I love this dude... No real connection to the content of the thread that I see but, still, thanks for the drop, a very enjoyable view.
Value of Life & Intelligence (CP warning)
- Thread starter Costanza
- Start date
I love this dude... No real connection to the content of the thread that I see but, still, thanks for the drop, a very enjoyable view.
I'm not going to go into the equally corrupt myopic insanity that is politics in regards to a heath care system already successfully in place in other countries with a variety of governments and economies, this is simply silly imo...on to the orginal topic
Since when especially in the information age has WILLFUL ignorance/looking the other way, been a VALID defense? TOP THAT OFF with the fact that most people cannot escape the CONSTANT bombardment of the "news" ....PURE IGNORANCE to anyone with an IQ over 70 is extinct
We might live in an information age in the sense that information is readily available but, in the sense that it is heavily consumed and highly valued, we most certainly do not live in an information age.
What is the Internet-- the greatest tool available distinguishing this age from others-- in practice for most people? A means of acquiring porn, gossip and sharing jokes and funny videos.
I don't bring up ignorance as a defense but as an explanation. Its not something to be excused; it simply is... As far as politics, that has been included as a) an excuse to bump the thread and b) examples of the current practical application of the theories being discussed here.
The phrase "civilized human behavior" strikes me as oxymoronic.
Beyond that, as the parameters of acceptable human behavior and ideals have always been changing, views far outside those parameters may be of great significance and a harbinger of future norms.
Lower us? Doesn't that suggest a fall from a previous height? Outside of biblical fairy tales there is nothing indicating we have ever been any "better than the other animals with whom we share this planet."
This sounds good to me but I'm not knowledgeable enough of animal rights or treatment throughout history to really know if it is true. Based on what I know of certain Native American beliefs/practices regarding animals, it would seem as if the progress is ebbs and flows more than continual. I couldn't really compare treatment of animals through time and places very well, though-- Ancient Africa/Rome/"Middle East" through the first modern millenium through around the 1500s versus today. Any info on this would be interesting.
c/s
I mean if you just stirring things up cool. But the whole point isn't that we are all-knowing beings due to the information age, but now the explanation/defense of not knowing is laughable.
If you are having sex and don't know 4 out of 5 sexually active people in America have Herpes, and catch it... you saying someone can claim "I didn't know" as a explanation/defense??
They teach 7 year olds how to google in school nowadays... sorry can't buy the "we didn't know" excuse no more
c/s
I mean if you just stirring things up cool. But the whole point isn't that we are all-knowing beings due to the information age, but now the explanation/defense of not knowing is laughable.
If you are having sex and don't know 4 out of 5 sexually active people in America have Herpes, and catch it... you saying someone can claim "I didn't know" as a explanation/defense??
They teach 7 year olds how to google in school nowadays... sorry can't buy the "we didn't know" excuse no more
You keep confusing access with use-- Just because seven year olds know how to google, if they choose to use it to find free games or tv shows, they likely don't know many things they could know. Maybe you could call "we had no way of knowing" a lame excuse but "we didn't know" is a statement of fact, respectable or not.
As implied in the Tyson video Flawless posted, there are many reasons people fail to reach their potential. He focuses on one of the most important influences-- parents. But there are many cultural reasons which promote ignorance and you don't have to respect it, you can even laugh at it, but you can't pretend it doesn't exist just because you believe it shouldn't exist.
Entertainment slaves???
I've thought about this before. Bill Maher, who I posted before comparing retarded children and dogs, had an interesting comment along these lines.
"I always hear women say, 'Y'know, married men live longer.' Uh, yes, and an indoor cat... also... lives longer. It's a fur-ball with a broken spirit that can only look out on a world it will never enjoy, but it does technically live longer."
So, as someone who owns a cat-- born to a friend's housecat-- I've often wondered if she'd be happier totally separate from me.
slave
Noun
1. a person legally owned by another for whom he or she has to work without freedom, pay, or rights
2. a person under the domination of another or of some habit or influence: a slave to party doctrine
3. Informal a badly-paid person doing menial tasks
I think the third, informal definition best captures the difference. Human slaves were overwhelmingly treated badly and exploited; if the average pet owner was Michael Vick the comparison might have more merit but many people treat their pets as good or even better than some people do their own kids.
my personal theory is that everyone is born with the same intelligience but since the personality is a system of ideas, not everyone agrees with the idea on how to express that "intelligience."
I've tended to think that people are born tabula rasa, a blank slate, and their environment shapes their development for the most part.
I think people are born with varying levels of abilities but that it usually makes only a slight difference in their overall potential and future path.
A post last night had me thinking about this subject, so its interesting that you bump this thread today with this comment...
The entire concept of animal instinct is amazing to me. What makes animals want to have sex and know how to do it? How can an elephant know how to revive its stillborn child?? Why does it even care???
Obviously, there is something built in...
This was my original response to the Elepphant CPR video:
Seeing things like this makes me want to respect life more... I'm sort of tempted to become somewhat of an animal rights activist and vegetarian; I'll fix a chicken salad and when I'm cracking my boiled eggs I think "Damn, it's not enough that you're chopping up this chicken to mix with lettuce, parmesan cheese and thousand island, you gotta throw in a couple of chicken fetuses to boot?"
Honestly, I am really not convinced that we have more of a right to live and breathe than other creatures on this planet, particularly after scenes such as this.
This animal had the same concern for its stillborn child as any decent human would... And I add the modifier "decent" because, obviously, many humans just don't give a damn, which I'm not sure is true of elephants...
Ivory Poaching At Critical Levels: Elephants On Path To Extinction By 2020?
ScienceDaily (Aug. 1, 2008) — African elephants are being slaughtered for their ivory at a pace unseen since an international ban on the ivory trade took effect in 1989. But the public outcry that resulted in that ban is absent today, and a University of Washington conservation biologist contends it is because the public seems to be unaware of the giant mammals' plight.
The elephant death rate from poaching throughout Africa is about 8 percent a year based on recent studies, which is actually higher than the 7.4 percent annual death rate that led to the international ivory trade ban nearly 20 years ago, said Samuel Wasser, a UW biology professor.
But the poaching death rate in the late 1980s was based on a population that numbered more than 1 million. Today the total African elephant population is less than 470,000.
"If the trend continues, there won't be any elephants except in fenced areas with a lot of enforcement to protect them," said Wasser.
He is lead author of a paper in the August issue of Conservation Biology that contends elephants are on a course that could mean most remaining large groups will be extinct by 2020 unless renewed public pressure brings about heightened enforcement.
Co-authors are William Clark of the Interpol Working Group on Wildlife Crime and the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, Ofir Drori of the Last Great Ape Organization in Cameroon, Emily Kisamo of the Lusaka Agreement Task Force in Kenya, Celia Mailand of the UW, Benezeth Mutayoba of Sokoine University in Tanzania and Matthew Stephens of the University of Chicago.
Wasser's laboratory has developed DNA tools that can determine which elephant population ivory came from. That is important because often poachers attack elephants in one country but ship the contraband ivory from an adjacent nation to throw off law enforcement.
For instance, 6.5 tons of ivory seized in Singapore in 2002 were shipped from Malawi, but DNA tracking showed the ivory came originally from an area centered on Zambia. Similarly, a 2006 shipment of 3.9 tons seized in Hong Kong had been sent from Cameroon, but DNA forensics showed it came from an area centered on Gabon.
Evidence gathered from recent major ivory seizures shows conclusively that the ivory is not coming from a broad geographic area but rather that hunters are targeting specific herds. With such information, Wasser said, authorities can beef up enforcement efforts and focus them in specific areas where poaching is known to occur as a means of preventing elephants from being killed. But that will only happen if there is sufficient public pressure to marshal funding for a much larger international effort to halt the poaching.
In 1989, most international ivory trade was banned by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, which regulates trade in threatened and endangered species. The restrictions banned ivory trade except for ivory from elephants that nations legally culled from their herds or those that died naturally.
At the time the treaty was enacted, poachers were killing an average of 70,000 elephants a year. The ban instigated much stronger enforcement efforts, nearly halting poaching almost immediately. However, that sense of success resulted in waning enforcement. Western aid was withdrawn four years after the ban was enacted and poaching gradually increased to the current alarming rates, Wasser said.
"The situation is worse than ever before and the public is unaware," he said, "It's very serious because elephants are an incredibly important species. They keep habitats open so other species that depend on such ecosystems can use them. Without elephants, there will be major habitat changes, with negative effects on the many species that depend on the lost habitat.
"Elephants also are a major part of ecotourism, which is an important source of hard currency for many African countries."
The illegal ivory trade is being carried out mostly by large crime syndicates, Wasser believes, and is being driven by growing markets in China and Japan, where ivory is in demand for carvings and signature stamps called hankos.
In addition, in the last few years demand has risen sharply in the United States, where much of the ivory is used to make knife handles and gun grips. In fact, a May report from the Care for the Wild International, a not-for-profit British natural protection organization, ranks the U.S. second behind China as a marketplace for illegal ivory.
But the illegal ivory trade has gotten relatively low priority from prosecutors, and new laws promoting global trade have created "a policing nightmare," Wasser says, which makes ivory poaching a high-profit, low-risk endeavor.
The only way to curb the trade, he believes, is to focus enforcement in areas where the ivory comes from in the first place, before it enters the complex, global crime trade network. Public support is crucial to helping reduce demand and to spur the needed enforcement help from the West.
However, Wasser believes that news reports about the need to cull excess elephants from managed populations in three or four countries have led many people to believe incorrectly that there are too many elephants in Africa. Those managed populations are confined by fences that limit the elephants' natural movements.
"Public support stopped the illegal ivory trade back in 1989 and can do so again," Wasser said. "The work with DNA sampling allows us to focus law enforcement on poaching hot spots.
