damn cool if dolphin languages could be successfully translated such that we could talk to them in a way they and us understand.
You see because then we implement the future of fishing: we get the dolphins to farm ocean fish for us in exchange for technology, and the dolphins benefit by having more fish then they could ever have dream of being able to have. Also then we can have Dolphin Corps to hunt and destroy mind-controlled Russian giant squids which you just know Putin is working on.
I'd be surprised if chickens didn't start showing love for conveyor belts and lazer-beak-scalding in a few generations, if they haven't already. Unless of course, unhappy chickens are more profitable or make tastier eggs. You can get pretty dramatic changes in only a handful of decades if you select hard enough.
This is incredibly stupid sentiment.
First, the central nervous system is a grizzled heavyweight of evolutionary construction; it's been honed over millions of years to warn an organism against damage in the form of pain. Saying that this mechanism would change over the course of just a few generations for any reason is ridiculous.
Second, selection does not occur in factory farms based on how well the chickens respond to being tormented. Chickens are not measured for their ability to produce chicks that react with less pain / greater appreciation for their surrounding machinery and then bred.
Third, even if it were that chickens were selected for based on how well or not well they reacted to having their beaks singed off, it's highly dubious that you would ever end up with a chicken that appreciated the process. Selection isn't magically without limitation - there are always trade-offs and impossibilities (you will never, for example, be able to breed a mammal with a strong immune system that can perform reptile-like regeneration. These are mutually exclusive traits).
I don't think it would be that difficult.
Domestication of the Fox is said to have only taken 8 generations to see dramatic results. Chickens only take 6 months to mature. Although I'm aware the mechanism for domestication (paedomorphosis) is easier to select for than 'fucking love being in a factory'. If a shift were possible, it could occur on a small timescale: within decades even.
Congenital insensitivity to pain is a known human disorder. I don't know if it exists in the avian world, but if a similar mutation existed it could be screened for and used in the next generation of factory chickens. This is assuming it causes the chickens to be less agitated and willing to escape (because they don't mind their current pain) than more agitated (because they don't mind the pain of bashing their heads on their cages). The biggest issue seems to be if it is profitable for the factory.
Addendum: This news article seems to imply that researchers have already bred pain free mice.
Zhou-Feng Chen, a neuroscientist at Washington University in St Louis and colleagues are identifying the genes that regulate affective pain. Already, they have engineered mice that lack two enzymes which help neuron-to-neuron communication in the ACC. When the team injected a noxious, painful chemical into their paws, the mice licked them only briefly. In contrast, normal mice continued to do so for hours afterwards (Neuron, vol 36, p 713). This suggests that livestock could be spared persistent, nagging pain.
Other work in Chen's lab suggests genetic engineering may do an even better job at tempering affective pain. Last year, the team identified a gene expressed almost exclusively in the ACC called P311. Mice without P311 recoiled from heat and pressure. But when the team taught their mice to associate a region of their cage with a painful formalin injection, normal mice rapidly learned to avoid that area, while those lacking P311 kept returning.
Since P311 varies little among mammals, it's possible that knocking out the gene in cows and pigs could yield comparable results, Chen says.
You'd be free to eat meat without any suffering. New question: Is it morally right to engineer animals that don't feel suffering when we eat them?
You'd be free to eat meat without any suffering. New question: Is it morally right to engineer animals that don't feel suffering when we eat them?
I don't see why not.
That depends on whether the primary thing wrong with eating animals is the pain that they feel when they're slaughtered.
That's the primary concern I have with it. I'd also be concerned with psychological suffering re: enclosed spaces. It seems like also potentially necessary step would be to make animals as dumb as trees. Or masochists. But I think treebrains would be easier.
Loren Michael on
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
edited January 2010
I'm all for synthetic meat.
But I'm not necessarily ever okay with slaughtering animals, even if it's done painlessly. It really depends on the sort of mental life we take the animal to have, and I'd really rather play these things safe.
But I'm not necessarily ever okay with slaughtering animals, even if it's done painlessly. It really depends on the sort of mental life we take the animal to have, and I'd really rather play these things safe.
I think that the desired outcomes of synthetic meat (in terms of being completely suffering free) could conceivably be bred and genetically modified into existence from existing stock.
I'm not clear on synth meat in terms of proposed creation process though, so maybe that's what I'm already talking about.
Loren Michael on
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
edited January 2010
I just think that we need to take an expansive view of suffering, one which goes beyond mere pain and includes things like psychological trauma and even deprivation of future goods. You know, like we do for people.