"It forces countries to take more responsibility for what goes on within their borders, and it also gives us more insight on where to look so that, hopefully, we can stop the poachers before the elephants are actually killed."
The work was funded by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service African Elephant Conservation Fund, the University of Washington Center for Conservation Biology and the International Fund for Animal Welfare.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/080731140219.htm
I appreciate that you appreciated it.dang, I enjoyed this thread to much.....nice drop on the video
Scientists say dolphins should be treated as 'non-human persons'
Jonathan Leake
Dolphins have been declared the world’s second most intelligent creatures after humans, with scientists suggesting they are so bright that they should be treated as “non-human persons”.
Studies into dolphin behaviour have highlighted how similar their communications are to those of humans and that they are brighter than chimpanzees. These have been backed up by anatomical research showing that dolphin brains have many key features associated with high intelligence.
The researchers argue that their work shows it is morally unacceptable to keep such intelligent animals in amusement parks or to kill them for food or by accident when fishing. Some 300,000 whales, dolphins and porpoises die in this way each year.
“Many dolphin brains are larger than our own and second in mass only to the human brain when corrected for body size,” said Lori Marino, a zoologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, who has used magnetic resonance imaging scans to map the brains of dolphin species and compare them with those of primates.
“The neuroanatomy suggests psychological continuity between humans and dolphins and has profound implications for the ethics of human-dolphin interactions,” she added.
Dolphins have long been recognised as among the most intelligent of animals but many researchers had placed them below chimps, which some studies have found can reach the intelligence levels of three-year-old children. Recently, however, a series of behavioural studies has suggested that dolphins, especially species such as the bottlenose, could be the brighter of the two. The studies show how dolphins have distinct personalities, a strong sense of self and can think about the future.
It has also become clear that they are “cultural” animals, meaning that new types of behaviour can quickly be picked up by one dolphin from another.
In one study, Diana Reiss, professor of psychology at Hunter College, City University of New York, showed that bottlenose dolphins could recognise themselves in a mirror and use it to inspect various parts of their bodies, an ability that had been thought limited to humans and great apes.
In another, she found that captive animals also had the ability to learn a rudimentary symbol-based language.
Other research has shown dolphins can solve difficult problems, while those living in the wild co-operate in ways that imply complex social structures and a high level of emotional sophistication.
In one recent case, a dolphin rescued from the wild was taught to tail-walk while recuperating for three weeks in a dolphinarium in Australia.
After she was released, scientists were astonished to see the trick spreading among wild dolphins who had learnt it from the former captive.
There are many similar examples, such as the way dolphins living off Western Australia learnt to hold sponges over their snouts to protect themselves when searching for spiny fish on the ocean floor.
Such observations, along with others showing, for example, how dolphins could co-operate with military precision to round up shoals of fish to eat, have prompted questions about the brain structures that must underlie them.
Size is only one factor. Researchers have found that brain size varies hugely from around 7oz for smaller cetacean species such as the Ganges River dolphin to more than 19lb for sperm whales, whose brains are the largest on the planet. Human brains, by contrast, range from 2lb-4lb, while a chimp’s brain is about 12oz.
When it comes to intelligence, however, brain size is less important than its size relative to the body.
What Marino and her colleagues found was that the cerebral cortex and neocortex of bottlenose dolphins were so large that “the anatomical ratios that assess cognitive capacity place it second only to the human brain”. They also found that the brain cortex of dolphins such as the bottlenose had the same convoluted folds that are strongly linked with human intelligence.
Such folds increase the volume of the cortex and the ability of brain cells to interconnect with each other. “Despite evolving along a different neuroanatomical trajectory to humans, cetacean brains have several features that are correlated with complex intelligence,” Marino said.
Marino and Reiss will present their findings at a conference in San Diego, California, next month, concluding that the new evidence about dolphin intelligence makes it morally repugnant to mistreat them.
Thomas White, professor of ethics at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, who has written a series of academic studies suggesting dolphins should have rights, will speak at the same conference.
“The scientific research . . . suggests that dolphins are ‘non-human persons’ who qualify for moral standing as individuals,” he said.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article6973994.ece#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=797084
Jonathan Leake
Dolphins have been declared the world’s second most intelligent creatures after humans, with scientists suggesting they are so bright that they should be treated as “non-human persons”.
Studies into dolphin behaviour have highlighted how similar their communications are to those of humans and that they are brighter than chimpanzees. These have been backed up by anatomical research showing that dolphin brains have many key features associated with high intelligence.
The researchers argue that their work shows it is morally unacceptable to keep such intelligent animals in amusement parks or to kill them for food or by accident when fishing. Some 300,000 whales, dolphins and porpoises die in this way each year.
“Many dolphin brains are larger than our own and second in mass only to the human brain when corrected for body size,” said Lori Marino, a zoologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, who has used magnetic resonance imaging scans to map the brains of dolphin species and compare them with those of primates.
“The neuroanatomy suggests psychological continuity between humans and dolphins and has profound implications for the ethics of human-dolphin interactions,” she added.
Dolphins have long been recognised as among the most intelligent of animals but many researchers had placed them below chimps, which some studies have found can reach the intelligence levels of three-year-old children. Recently, however, a series of behavioural studies has suggested that dolphins, especially species such as the bottlenose, could be the brighter of the two. The studies show how dolphins have distinct personalities, a strong sense of self and can think about the future.
It has also become clear that they are “cultural” animals, meaning that new types of behaviour can quickly be picked up by one dolphin from another.
In one study, Diana Reiss, professor of psychology at Hunter College, City University of New York, showed that bottlenose dolphins could recognise themselves in a mirror and use it to inspect various parts of their bodies, an ability that had been thought limited to humans and great apes.
In another, she found that captive animals also had the ability to learn a rudimentary symbol-based language.
Other research has shown dolphins can solve difficult problems, while those living in the wild co-operate in ways that imply complex social structures and a high level of emotional sophistication.
In one recent case, a dolphin rescued from the wild was taught to tail-walk while recuperating for three weeks in a dolphinarium in Australia.
After she was released, scientists were astonished to see the trick spreading among wild dolphins who had learnt it from the former captive.
There are many similar examples, such as the way dolphins living off Western Australia learnt to hold sponges over their snouts to protect themselves when searching for spiny fish on the ocean floor.
Such observations, along with others showing, for example, how dolphins could co-operate with military precision to round up shoals of fish to eat, have prompted questions about the brain structures that must underlie them.
Size is only one factor. Researchers have found that brain size varies hugely from around 7oz for smaller cetacean species such as the Ganges River dolphin to more than 19lb for sperm whales, whose brains are the largest on the planet. Human brains, by contrast, range from 2lb-4lb, while a chimp’s brain is about 12oz.
When it comes to intelligence, however, brain size is less important than its size relative to the body.
What Marino and her colleagues found was that the cerebral cortex and neocortex of bottlenose dolphins were so large that “the anatomical ratios that assess cognitive capacity place it second only to the human brain”. They also found that the brain cortex of dolphins such as the bottlenose had the same convoluted folds that are strongly linked with human intelligence.
Such folds increase the volume of the cortex and the ability of brain cells to interconnect with each other. “Despite evolving along a different neuroanatomical trajectory to humans, cetacean brains have several features that are correlated with complex intelligence,” Marino said.
Marino and Reiss will present their findings at a conference in San Diego, California, next month, concluding that the new evidence about dolphin intelligence makes it morally repugnant to mistreat them.
Thomas White, professor of ethics at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, who has written a series of academic studies suggesting dolphins should have rights, will speak at the same conference.
“The scientific research . . . suggests that dolphins are ‘non-human persons’ who qualify for moral standing as individuals,” he said.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article6973994.ece#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=797084
If only we were as smart as dolphins
By Tony Norman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Last weekend, The Sunday Times of London published a fascinating piece on the latest research into dolphin intelligence.
According to recent studies, dolphins have a strong sense of self and, like the great apes, recognize their reflections. Give a dolphin a mirror and there will be a lot of primping going on.
Dolphins are also believed to have the ability to think about and anticipate the future in ways that other creatures driven purely by instinct can't.
Though in many cases, dolphin brains are larger than ours, the only concession they can expect from our species in the smarts department is sole possession of the hotly disputed No. 2 spot in the hierarchy of animal intelligence.
In recent years, dolphins have vaulted over chimpanzees, elephants and even our faithful dogs in the "cognitive capacity" department.
Formerly captive dolphins have been observed teaching their peers in the wild the latest stupid human tricks they picked up during their time jumping through hoops at a local marina.
Thomas White, an ethics professor at Loyola Marymount University, argues that it may be time to think about dolphins as "nonhuman persons."
As someone who has always loved and admired dolphins, I understand where Professor White is coming from. Still, referring to these beautiful creatures as nonhuman persons may be damning them with faint praise if the measure of personhood is -- us.
Superior technology and a willingness to commit animal and human genocide for fun and profit hardly makes us a worthy standard by which to measure our brethren in the animal kingdom.
If they're half as intelligent as we now believe they are, most self-respecting dolphins would bitterly resent the comparison, anyway.
Perhaps a more reliable measure of intelligence is an ability to live in harmony with nature as much as possible. Actually, that would give the advantage to dolphins -- and every other nonhuman creature that swims, creeps or flies over the surface of the Earth.
As a species, we flatter ourselves by imagining a moral and intellectual gulf between us and the rest of the planet's inhabitants that somehow justifies what we do as we go about advancing our interests over theirs.
I once read somewhere that the only thing separating us from animals was our ability to imagine death while striving for transcendence. I think a more prosaic explanation would be our ability to kill without conscience while using the rhetoric of transcendence as a crutch.
Because we have opposable thumbs, big brains and a highly developed sense of God's existence, we assume that gives us the right to manipulate nature so that it reflects our values and interests, even if it means mass extinction.
Adherents of the three great Abrahamic faiths have claimed this as our prerogative since the moment humanity was cast out of Eden. If there's a more perverse or ironic take on a parable about disobeying God and insulting the integrity of creation for extra credit, I'm still waiting to hear it.
If it were possible for the cetacean and human brains to communicate across the gulf that currently separates our species, it would be interesting to get a dolphin's take on some of the heinous things we've done with our sense of transcendence.
What would dolphins think of humans who pray before strapping on explosive vests to kill as many innocent people as possible? Would they be impressed with the piety of someone who slaughters indiscriminately for the promise of sex with 72 virgins in the afterlife?
Could a dolphin understand our compulsion to crush those of different religions, races, ideologies and sexual orientation, without it assuming that it shares this planet with a species more fearsome than any of the giant reptiles that once walked the Earth?
Is it possible to rationalize our contempt for nature in a way that makes sense to creatures being laid waste by our pursuit of profits? Could we explain why our over-fishing of the oceans makes sense?
When the last glacier has melted and we're up to our necks in sea water, perhaps we'll revisit the notion of which animal is really smarter.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10005/1025841-153.stm#ixzz0dQ88hQZU
By Tony Norman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Last weekend, The Sunday Times of London published a fascinating piece on the latest research into dolphin intelligence.
According to recent studies, dolphins have a strong sense of self and, like the great apes, recognize their reflections. Give a dolphin a mirror and there will be a lot of primping going on.
Dolphins are also believed to have the ability to think about and anticipate the future in ways that other creatures driven purely by instinct can't.
Though in many cases, dolphin brains are larger than ours, the only concession they can expect from our species in the smarts department is sole possession of the hotly disputed No. 2 spot in the hierarchy of animal intelligence.
In recent years, dolphins have vaulted over chimpanzees, elephants and even our faithful dogs in the "cognitive capacity" department.
Formerly captive dolphins have been observed teaching their peers in the wild the latest stupid human tricks they picked up during their time jumping through hoops at a local marina.
Thomas White, an ethics professor at Loyola Marymount University, argues that it may be time to think about dolphins as "nonhuman persons."
As someone who has always loved and admired dolphins, I understand where Professor White is coming from. Still, referring to these beautiful creatures as nonhuman persons may be damning them with faint praise if the measure of personhood is -- us.
Superior technology and a willingness to commit animal and human genocide for fun and profit hardly makes us a worthy standard by which to measure our brethren in the animal kingdom.
If they're half as intelligent as we now believe they are, most self-respecting dolphins would bitterly resent the comparison, anyway.
Perhaps a more reliable measure of intelligence is an ability to live in harmony with nature as much as possible. Actually, that would give the advantage to dolphins -- and every other nonhuman creature that swims, creeps or flies over the surface of the Earth.
As a species, we flatter ourselves by imagining a moral and intellectual gulf between us and the rest of the planet's inhabitants that somehow justifies what we do as we go about advancing our interests over theirs.
I once read somewhere that the only thing separating us from animals was our ability to imagine death while striving for transcendence. I think a more prosaic explanation would be our ability to kill without conscience while using the rhetoric of transcendence as a crutch.
Because we have opposable thumbs, big brains and a highly developed sense of God's existence, we assume that gives us the right to manipulate nature so that it reflects our values and interests, even if it means mass extinction.
Adherents of the three great Abrahamic faiths have claimed this as our prerogative since the moment humanity was cast out of Eden. If there's a more perverse or ironic take on a parable about disobeying God and insulting the integrity of creation for extra credit, I'm still waiting to hear it.
If it were possible for the cetacean and human brains to communicate across the gulf that currently separates our species, it would be interesting to get a dolphin's take on some of the heinous things we've done with our sense of transcendence.
What would dolphins think of humans who pray before strapping on explosive vests to kill as many innocent people as possible? Would they be impressed with the piety of someone who slaughters indiscriminately for the promise of sex with 72 virgins in the afterlife?
Could a dolphin understand our compulsion to crush those of different religions, races, ideologies and sexual orientation, without it assuming that it shares this planet with a species more fearsome than any of the giant reptiles that once walked the Earth?
Is it possible to rationalize our contempt for nature in a way that makes sense to creatures being laid waste by our pursuit of profits? Could we explain why our over-fishing of the oceans makes sense?
When the last glacier has melted and we're up to our necks in sea water, perhaps we'll revisit the notion of which animal is really smarter.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10005/1025841-153.stm#ixzz0dQ88hQZU
You sound like the so-called American patriot who brags of superiority in all areas but justifies American actions based upon those of it's most despised and dehumanized enemies-- "Do you know what the Taliban would do in that situation???"
Humans are supposed to be intellectually and morally superior to other animals according to conventional wisdom... yet, continually, people justify human savagery based on the habits of less intelligent and less capable creatures.
Of course, morality is a choice... Your point? There is, unfortunately, ample evidence that it definitely is not a requirement for the creatures on this planet.
man this is a good thread. I agree that we need to treat people who are developmentally slow and animals with the same respect we give others.
It's crazy to me that people do the most effed up things to an animal or a person who is developmentally disabled and LAUGH about it like it's funny. That shit isn't funny, good or great! Some people lack compassion and it's showing in alot of those posts you quoted.
It's crazy to me that people do the most effed up things to an animal or a person who is developmentally disabled and LAUGH about it like it's funny. That shit isn't funny, good or great! Some people lack compassion and it's showing in alot of those posts you quoted.
Yeah, it's predatory. We throw around this word "inhumane" all the time but what meaning does it really have? Cruelty is a trait uniquely perfected by humans. Is it inhumane to be predatory, savage... Darwinists will tell you that it is what evolution is all about. I think a predatory nature is a sign of an inferior nature.
Thanks for bumping this powerful thread.
No. I sound like someone who is simply telling the cold hard truth.
Morality is a choice, most of the time it is dictated by a group. Groups (cultures) around the globe have different sets of "morality". There is no such thing as a universal morality unless you are a theist. Morality is a CHOICE. For example, I chose not to kill a muthafucka TODAY.
First off - great fucking thread Costanza.
I've been frequenting some of your threads lately and it's refreshing these kinds of thought provoking intelligent threads where folks offer different perspectives.
Secondly - thanks to the poster that bumped it.
Some of my comments (**SEVERE COLLIN POWELL WARNING!!!**)
The depth of this statement can but only be understated.
ANTHROPOMORPHISM. The first term that comes to mind when I listen to statements/arguments of this nature. For the sake of clarity, a definition:
The attribution of human characteristics, motivation or behavior to non-human creatures and beings, phenomena, material states and objects or abstract concepts.
I tend to agree with Dr. Tyson's position in the above clip. The comprehension of the complete nature of the universe is most likely beyond the realms of our perceptions and intelligence and our ego is a crucial impediment in a feed-back loop which forms an integral part of the evolution of our intelligence.
Now, I remember watching this clip someone posted on here a while ago, and please bear with me here, this is not a digression and is actually very much related to the topic of the thread:
Now, I can understand Dr. Tyson's frustration with the Creationism and Intelligent Design argument (which are actually two different concepts). This is a nuance ridden and cumbersome, albeit classic debate, the crux of which I believe resides in semantics - the definition of the "Creator"/"Designer". But that's a separate issue.
However, I find it ironic that rebuttals of this nature, that scrutinize the quality/utility of the "designed" vis-a-vis the intelligence of the "designer" are fundamentally anthropomorphic - and inevitably so because of the significance of our limited perception of the our environment (universe) and the evolution of our phenotype therein.
Dr. Tyson, evaluates the utility/functionality of a parts of the human anatomy (the reproductive/excretory organs) against a Dolphin benchmark,
Anthropomorphism begets anthropocentric notions of our status on this planet, on other accessible planets and ultimately the entire universe, which have lead to some of the myopic (IMO) responses you quoted in your OP.
The Anthropic Principle (physics, cosmology) submits that the universe (the observable universe) has been finely tuned to support life on Earth as we know it because of the crazy precision of the measured and mathematically/experimentally verifiable fundamental physical constants (speed of light, cosmological constant, mass of elementary particles, etc).
ID/Creationist often tout a hard-line version of this, The Strong Anthropic Principle (SAP), as THE major case for an "intelligent designer" -that this universe, the only universe, was made exclusively for us. Whereas arguments against a "designer" prefer the softer Weak Anthropic Principle that allows for multiple universe (multiverses) of which ours was finely tuned to support life.
ID and the multiverse, both controversial and scientifically untestable, IMO, reduce to the underlying rudiment of the topic of this thread:
"The Value of Life & Intelligence".
The reason I focus on anthropomorphism is that being [almost] inevitably and innately embedded in the way we humans cognitively synthesize sensory information from our environment, starting from when we first receive stimulus to mental processing and finally expression as perceptions and then interpretations.
I'd like y'all to focus on the transition in the last two words: "perceptions and then interpretations". I'll address in my comments below.
I think the argument JD Walker presents is noteworthy. He essentially argues that applying the logic of hierarchy in the animal kingdom as a metric for moral obligation (which I assume he thinks you're espousing...correct me if I'm wrong) amounts to flawed logic if you're inconsistent with the standards you apply across the spectrum of all animals. In his example a cat and a mouse.
Your response to this is essentially (again, correct me if I'm wrong here) that morality of humans shouldn't be ascribed to "less intelligent and less capable creatures"?
I completely agree. And I'd even expatiate.
JD used the term "cruelly" to define how the cats/kitten treat the mouse before killing it. Cruelty, the act of being cruel, by definition, required "willful knowledge" and oftentimes actual "enjoyment" of imparting pain, suffering and distress to the victim. For me the two key words in the midst of all these subjectives is "willful" and "knowledge".