Some animals may be incapable of psychological trauma (although the evidence is there suggesting that factory farmed animals essentially go insane), but I'd imagine that almost all of them are capable of being deprived of future goods. At least, all of the ones that are smarter than rocks.
The ones that are dumb (and insensible) as rocks don't really matter one way or the other.
Domestication of the Fox is said to have only taken 8 generations to see dramatic results. Chickens only take 6 months to mature. Although I'm aware the mechanism for domestication (paedomorphosis) is easier to select for than 'fucking love being in a factory'.
Do the chickens hate 'being in a factory'? I mean they're chickens, its not like they had aspirations to go to college and see the world and then some asshole put them in a cage. They didn't really seem all that shaken up post beak lasering, compared to say me if you lasered off part of my nose 15s earlier.
Mike Rowe(the Dirty Jobs guy) gave a talk at TED, and one of the stores he told was about how to properly castrate lambs I think it was. Basically theres a "humane" way to do it with rubber bands, and the old fashioned way with a knife, and according to him the lamb who got the knife was up a moving pretty much right away, while the humane rubber band method apparently keeps them in pain for a day plus.
Its about 20min long and worth watching, but the relevant bit is about the first 7m.
Domestication of the Fox is said to have only taken 8 generations to see dramatic results. Chickens only take 6 months to mature. Although I'm aware the mechanism for domestication (paedomorphosis) is easier to select for than 'fucking love being in a factory'. If a shift were possible, it could occur on a small timescale: within decades even.
Congenital insensitivity to pain is a known human disorder. I don't know if it exists in the avian world, but if a similar mutation existed it could be screened for and used in the next generation of factory chickens. This is assuming it causes the chickens to be less agitated and willing to escape (because they don't mind their current pain) than more agitated (because they don't mind the pain of bashing their heads on their cages). The biggest issue seems to be if it is profitable for the factory.
Have you done much reading about the Fox domestication project done in Russia, however? By the end of the project, the 'foxes' hardly resembled the animals the researchers had started with. And that's only with the researchers selecting for a behavioral trait.
By the time you were done purposefully selecting for chickens that reacted positively to having their beaks torn off, the animals you'd be working with would probably be so distinct from the original stock that they wouldn't even be able to breed with them anymore.
In any case, again, this wasn't even what you originally said. Your original statement suggested that simply running population after population of chicks through kill factories without any kind of selection pressure applied to the breeding population would somehow magically create chicks that enjoyed being killed (or already had done so), which is nonsense.
Kevin R Brown on
' As always when their class interests are at stake, the capitalists can dispense with noble sentiments like the right to free speech or the struggle against tyranny.'
But I'm not necessarily ever okay with slaughtering animals, even if it's done painlessly. It really depends on the sort of mental life we take the animal to have, and I'd really rather play these things safe.
My problem with a solution like synthetic meat would that, well... it's not really much of a solution, is it? It would be just one more benefit provided by science to a group of individuals who have zero appreciation for the methods of science.
It doesn't improve the standards at a factory farm or make the food any safer to eat; the meat (har har) of the technology simply goes towards further enabling those that operate such establishments by giving them another excuse to throw out ("Well, these animals don't even feel pain!"). I mean, I would definitely be more comfortable eating meat that I knew came from an effectively brain-dead animal that couldn't suffer, but I also don't think we should pretend that such biotechnology actually addresses the issue at hand (...in some ways, I can imagine it being detrimental. If the animals don't feel pain, for example, then the workers and owners can probably argue for much lower standards in their abattoirs)
Kevin R Brown on
' As always when their class interests are at stake, the capitalists can dispense with noble sentiments like the right to free speech or the struggle against tyranny.'
My problem with a solution like synthetic meat would that, well... it's not really much of a solution, is it? It would be just one more benefit provided by science to a group of individuals who have zero appreciation for the methods of science.
It doesn't improve the standards at a factory farm or make the food any safer to eat; the meat (har har) of the technology simply goes towards further enabling those that operate such establishments by giving them another excuse to throw out ("Well, these animals don't even feel pain!"). I mean, I would definitely be more comfortable eating meat that I knew came from an effectively brain-dead animal that couldn't suffer, but I also don't think we should pretend that such biotechnology actually addresses the issue at hand (...in some ways, I can imagine it being detrimental. If the animals don't feel pain, for example, then the workers and owners can probably argue for much lower standards in their abattoirs)
If the animal is brain-dead, then why does it matter what conditions it's kept in?
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Even if a dolphin was super smart though I don't see how they could actually build anything significant without hand like appendages. The human hand is part of the reason why we are so succesful.