Free will. Self-awareness. Consciousness. Are these traits exclusive to only humans? Which leads to the question of emotions in non-human animals which has been a topic of interest to both scientists and philosophers - and not lacking in controversy due to its implications. But this delves into the sticky field of behaviorism in animals which, again, is doomed by anthropomorphic interpretations. As is morality.
Hence, we can never really know for sure. IMO, and other scientists (based on some studies) emotions and some form of conscious experience outside of pure "animal-instinct" emerge in animals that have highly complex social systems and the degree is more pronounced as social complexity increases.
Cats, being social animals, are amenable to whats known as "symbiotic social adaptation" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cats#Behavior) when domesticated but will still retain some of their primal "instincts" especially the highly adapted ones like hunting skills, which in a domestic situation is just a case of "same prey, different habitat".
"Cat play and toys incorporates predatory games of "play aggression". These activities allow kittens and younger cats to grow and acquire cognitive and motor skills, and to socialize with other cats."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_play_and_toys
"This ability has likely been selected for because rapid learning of critical hunting skills is essential to survival."
http://zoopsy.free.fr/veille_biblio/social_organization_cat_2004.pdf Tons of references in this article.
And like I said earlier, I believe perception (purely neurophysiological) precedes interpretation (sociological adaptation) in the causal chain of information processing for both humans and animals. It's just a question of the degree to which society influences interpretations.
Now to address your issue with choice and morality.
I once read a very interesting article in Discover Magazine by a Harvard psychologist who argued that evolution hard-wired us to know right from wrong and gave us an innate universal sense of morality.
To arrive at this radical notion, Hauser draws on his own research in social cooperation, neuroscience, and primate behavior, as well as on the musings of philosophers, cognitive psychologists, and most important, the theories of MIT linguist Noam Chomsky, who in the 1950s proposed that all humans are equipped with a universal linguistic grammar, a set of instinctive rules that underlie all languages.
http://discovermagazine.com/2007/ma...ew-marc-hauser/article_view?b_start:int=0&-C=
If you're really interested and not arguing for argument sake, and you're not the non-reading CP type, I suggest you read it with an open mind then you can draw your own conclusions.
Here's an excerpt for that article where the interviewer asks a question:
What is the evidence that we draw upon unconscious principles when making moral decisions?
Let’s take two examples. A trolley is coming down a track, and it’s going to run over and kill five people if it continues. A person standing next to the track can flip a switch and turn the trolley onto a side track where it will kill one but save the five. Most people think that’s morally permissible—to harm one person when five are saved. Another case is when a nurse comes up to a doctor and says, “Doctor, we’ve got five patients in critical care; each one needs an organ to survive. We do not have time to send out for organs, but a healthy person just walked into the hospital—we can take his organs and save the five. Is that OK?” No one says yes to that one. Now, in both cases your action can save five while harming one, so they’re identical in that sense. So why the flip-flop? People of different ages, people of different religious backgrounds, people even with different educations typically cannot explain why they think those cases differ. There appears to be some kind of unconscious process driving moral judgments without its being accessible to conscious reflection.
I've been frequenting some of your threads lately and it's refreshing these kinds of thought provoking intelligent threads where folks offer different perspectives.
Secondly - thanks to the poster that bumped it.
Some of my comments (**SEVERE COLLIN POWELL WARNING!!!**)
We see a cat running in circles chasing its tail and see it as a stupid cat, subject to the dictates of natural hardwiring and so unlike us. But next time you're huddled next to your laptop pulling one of these movesyou might stop and ask yourself how advanced you really are.
The depth of this statement can but only be understated.
ANTHROPOMORPHISM. The first term that comes to mind when I listen to statements/arguments of this nature. For the sake of clarity, a definition:
The attribution of human characteristics, motivation or behavior to non-human creatures and beings, phenomena, material states and objects or abstract concepts.
I tend to agree with Dr. Tyson's position in the above clip. The comprehension of the complete nature of the universe is most likely beyond the realms of our perceptions and intelligence and our ego is a crucial impediment in a feed-back loop which forms an integral part of the evolution of our intelligence.
Now, I remember watching this clip someone posted on here a while ago, and please bear with me here, this is not a digression and is actually very much related to the topic of the thread:
Now, I can understand Dr. Tyson's frustration with the Creationism and Intelligent Design argument (which are actually two different concepts). This is a nuance ridden and cumbersome, albeit classic debate, the crux of which I believe resides in semantics - the definition of the "Creator"/"Designer". But that's a separate issue.
However, I find it ironic that rebuttals of this nature, that scrutinize the quality/utility of the "designed" vis-a-vis the intelligence of the "designer" are fundamentally anthropomorphic - and inevitably so because of the significance of our limited perception of the our environment (universe) and the evolution of our phenotype therein.
Dr. Tyson, evaluates the utility/functionality of a parts of the human anatomy (the reproductive/excretory organs) against a Dolphin benchmark,
Anthropomorphism begets anthropocentric notions of our status on this planet, on other accessible planets and ultimately the entire universe, which have lead to some of the myopic (IMO) responses you quoted in your OP.
The Anthropic Principle (physics, cosmology) submits that the universe (the observable universe) has been finely tuned to support life on Earth as we know it because of the crazy precision of the measured and mathematically/experimentally verifiable fundamental physical constants (speed of light, cosmological constant, mass of elementary particles, etc).
ID/Creationist often tout a hard-line version of this, The Strong Anthropic Principle (SAP), as THE major case for an "intelligent designer" -that this universe, the only universe, was made exclusively for us. Whereas arguments against a "designer" prefer the softer Weak Anthropic Principle that allows for multiple universe (multiverses) of which ours was finely tuned to support life.
ID and the multiverse, both controversial and scientifically untestable, IMO, reduce to the underlying rudiment of the topic of this thread:
"The Value of Life & Intelligence".
The reason I focus on anthropomorphism is that being [almost] inevitably and innately embedded in the way we humans cognitively synthesize sensory information from our environment, starting from when we first receive stimulus to mental processing and finally expression as perceptions and then interpretations.
I'd like y'all to focus on the transition in the last two words: "perceptions and then interpretations". I'll address in my comments below.
I think the argument JD Walker presents is noteworthy. He essentially argues that applying the logic of hierarchy in the animal kingdom as a metric for moral obligation (which I assume he thinks you're espousing...correct me if I'm wrong) amounts to flawed logic if you're inconsistent with the standards you apply across the spectrum of all animals. In his example a cat and a mouse.
Your response to this is essentially (again, correct me if I'm wrong here) that morality of humans shouldn't be ascribed to "less intelligent and less capable creatures"?
I completely agree. And I'd even expatiate.
JD used the term "cruelly" to define how the cats/kitten treat the mouse before killing it. Cruelty, the act of being cruel, by definition, required "willful knowledge" and oftentimes actual "enjoyment" of imparting pain, suffering and distress to the victim. For me the two key words in the midst of all these subjectives is "willful" and "knowledge".
Free will. Self-awareness. Consciousness. Are these traits exclusive to only humans? Which leads to the question of emotions in non-human animals which has been a topic of interest to both scientists and philosophers - and not lacking in controversy due to its implications. But this delves into the sticky field of behaviorism in animals which, again, is doomed by anthropomorphic interpretations. As is morality.
Hence, we can never really know for sure. IMO, and other scientists (based on some studies) emotions and some form of conscious experience outside of pure "animal-instinct" emerge in animals that have highly complex social systems and the degree is more pronounced as social complexity increases.
Cats, being social animals, are amenable to whats known as "symbiotic social adaptation" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cats#Behavior) when domesticated but will still retain some of their primal "instincts" especially the highly adapted ones like hunting skills, which in a domestic situation is just a case of "same prey, different habitat".
"Cat play and toys incorporates predatory games of "play aggression". These activities allow kittens and younger cats to grow and acquire cognitive and motor skills, and to socialize with other cats."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_play_and_toys
"This ability has likely been selected for because rapid learning of critical hunting skills is essential to survival."
http://zoopsy.free.fr/veille_biblio/social_organization_cat_2004.pdf Tons of references in this article.
And like I said earlier, I believe perception (purely neurophysiological) precedes interpretation (sociological adaptation) in the causal chain of information processing for both humans and animals. It's just a question of the degree to which society influences interpretations.
Now to address your issue with choice and morality.
I once read a very interesting article in Discover Magazine by a Harvard psychologist who argued that evolution hard-wired us to know right from wrong and gave us an innate universal sense of morality.
To arrive at this radical notion, Hauser draws on his own research in social cooperation, neuroscience, and primate behavior, as well as on the musings of philosophers, cognitive psychologists, and most important, the theories of MIT linguist Noam Chomsky, who in the 1950s proposed that all humans are equipped with a universal linguistic grammar, a set of instinctive rules that underlie all languages.
http://discovermagazine.com/2007/ma...ew-marc-hauser/article_view?b_start:int=0&-C=
If you're really interested and not arguing for argument sake, and you're not the non-reading CP type, I suggest you read it with an open mind then you can draw your own conclusions.
Here's an excerpt for that article where the interviewer asks a question:
What is the evidence that we draw upon unconscious principles when making moral decisions?
Let’s take two examples. A trolley is coming down a track, and it’s going to run over and kill five people if it continues. A person standing next to the track can flip a switch and turn the trolley onto a side track where it will kill one but save the five. Most people think that’s morally permissible—to harm one person when five are saved. Another case is when a nurse comes up to a doctor and says, “Doctor, we’ve got five patients in critical care; each one needs an organ to survive. We do not have time to send out for organs, but a healthy person just walked into the hospital—we can take his organs and save the five. Is that OK?” No one says yes to that one. Now, in both cases your action can save five while harming one, so they’re identical in that sense. So why the flip-flop? People of different ages, people of different religious backgrounds, people even with different educations typically cannot explain why they think those cases differ. There appears to be some kind of unconscious process driving moral judgments without its being accessible to conscious reflection.
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JD,
I definitely understand the subjectivity of morality. Human history is replete with examples of groups attempting to justify the subjugation of other groups on grounds of giving/bringing civiliztion to that group, improving and uplifting the from their savagery and/or primitive, unevolved ways.
"Morality is a choice, and that's it, nothing more, nothing less." This is a truism-- the repeated and everyday occurrence of some people choosing to do right and others-- or those same people in other instances-- choosing to do wrong.
Largely, "right" and "wrong" are conceived of through social norms-- In some countries, it is seen as "right" to punish women unequally for alleged indiscretions; in this country, many see it as "right" or at least okay for people to be bankrupted and impoverished because they became ill.
I'm still not sure what your point is... You "chose not to kill a muthafucka TODAY"-- Are you saying that was the right thing to do today? Or that it would be wrong on another day? That no one else has the right to rebuke your decision making? What exactly is your point?
Also, yes, theists-- a grouping that probably encompasses most of humanity-- mostly believe in a universal morality that was handed down from the sky and that is thus objective. Many people argue against atheism because they believe it is necessarily relativistic and removes that objective sense of right and wrong. Are you agreeing that acknowledging right and wrong as subjective concepts makes them nonexistent?
First off - great fucking thread Costanza.
I've been frequenting some of your threads lately and it's refreshing these kinds of thought provoking intelligent threads where folks offer different perspectives.
Secondly - thanks to the poster that bumped it.
Some of my comments (**SEVERE COLLIN POWELL WARNING!!!**)
The depth of this statement can but only be understated.
ANTHROPOMORPHISM. The first term that comes to mind when I listen to statements/arguments of this nature. For the sake of clarity, a definition:
The attribution of human characteristics, motivation or behavior to non-human creatures and beings, phenomena, material states and objects or abstract concepts.
I tend to agree with Dr. Tyson's position in the above clip. The comprehension of the complete nature of the universe is most likely beyond the realms of our perceptions and intelligence and our ego is a crucial impediment in a feed-back loop which forms an integral part of the evolution of our intelligence.
Now, I remember watching this clip someone posted on here a while ago, and please bear with me here, this is not a digression and is actually very much related to the topic of the thread:
The video certainly was not a digression and addresses an important aspect of this conversation. Religion is obviously inextricably tied to the subject of how people value life and whether or not intelligence is a factor in that evaluation. It's a hugely influential factor in how people think. That's why I included posts in this thread on health care and Sarah Palin's "death panels" argument (which, in retrospect really marked a major shift in the dialogue and a turning point in the public response to the legislation)-- an argument that explicitly evokes religious principles regarding life.
In my last post (prior to today's response to JD) I was critical of Darwinists for an outlook that lowers man from the pedestal that most of humanity has always placed itself upon out of ego. Sometimes the effect of that is cold and the opposite of aspirational of enlightened. I think humanity is sufficiently different from other species that it ought not be governed by "survival of the fittest"-- because of our intelligence, no other animal has the capacity for doing good that humanity does. As much as I dwelled, like Tony Norman ("If Only We Were as Smart as Dolphins"), on humanity's horrifically unique capacity for evil, it must be acknowledged that humanity has a unique capacity for doing good.
I must also criticize the religionists, though, especially those who adhere to the Old Testament (and it's "God," Yahweh, who is the strongest example of anthropomorphism in human history). It is they who are least cognizant of our lacking comprehension of the true and complete nature of the universe. They think they know it all, in overwhelming numbers. And, unlike the Darwinists, they place man on a pedestal. Humanity has "dominion over the Earth," which has promoted a belief that we don't have to care for the Earth and other "lower" species on it.
Just to make sure I understand you correctly, your point is to highlight that Tyson's standards for proving the stupidity of design is by pointing to their lack of utility for humans? I'd say that's a valid criticism, though, to be fair, creationists have long egotistically asserted the provability of creation by arguing how well suited it is for humanity, the centerpiece of creation. I'm sure he meant to argue against that and would recognize what you pointed out.
Interesting point. I wouldn't have questioned his description because it seemed cruel to me. I wonder what is in the cat's mind.
You'd be correct in boiling my position down to "that morality of humans shouldn't be ascribed to 'less intelligent and less capable creatures.'" I basically elaborated on that above in the discussion of greater human capacity both for good and for evil.
Free will. Self-awareness. Consciousness. Are these traits exclusive to only humans? Which leads to the question of emotions in non-human animals which has been a topic of interest to both scientists and philosophers - and not lacking in controversy due to its implications. But this delves into the sticky field of behaviorism in animals which, again, is doomed by anthropomorphic interpretations. As is morality.
Hence, we can never really know for sure. IMO, and other scientists (based on some studies) emotions and some form of conscious experience outside of pure "animal-instinct" emerge in animals that have highly complex social systems and the degree is more pronounced as social complexity increases.
Cats, being social animals, are amenable to whats known as "symbiotic social adaptation" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cats#Behavior) when domesticated but will still retain some of their primal "instincts" especially the highly adapted ones like hunting skills, which in a domestic situation is just a case of "same prey, different habitat".
"Cat play and toys incorporates predatory games of "play aggression". These activities allow kittens and younger cats to grow and acquire cognitive and motor skills, and to socialize with other cats."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_play_and_toys
"This ability has likely been selected for because rapid learning of critical hunting skills is essential to survival."
http://zoopsy.free.fr/veille_biblio/social_organization_cat_2004.pdf Tons of references in this article.
And like I said earlier, I believe perception (purely neurophysiological) precedes interpretation (sociological adaptation) in the causal chain of information processing for both humans and animals. It's just a question of the degree to which society influences interpretations.
This is pretty much what I was interested in with the elephant birth. It's pretty clear in both humans and animals that "tabula rasa" is a faulty concept. The question is the same with all animals... To what extent?
To what extent are we governed by natural and instinctual processes beyond our control?
This question is most centrally addressed in popular culture in the form of homosexuality and whether or not that is a choice. Prewired preferences and expressions which prevail over environmental influences.
Even if these inclinations are hardwired through evolution, I'd hesitate to describe it as an "innate moral code" because the inclusion of the word moral seems laughable. (I'll explain my reasoning on this in response to the portion of the article you excerpted.) It seems simply an innate coding.
I think Hauser would actually agree with my assessment based on this response:
One possibility is that these principles that I’m describing were not selected for morality. They were favored for other aspects of social cognition and are simply borrowed by morality. What does morality do at a very general level? It sets up, either unconsciously or consciously, rules for navigating the social world. Now, why might it be unconscious? It might be unconscious for exactly the same reason that language is unconscious at some level. ...
Of course, one of the things that makes morality adaptive is that it does allow for a certain level of within-group stability and, therefore, allows for individual fitness to be enhanced from a genetic perspective. So if I live in a world of defectors, I have no chance, whereas if I can find the cooperators and cooperate with them, my own individual fitness will be greatly enhanced. So I want to know who are the individuals I can trust and those I can’t trust. At that level, there’s been, of course, greater selection for any kind of social group to have certain kinds of principles that allow for group-level stability.
He still applies that word morality but admits that the results are by no means moral and even that the intent or motivating force has nothing to do with right or wrong. Social cooperation makes sense from an evolutionary perspective but seems to have more to do with self-interest in a group dynamic than any "innate universal sense of morality." Hauser cites the so-called Golden Rule as one which a moral principle "that hold
You see it everywhere. So there’s some notion of reciprocity, and that includes both the good and bad. If I have been harmed, there is some notion of revenge which certainly seems to be part of the human psychology. Some level of, “If somebody does something nice for me, I should do something nice back to them” also seems part of the psychology. It may be evolutionarily ancient. Work that we’ve done on animals suggests some kind of reciprocity, some ancient level of cooperation. So is there a generic rule that says “don’t kill others”? No, there’s not, because that rule is always adjoined to a caveat, which says, “Well, we kill some people, but not everybody.” It’s always an in-group, out-group distinction.
"I won't stab you in hopes that you won't stab me. And we need to consider stabbing those motherfuckers over there." That seems closer to self-interest than morality to me.
It's not a good comparison. People may not be able to articulate their reasoning but there is a clear difference in the two scenarios.
"A trolley is coming down a track, and it’s going to run over and kill five people if it continues. A person standing next to the track can flip a switch and turn the trolley onto a side track where it will kill one but save the five." It's GOING TO kill five people or it WILL kill one.
"Doctor, we’ve got five patients in critical care; each one needs an organ to survive. We do not have time to send out for organs, but a healthy person just walked into the hospital—we can take his organs and save the five." We CAN TAKE his organs.
The first scenario features unavoidable death and the only value judgment is how many people have to die. The second scenario requires an active decision to take a life.
Passively allowing for suffering doesn't produce the same guilt as taking an active role in directly causing suffering... I've often wished that it did. Because the cold hard effect of these two scenarios is the same-- five people die. Every person who chooses to take viable organs to the grave with them rather than donating their organs really makes this decision but they don't view it in those terms. I attribute that to a passive role and the presence of guilt. You could apply the same principle to every person who feasts as others suffer through famine. Every person who feels compelled to sport the newest Nikes and adorn themselves with jewelry without consideration for the Asian child toiling at slave "wages" or the little African boy who might have had his arm chopped off by the monsters financially supported by a distant and guiltless-- to themselves-- people.
I think human "intelligence" is undoubtedly emergent from the size and complexity of our brains -- large cerebral cortex, over 100 billion neural connections, etc.