Man, this thread is just rife with Douglas Adams!
It means that we have evolutionary/psychological reasons for almost every moral precept we find truth in. We have an aversion against throwing people off cliffs, but less so for flipping a switch that causes a train to run over someone. We have taboos against cannibalism, but not against eating non-human animals. Philosophy feels like it's more about using 'reason' to justify or rationalize those beliefs or feelings, rather than about finding some kind of objective truth.
The highlighted portion of this argument is an appeal to nature fallacy. The vast majority of species participating in a given activity doesn't have any bearing on it's objective moral value (consider, for example, that many species practice infanticide - and very few species appear to impose any sort of punitive sanctions against violent behavior).
Humans are plainly just another branch of the primate species. This fact is not some excuse to hide behind for acting with malice & cruelty. Big cats, while certainly smart, do not have second order reasoning or the faculties of abstraction necessary to understand that what they are doing might be considered cruel; moreover, a lion or tiger has no alternative for keeping itself alive other than hunting and killing prey. It doesn't have the teeth or digestive system for handling a vegetable diet.
We don't have either excuse. We're omnivores who do understand that factory farming is cruel and have a choice about our diets.
I think that my life is objectively more valuable than an infant's, but I don't think that means that I get to eat them.
This is incredibly stupid sentiment.
First, the central nervous system is a grizzled heavyweight of evolutionary construction; it's been honed over millions of years to warn an organism against damage in the form of pain. Saying that this mechanism would change over the course of just a few generations for any reason is ridiculous.
Second, selection does not occur in factory farms based on how well the chickens respond to being tormented. Chickens are not measured for their ability to produce chicks that react with less pain / greater appreciation for their surrounding machinery and then bred.
Third, even if it were that chickens were selected for based on how well or not well they reacted to having their beaks singed off, it's highly dubious that you would ever end up with a chicken that appreciated the process. Selection isn't magically without limitation - there are always trade-offs and impossibilities (you will never, for example, be able to breed a mammal with a strong immune system that can perform reptile-like regeneration. These are mutually exclusive traits).
EDIT: As an example, let's say you wanted to breed a flying German Shepherd, and had many millions of years at your disposal to make this happen. There is little doubt that, assuming you found an effective selection method, you could wind-up with a flying animal. There is tremendous doubt that, by the time you were done breeding such an animal, it would at all resemble anything like a German Shepherd.
If that were true then people like Peter Singer would not exist.
In general, a consensus on relative worth is typically at the center of questions like "is it OK for me to eat that thing".
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Then grow fat and lazy watching mexican dolphin soap operas.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
I'm not sure I like this idea. If I've learned anything from this thread, it's that dolphins are assholes. And I already knew they 9/10 dolphins approve of RAEP as a hobby.
To me, this simply means, "It's high time we decided to start communicating with dolphins (among other animals),"
As has been mentioned already, it's almost inconceivable that there would be one universal dolphin language at this point, but we ought to start somewhere. There may well be a vast wealth of ideas and brilliant minds that we are impoverishing our discourse of simply due to our communication bias with humans.
Although the "Who fucking cares, I'm swimming?" school of philosophy could probably use the influx of like-minded individuals.
Joking aside, I'm amazed that it has met even half-hearted debate that killing dolphins is a bad thing.
Which is why it would be interesting to have a conversation with a dolphin about this sort of issue. Maybe we know something the the dolphins don't (I imagine this would be the common outlook), in which case we may be able to improve their station - or, just maybe, dolphins know something that we don't, in which case we'll have enriched our own understanding just by opening one iddy biddy channel of discourse.
Come on, even from a purely practical standpoint there is a value in their full adult lifespan. An adult's worth to society starts to diminish after a certain age. From an ethical standpoint you could also say that childhood years are generally happier than adult ones and so that baby has more to lose.
Also it would be an interesting exercise in the difficulties of communicating with alien lifeforms. I mean, if we meet intelligent aliens, they won't have one language (because we don't) they'll have thousands of dialects (like we do) and we'll be talking to something with a completely different biological outlook on the world.
I think trying to talk to dolphins would be fascinating xenolinguistics project to start answering questions about just how you would talk to alien intelligence.
And yes - I think that dolphins are a-ok with rape isn't an indightment of their morality so much as a reminder that humans, in the absence of a strong cultural structure, tend to conclude the same thing.
But dolphins may very well have a "strong cultural structure." Just because humans organize themselves into hierarchical tribe-groups doesn't mean that dolphins function in the same way with pods. It's even not impossible that rape is part of that structure for dolphins. Again, there's no great way to determine that's true or false without being able to ask a dolphin directly.