The limits of animal neurophysiology is the key IMO.
Synaptic Plasticity/Neuroplasticity (postulated to be responsible for memory and learning), our highly developed hippocampus (relative to other animals and species) which is essential for learning and consolidating information from short-term to long-term memory is particularly important in the development of our sense of "self-awareness" which enabled the evolution of social behaviors, cultures, morality/ethics, etc.
Are we "sufficiently different" in that sense? Yes.
Are other animals incapable of "doing the good that humanity does". Of course. Because other animals are incapable of doing the "bad" that necessitated the good in the first place.
There are many studied cases of social animals that demonstrate emotion driven practices akin to humans but the question is always one of self-awareness. We an sufficiently convinced that we can never answer this.
I agree 100%.
Yes that was my point. And yes, this creationist reasoning is anthropic but that's my point. Dr. Tyson's argument of a lousy design is equally anthropic because it draws from a sense of human aesthetics.
The classic Nature vs. Nurture. I still contend that we can never know for animals since we can never "think" like them. I'm satified with that. The best we can do is to continue our quest to establish neural correlates of consciousness/self-awareness.
The biological basis for physio-sexuality is obvious. And it's manifestly clear that there's a biological, genetic and biochemical basis for psycho-sexuality. Scientifically, our sex is not only a function of the anatomy of our genitalia but also a function of how our psychological identity aligns with this anatomy.
Ref: Gender Identity and Sexual Dimorphic Nucleus
Perhaps it's a question of semantics here. Replace the word moraily with self-intrest?
Makes sense.
I agree. The choices we make regarding moral decisions are at time driven by temporal guilt modulated by our connectivity to the subject. I think this is the point he was trying to make here. In one case there's direct involvment and in the other case it's indirect, however, the ultimate choices are still the same regardless of the difficulty in making them.
this has been some INSIGHTFUL stuff. I have yet to finish reading everything... but good stuff indeed!
This reminds me of Nietzsche's cow... I can't find his actual writing on the subject but here's a decent summary:
In the second of his untimely meditations, Nietzsche suggests that a cow lives without boredom and pain, because it does not remember. Because it has no past, the cow is happy. But the animal cannot confirm its happiness precisely because it does not have the power to recall its previous state. It lives unmindful of the past, which, as it gives happiness, also takes it away from the animal. Nietzsche uses this example to point to the liberating power of what he terms "active forgetting," a willfull abandonment of the past that is beyond the capacities of the cow: In the case of the smallest or of the greatest happiness... it is always the same thing that makes happiness happiness: the ability to forget or, expressed in more scholarly fashion, the capacity to feel unhistorically during its duration. Nietzsche calls for an abandonment of the past because, as he says, it "returns as a ghost and disturbs the peace of a later moment." Too much past precludes action, happiness, and further development.
I don't know whether to pity or envy such a creature...
The only thing I'd disagree with that you wrote is that other animals are incapable of doing the good that humanity does "because other animals are incapable of doing the 'bad' that necessitated the good in the first place." It's a bit of an oversimplification. Though humanity does plenty of evil which requires human effort to correct or negate, plenty of human good is not a direct result of human evil or even human action-- i.e. those with an honest desire to help in the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti.
This gets back to the nature versus nature topic... I almost reflexively called those brain differences a disability, though I think they are obviously simply differences.
Are you aware of an study which attempts to determine the percentage of homosexuals affected by this difference and the percentage for which this condition is not present (which would be commonly referred to as gay by "choice" but better explained as as without biological predispositions)?
Right away, I can see that such a study would be extremely difficult and flawed because you'd have to rely on people to be honest, both with themselves and others, in self-identifying as homosexuals. Still, you could at least measure the percentage of people with brain differences which should result in a different psycho-sexuality against the number of people in society who identify as homosexuals.
I don't know how difficult that is to measure, though, or if it is even possible...
I don't know... I suppose I agree but it is tough. You're right, however, that it is really the same choice, even though it really is the same thing.
It's definitely an interesting scenario.
Me too. Shit, I guess it's the double edged sword paradox once again. While I get the central point Nietzsche is trying to make, I think his assumption that cows don't remember is just that. An assumption. Clearly, animals have the ability to recollect events of past experiences as displayed by adaptations, learning, behavior. Heck, lab fruit flies can learn to solve problems.
I guess the question then becomes one of to what degree can certain animals generate emotions from ABSTRACTIONS from memories. Are there some animals that simply don't have the "brain power" (density, size, mass, neural connectivities, whatever) to facilitate these abstractions and operate purely at the biochemical instinctive level?
I think it's very difficult to attempt to make such distinctions because, as I've said earlier, our anthropomorphic biases will almost always inevitably factor in. But I still think social animal species are more likely to evolve this. The underlying mechanisms? I have no clue.
You make a good point here. Yes, genuine humanitarianism in the case of the aftermath of natural disasters would be an exception.
But then again, the ethology of animal altruism is a well established.
No I'm not immediately aware of any such study, however, I think it would be possible to carry it out with sufficient scientific experimental integrity using controls, blind studies, etc.
Physiological sexual identity can easily be confirmed through genetics. Psycho-sexual identity through psychoanalysis along with FMRI brain scans.
I'm not a Neuroscientist but it seems possible. I should ask Ramachandran and see what he thinks.
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Eugenics, American Style
This past weekend, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum attacked the Affordable Care Act for requiring free prenatal testing. Such testing, Santorum claims, is aimed at identifying babies with birth defects or disabilities, and encouraging parents to abort them. Santorum said, “Free prenatal testing ends up in more abortions and therefore less care that has to be done because we cull the ranks of the disabled in our society. That, too, is part of Obamacare, another hidden message as to what President Obama thinks of those who are less able than the elites who want to govern our country."
Santorum is not the first person to raise the issue of whether prenatal testing leads to the abortion of children with special needs. Back in December 1996, Tucker Carlson, now editor of the Daily Caller, wrote a powerful article for the Weekly Standard about the abortion of babies with Down syndrome. It is reprinted here with Carlson’s permission.
Testifying before Congress in the spring of 1990, Arkansas state health director Joycelyn Elders took an unusual tack in her defense of legal abortion. "Abortion," she said, "has had an important, and positive, public- health effect," in that it has reduced "the number of children afflicted with severe defects." As evidence, the future surgeon general cited this statistic: "The number of Down's Syndrome infants in Washington state in 1976 was 64 percent lower than it would have been without legal abortion."
Her remark went all but unnoticed at the time and has received little attention since, even during Elders's contentious tenure as surgeon general in the Clinton administration. But it was a significant statement nonetheless, if only because it represents one of the few occasions on which a public health official has publicly acknowledged the eugenic utility of abortion. Terminating a pregnancy, Elders argued, is not simply a difficult personal decision, an agonizing last resort. When guided by public-health objectives, abortion can also be a positive act—a means of improving the species.
Stylized and dulled by euphemism as it is, the debate over abortion in America rarely allows for statements as clear and direct as Elders's, and the words may sound almost unrecognizably harsh to ears accustomed to intentionally opaque terms such as "choice" and "life." But what Elders said is nothing new. For 30 years, nearly every element of Western medicine—physicians, geneticists, insurance companies—has, explicitly and not, encouraged the use of abortion to reduce the incidence of birth defects.
The effort has succeeded dramatically, particularly in the case of Down Syndrome, the most frequently occurring genetic disorder. Far more women now are able to detect Down Syndrome pregnancies, and far more end them with abortion. Yet even as it becomes easier and more common to prevent children with Down Syndrome from being born, the justification for doing so grows murkier.
Unlike many other genetic anomalies, such as Tay-Sachs and anencephaly, Down Syndrome (also known as Down's Syndrome or Trisomy 21) is not a terminal disorder. Children born with Down Syndrome are not vegetables, nor are their lives demonstrably not worth living. Indeed, advances in science and changes in public perception have combined to make Down Syndrome a relatively mild birth defect: The average child born with Down Syndrome in America today can expect to reside at home, go to school, learn to read, hold a job, and live to the age of 55. He will grow up cognizant of ethics and events, and will be mildly to moderately retarded, with an IQ of between 55 and 70. It is one of the triumphs of modern society that the life of the average person with Down Syndrome has become strikingly normal. Except that, unlike normal people, people with Down Syndrome have been targeted for elimination.
Of 22,000 women who received prenatal diagnosis in one 1990 study in Canada, 88 percent of those who found they were carrying a child with Down Syndrome aborted the fetus. Other studies have put the rate of Down Syndrome abortions at about 90 percent, some even higher.
Last year, British journalist Dominic Lawson published an article in the London Spectator about the birth of his daughter, who has Down Syndrome. Lawson, a self-described atheist, expressed outrage at the National Health Service's policy of providing free prenatal tests for, and complimentary abortions of, babies with Down Syndrome. He went on to compare the policy to the Nazi eugenics program. Lawson's article was reprinted in the Daily Mail, prompting scores of letters to the editor and counter articles. Partly in response to what Lawson had written, a bill was introduced in the House of Lords that would outlaw abortions conducted solely to prevent the birth of a child with Down Syndrome. (Currently, abortion of "seriously handicapped" children, including those with Down Syndrome, is legal in England through the ninth month.) A national debate has begun.
So far, no such public discussion has broken out in the United States, where amniocentesis and other genetic tests have been used to target Down Syndrome pregnancies for abortion since at least the late 1960s. In 1959, French geneticist Jerome Lejeune discovered that people with Down Syndrome have an extra chromosome responsible for the disorder. The discovery soon made it possible to detect the presence of Down Syndrome in utero. Grasping the implications of his work, Lejeune grew to be a passionate opponent of abortion and prenatal testing, which he called "biological pornography."
But Lejeune could not stop what he had unwittingly begun. By the summer of 1967, the American Medical Association had passed a resolution endorsing abortion in cases in which "an infant may be born with incapacitating physical deformity or mental deficiency." A year later, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists came out with a similar policy. A number of states, years before Roe v. Wade, followed suit with laws allowing abortion for the purpose of eliminating children with mental defects, including Down Syndrome.
During the 1970s, genetic testing of pregnant women became routine, a practice encouraged by groups like Planned Parenthood. Since it is an invasive procedure that entails extracting amniotic fluid with a needle from around the child, amniocentesis (like its alternative, chorionic villous sampling) carries a significant risk of miscarriage, in some places as high as one in 100. As a result, the test generally has been reserved for use by women over the age of 34, who are more willing to weigh the risk against that of having a child with Down Syndrome. (The incidence of Down Syndrome increases with maternal age, from about one in 2,000 births at age 20 to one in 10 at age 49.) In 1984, however, it was discovered that a non-invasive blood test could be used to calculate the likelihood of bearing a Down Syndrome child. The blood test made it possible to provide screening for Down Syndrome to women of all ages at no risk to the mother. In 1986, the State of California began requiring physicians to offer the tests to pregnant women. The state's health department now funds much of the screening itself, spending $56 million a year to detect prenatal birth defects.
The rest of the country followed California's lead. Between 1988 and 1993, the number of pregnant women who received blood tests for Down Syndrome doubled, to about 2 million. Almost all the tests were covered by private health insurance or Medicaid. Last year, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists officially recommended Down Syndrome screening for all pregnant women. Although there is no cure or prevention for Down Syndrome—indeed, the only real intervention that can be taken after a positive test result is abortion—prenatal screening is now, in effect, mandatory. Few physicians, regardless of their beliefs on the subject, are willing to risk not offering the test, for fear of being slapped with a "wrongful birth" suit if a handicapped child is born. It has happened, repeatedly.
The rapid growth of prenatal testing has had some undeniably positive effects: A woman who knows she will bear a child with a handicap can plan to deliver in a hospital equipped for risky births. And many couples prefer the opportunity to prepare psychologically for the work of raising a disabled child. By far the most profound effect of prenatal testing, however, has been a staggering increase in the number of abortions.
The trend is clear: More testing invariably leads to more—many more—abortions of Down Syndrome children. "Most women who have children with Down Syndrome did not have the amnio," says Lori Atkins of the National Down Syndrome Society, and there is growing evidence to indicate this is true. A study of data from selected states by the Centers for Disease Control found that the rate of Down Syndrome births to mothers 35 or older dropped by about a third between 1983 and 1990. Another study, conducted over a slightly longer period, pegged the decline at 46 percent.
Larry Edmunds, a CDC statistician who is among the country's acknowledged experts on birth-defect trends, cites data from the 1980s suggesting that abortion reduced the number of children with Down Syndrome born to white women over 35 in the metropolitan Atlanta area by about 70 percent. Of the 30 percent in that study who did bear children with Down Syndrome, Edmunds explains, "those were mainly women who didn't have the test."
Lewis Holmes, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School who works at Massachusetts General Hospital, says that in his experience, of women who learn they are carrying a Down Syndrome child, "90 percent will say they want to terminate. If you have all the technology available and educate the women as to what their choices are, that will happen."
Far fewer than 90 percent of women support abortion, at least in the abstract, so there is some question as to why so many are choosing it when they find they are carrying children with Down Syndrome. A number of studies have attempted to provide an answer. One, conducted by the Canadian Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies, found that, because of pressure from hospital staff, one in four pregnant women "felt obliged" to undergo amniocentesis. Of those who tested positive for a birth defect, one in three believed she was "more or less forced" to have an abortion.
Another study, published this summer in the British Medical Journal, describes the case of one pregnant woman whose child had tested positive for birth defects. Following her doctor's orders, she reported to the labor ward of her hospital for what the physician had termed an "induction." It dawned on the woman, who was five months pregnant, that the "induction" was in fact to be an abortion. Horrified, she returned home and later bore the child.
Laurie Cowan, a physician at the state of Delaware's public health department, readily admits that abortion has had a dramatic effect on births of children with Down Syndrome. "We are seeing a real drop in the rate of [Down Syndrome] children who are born. We're not seeing a drop in the rate of children who are conceived," she says. But like many in the medical profession, Cowan is wary of how such information might be used. Abortion, she explains, "has been a right that people have had. So I hope that in no way you'll do anything to try to take away that right. I'm just very concerned about that. I just hope in no way your work will undermine that." Antiabortion forces, she warns, would allow the procedure "only if the mother is raped, only if she's going to die because of this pregnancy. And that's uncomfortable for me because there are certain things that are pretty close to that."
Having a Down Syndrome child is close to being raped? To dying?
Why such eagerness to prevent Down Syndrome children from being born? Undoubtedly, some physicians are motivated by a belief that children with birth defects pollute the gene pool. "There is nothing wrong with eugenics," said Dr. F. Clarke Fraser, founder of the genetics clinic at Montreal Children's Hospital, not long ago in an unusually blunt interview with the Montreal Gazette.
Many others, however, simply view abortion and Down Syndrome as parts of an economic equation. Amniocentesis "may cost about $1,000, but a reasonably conservative estimate is that it costs $ 100,000 for just the first year of a Down Syndrome baby's life," explained Dr. Mark Evans, director of Detroit's Center for Fetal Diagnosis and Therapy. "How many people would I have to test to balance the lifetime cost?" he asked a New York Times reporter in what must rank among the creepiest rhetorical questions ever posed. 'And then there are economic considerations nobody knows how to factor in, like the number of women who would have to quit their careers to care for these babies. "
Actually, Dr. Evans was wrong on at least one count: A number of people have "factored in" the various costs of Down Syndrome. A 1995 study led by Norman Waitzman of the University of Utah sought to calculate the toll birth defects take on the American economy. The results, published in a CDC report, found that each child born with Down Syndrome will, over a lifetime, cost society about $451,000. The total cost for all children born with the disorder in a given year, the study determined, is $ 1.8 billion. "Particularly in these times of fiscal squeeze," he concluded, "these costs provide a vivid picture of the value of research and prevention" (italics added).
Needless to say, Waltzman failed to point out that, in the case of Down Syndrome, there's no way to "prevent" the disorder, only the birth of those afflicted with it. Obscured by euphemisms or not, calculations such as Waltzman's have not escaped the attention of insurance companies, many of which have proved indecorously eager to cover testing for potentially expensive genetic defects, most recently for cystic fibrosis.
Nachum Sicherman of the Columbia Business School, another researcher who has examined the "enormous cost-saving potential of amniocentesis," is the sort of expert insurance companies doubtless will consult as they begin to sort out the growing number of prenatal genetic tests in order to determine which ones they should pay for. Sicherman figures the cost to society over the lifetime of a person with Down Syndrome is at least $ 1 million—most of which, he points out, "is not going to be paid by parents." Numbers like these—and Sicherman's are larger than most—have led Sicherman to recommend that amniocentesis be made available to all nearly pregnant women, regardless of age. "If you take all costs into account—costs to school districts, to Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, lost days of work for parents," he explains enthusiastically, "there is nothing more beneficial than amniocentesis, if it is given under the assumption that if Down Syndrome is discovered, there is an abortion following. It's a great cost saving."
Sicherman does more than simply theorize on the subject. "When my wife was pregnant," he recalls, "we went to Lamaze class and I asked the women there if they'd ever heard of amniocentesis." Being a mostly young and lower-income group, he says, none had, and Sicherman did his best to remedy their ignorance. It was, after all, only the right thing to do. "Everybody should tell their patients about amniocentesis," he says.
Sicherman's views may be a bit blunt for the present state of public opinion in America. Not so in the Netherlands, however, where subjecting pregnancy to rigorous economic calculation is considered a civic responsibility. A 1991 report by the Royal Dutch Society of Medicine (entitled "Life Terminating Actions with Incompetent Patients, Part I: Severely Handicapped Newborns") studied a series of 2,816 amniocenteses given to pregnant women. The tests resulted in 75 abortions, 57 of which were of " defective fetuses."
"These 2,816 amniocenteses and the chromosome analyses cost approximately $ 1.5 million," the study said. "This is in the same order of magnitude as the costs for taking care of one patient with Down's Syndrome in a medical institution for a period of 60 years. Seen in the light of a cost-benefit analysis the conclusion is obvious."
From here, it is a short trip to killing handicapped children outright. Why, after all, stop the economizing simply because a child has left the womb? James D. Watson, who won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of DNA, believed that newborns who scored below a certain level on the APGAR test given immediately after birth should be euthanized.
In fact, infants with Down Syndrome are routinely starved to death in Dutch hospitals—a practice that has been resoundingly affirmed by both that country's supreme court and its Council for Children's Protection. Nor are such practices restricted to the Netherlands. A 1975 poll found that 77 percent of American pediatric surgeons favored withholding food and medical treatment from infants with Down Syndrome and leaving them to die. Seven years later, in the well-publicized Baby Doe case, a Bloomington, Indiana, couple asked their doctor to do just that to their child born with Down Syndrome. The infant, who needed only simple surgery to correct a blocked esophagus, died after six days of neglect. In a strikingly similar incident several years later in Montreal, a Down Syndrome child died after 11 days without food or water. "The presence of Down Syndrome," said a local coroner, "was another element [in the decision to kill the child] since mongolism implies a quasi-vegetative life or severely diminished quality of life."
Given these stories and the evidence that an entire population of retarded people may be wiped clean from this country, one would expect organizations that represent the disabled to be up in arms.
One would expect wrong.