EDIT: Dolphins, for all we know, could be very weird compared to humans in terms of morality.
You see because then we implement the future of fishing: we get the dolphins to farm ocean fish for us in exchange for technology, and the dolphins benefit by having more fish then they could ever have dream of being able to have. Also then we can have Dolphin Corps to hunt and destroy mind-controlled Russian giant squids which you just know Putin is working on.
PSN - sumowot
I don't think it would be that difficult.
Domestication of the Fox is said to have only taken 8 generations to see dramatic results. Chickens only take 6 months to mature. Although I'm aware the mechanism for domestication (paedomorphosis) is easier to select for than 'fucking love being in a factory'. If a shift were possible, it could occur on a small timescale: within decades even.
Congenital insensitivity to pain is a known human disorder. I don't know if it exists in the avian world, but if a similar mutation existed it could be screened for and used in the next generation of factory chickens. This is assuming it causes the chickens to be less agitated and willing to escape (because they don't mind their current pain) than more agitated (because they don't mind the pain of bashing their heads on their cages). The biggest issue seems to be if it is profitable for the factory.
Addendum: This news article seems to imply that researchers have already bred pain free mice.
You'd be free to eat meat without any suffering. New question: Is it morally right to engineer animals that don't feel suffering when we eat them?
I don't see why not.
That depends on whether the primary thing wrong with eating animals is the pain that they feel when they're slaughtered.
That's the primary concern I have with it. I'd also be concerned with psychological suffering re: enclosed spaces. It seems like also potentially necessary step would be to make animals as dumb as trees. Or masochists. But I think treebrains would be easier.
But I'm not necessarily ever okay with slaughtering animals, even if it's done painlessly. It really depends on the sort of mental life we take the animal to have, and I'd really rather play these things safe.
I think that the desired outcomes of synthetic meat (in terms of being completely suffering free) could conceivably be bred and genetically modified into existence from existing stock.
I'm not clear on synth meat in terms of proposed creation process though, so maybe that's what I'm already talking about.
Some animals may be incapable of psychological trauma (although the evidence is there suggesting that factory farmed animals essentially go insane), but I'd imagine that almost all of them are capable of being deprived of future goods. At least, all of the ones that are smarter than rocks.
The ones that are dumb (and insensible) as rocks don't really matter one way or the other.
I'm more or less okay with that.
Do the chickens hate 'being in a factory'? I mean they're chickens, its not like they had aspirations to go to college and see the world and then some asshole put them in a cage. They didn't really seem all that shaken up post beak lasering, compared to say me if you lasered off part of my nose 15s earlier.
Mike Rowe(the Dirty Jobs guy) gave a talk at TED, and one of the stores he told was about how to properly castrate lambs I think it was. Basically theres a "humane" way to do it with rubber bands, and the old fashioned way with a knife, and according to him the lamb who got the knife was up a moving pretty much right away, while the humane rubber band method apparently keeps them in pain for a day plus.
Its about 20min long and worth watching, but the relevant bit is about the first 7m.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRVdiHu1VCc
Have you done much reading about the Fox domestication project done in Russia, however? By the end of the project, the 'foxes' hardly resembled the animals the researchers had started with. And that's only with the researchers selecting for a behavioral trait.
By the time you were done purposefully selecting for chickens that reacted positively to having their beaks torn off, the animals you'd be working with would probably be so distinct from the original stock that they wouldn't even be able to breed with them anymore.
In any case, again, this wasn't even what you originally said. Your original statement suggested that simply running population after population of chicks through kill factories without any kind of selection pressure applied to the breeding population would somehow magically create chicks that enjoyed being killed (or already had done so), which is nonsense.
My problem with a solution like synthetic meat would that, well... it's not really much of a solution, is it? It would be just one more benefit provided by science to a group of individuals who have zero appreciation for the methods of science.
It doesn't improve the standards at a factory farm or make the food any safer to eat; the meat (har har) of the technology simply goes towards further enabling those that operate such establishments by giving them another excuse to throw out ("Well, these animals don't even feel pain!"). I mean, I would definitely be more comfortable eating meat that I knew came from an effectively brain-dead animal that couldn't suffer, but I also don't think we should pretend that such biotechnology actually addresses the issue at hand (...in some ways, I can imagine it being detrimental. If the animals don't feel pain, for example, then the workers and owners can probably argue for much lower standards in their abattoirs)
"If you wake up in the middle of the night and see your TV floating, what do you do?
You shout, "Drop the TV, Sushi!"
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