"We have a clear position not to take a position on the issue of abortion," says Paul Marchand, head lobbyist at The Arc (formerly known as the Association for Retarded Citizens), one of the country's largest such groups. The National Down Syndrome Congress, in its "Position Statement on Prenatal Testing and Eugenics," is equally explicit: "These positions ... in no way involve the movement in the debate over whether a woman should have a legal right to abortion."
Disability groups tend to be on edge when it comes to public perceptions of the mentally retarded (Al Gore learned this the hard way when he referred to Oliver North's political supporters as "the extra-chromosome right wing," drawing roars of protest from Down Syndrome groups). They are quick to spot even the most subtle forms of discrimination—The Arc actually has an official policy demanding equal access to dental treatment. So it is puzzling that so few groups have seen fit to comment on the growth of state-endorsed eugenics targeted—in the most discriminatory, dehumanizing way imaginable—at their own constituents. It's a little like the NAACP refusing to come out against slavery.
In 1978, the Delaware chapter of the Association for Retarded Citizens did take a position: It passed a resolution demanding that the federal government pay for abortions for poor women who learn they are carrying potential retarded citizens. The resolution prompted The Arc's national organization to convene a task force on the issue. After months of work, the group produced a 60-page report declaring that, although a majority of its members supported government funding for the abortion of retarded children, a unanimous decision could not be reached. And that, says lobbyist Marchand, was that: "I don't think anything on abortion has crossed my desk in the last ten years." The only comparable issue today, he says, is the debate within the "disability community" over whether it is valid to search for a cure for mental retardation. "It can be a touchy subject," he explains without a hint of irony, because when you seek a cure, "what you're doing de facto is devaluing people with mental retardation."
Not that The Arc spends a lot of time pondering existential questions like these. The group's real concern nowadays, says Marchand, is "the federal role in the future of mental retardation"—i.e., getting more money from the government. He rattles off a list of programs his organization is lobbying to maintain and expand: Medicaid, Social Security, disability insurance, job training, special education. "We are extremely occupied with a myriad of federal policy issues that are before us," Marchand says. "Our plate is more than overflowing."
Meanwhile, as The Arc concerned itself with its "myriad of federal policy issues," another issue was being decided on Capitol Hill, one from which the voice of the disability lobby was noticeably absent: partial-birth abortion. The vast majority of Down Syndrome children identified in utero are diagnosed using amniocentesis, which is not even performed until the sixteenth week of pregnancy. The abortions that result are of the grisly variety, some of them performed by the skull-crushing partial-birth technique on infants capable of living outside the womb.
During the debate over the procedure, the Clinton administration cited the record of abortion doctor James McMahon as evidence that a ban on partial-birth abortions would be unacceptably rigid. The pregnant women McMahon had treated, the administration argued, had received abortions to alleviate the sort of "serious health problems" that should be exempted under the ban. And what were these problems? According to data the doctor himself provided to Congress, the single most common "serious fetal defect" McMahon" treated" was Down Syndrome.
It would be unfair to single out organized Down Syndrome groups for their unwillingness to confront the subject of abortion, since the willful blindness runs much deeper. In Life As We Know It, his recent book about raising a son with Down Syndrome, Michael Berube describes the typical response on an Internet discussion group when the subject of prenatal testing and abortion arises: "Every time someone brings up the question on the listserv, he or she is met with dozens of e-mail responses reading, "NO! NO! NOT ON THIS LIST! Please don't have this discussion here! There are plenty of other newsgroups for this debate. This is about children with disabilities.'"
Dr. Bill Cohen of the Down Syndrome Center of Western Pennsylvania, a noted authority on the disorder, has much the same response when asked about his views on abortion. "If someone comes to me and says that they're thinking about terminating the pregnancy, my job is not to convince them not to," he says. "This is not a right-to-life issue. This is a choice issue. This is an information issue. ... It's hard enough to deal with any of these things without being made to feel on top of it that you've done something wrong."
Yet, it's difficult to shake the feeling that those who abort a child simply because he or she has Down Syndrome have done something wrong. Children with Down Syndrome are not monsters, but uncommonly gentle human beings who can and do lead full lives. And there are alternatives to abortion. "It's not at all difficult" to find homes for kids with Down Syndrome, says Janet Marchese of the Down Syndrome Adoption Exchange in White Plains, New York, one of several agencies of its kind in the United States. Over the past 20 years, Marchese has placed about 3,600 children with Down Syndrome; her waiting list of couples hoping to adopt rarely dips below 100.
What do people who would adopt a Down Syndrome child know that most obstetricians do not? "Having a child with Down Syndrome is not such a big deal—if you have some experience with Down Syndrome you realize that," says Nancy Simpson of Chesapeake Down Syndrome Parent Group in Phoenix, Maryland, whose eight-year-old daughter has Down Syndrome. "It's definitely not as easy as raising a typical child; there are a lot of things that are involved in it. Raising a child with Down Syndrome takes extra patience and extra care and extra time. But you also get back a completely different perspective on the world, and a great deal of love."
Sentiments like these are almost unimaginable to Jeffrey Greenspoon, M.D. Greenspoon is the director of the high-risk obstetric unit at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. In the summer of 1995, during the beginning of the debate over partial-birth abortion, Greenspoon sent a letter to Rep. Henry Hyde passionately defending the procedure, especially in cases where a child might be born with "problems ... incompatible with a normal life," such as Down Syndrome.
"A pregnancy that is desired and planned is the foundation for the next generation of productive, healthy Americans," Greenspoon wrote. "The burden of raising one or two abnormal children is realistically unbearable."
Reached at his office, Greenspoon admits that he approves of eugenics—weeding out "babies who don't have much of a viable life." What makes him uncomfortable, he says, is the word "eugenics," which somehow has assumed "bad connotations over time. I think the better terms would be 'genetic counseling' and 'prenatal diagnosis' and 'having a country in which the option to exercise choice in whether to continue or terminate a pregnancy is a right of the people.'" After all, he says, "Sometimes you need to abandon words that have common meanings that connote the wrong ethics or morals."
But only the words have changed.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_...nd_the_abortion_of_down_syndrome_babies_.html
This past weekend, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum attacked the Affordable Care Act for requiring free prenatal testing. Such testing, Santorum claims, is aimed at identifying babies with birth defects or disabilities, and encouraging parents to abort them. Santorum said, “Free prenatal testing ends up in more abortions and therefore less care that has to be done because we cull the ranks of the disabled in our society. That, too, is part of Obamacare, another hidden message as to what President Obama thinks of those who are less able than the elites who want to govern our country."
Santorum is not the first person to raise the issue of whether prenatal testing leads to the abortion of children with special needs. Back in December 1996, Tucker Carlson, now editor of the Daily Caller, wrote a powerful article for the Weekly Standard about the abortion of babies with Down syndrome. It is reprinted here with Carlson’s permission.
Testifying before Congress in the spring of 1990, Arkansas state health director Joycelyn Elders took an unusual tack in her defense of legal abortion. "Abortion," she said, "has had an important, and positive, public- health effect," in that it has reduced "the number of children afflicted with severe defects." As evidence, the future surgeon general cited this statistic: "The number of Down's Syndrome infants in Washington state in 1976 was 64 percent lower than it would have been without legal abortion."
Her remark went all but unnoticed at the time and has received little attention since, even during Elders's contentious tenure as surgeon general in the Clinton administration. But it was a significant statement nonetheless, if only because it represents one of the few occasions on which a public health official has publicly acknowledged the eugenic utility of abortion. Terminating a pregnancy, Elders argued, is not simply a difficult personal decision, an agonizing last resort. When guided by public-health objectives, abortion can also be a positive act—a means of improving the species.
Stylized and dulled by euphemism as it is, the debate over abortion in America rarely allows for statements as clear and direct as Elders's, and the words may sound almost unrecognizably harsh to ears accustomed to intentionally opaque terms such as "choice" and "life." But what Elders said is nothing new. For 30 years, nearly every element of Western medicine—physicians, geneticists, insurance companies—has, explicitly and not, encouraged the use of abortion to reduce the incidence of birth defects.
The effort has succeeded dramatically, particularly in the case of Down Syndrome, the most frequently occurring genetic disorder. Far more women now are able to detect Down Syndrome pregnancies, and far more end them with abortion. Yet even as it becomes easier and more common to prevent children with Down Syndrome from being born, the justification for doing so grows murkier.
Unlike many other genetic anomalies, such as Tay-Sachs and anencephaly, Down Syndrome (also known as Down's Syndrome or Trisomy 21) is not a terminal disorder. Children born with Down Syndrome are not vegetables, nor are their lives demonstrably not worth living. Indeed, advances in science and changes in public perception have combined to make Down Syndrome a relatively mild birth defect: The average child born with Down Syndrome in America today can expect to reside at home, go to school, learn to read, hold a job, and live to the age of 55. He will grow up cognizant of ethics and events, and will be mildly to moderately retarded, with an IQ of between 55 and 70. It is one of the triumphs of modern society that the life of the average person with Down Syndrome has become strikingly normal. Except that, unlike normal people, people with Down Syndrome have been targeted for elimination.
Of 22,000 women who received prenatal diagnosis in one 1990 study in Canada, 88 percent of those who found they were carrying a child with Down Syndrome aborted the fetus. Other studies have put the rate of Down Syndrome abortions at about 90 percent, some even higher.
Last year, British journalist Dominic Lawson published an article in the London Spectator about the birth of his daughter, who has Down Syndrome. Lawson, a self-described atheist, expressed outrage at the National Health Service's policy of providing free prenatal tests for, and complimentary abortions of, babies with Down Syndrome. He went on to compare the policy to the Nazi eugenics program. Lawson's article was reprinted in the Daily Mail, prompting scores of letters to the editor and counter articles. Partly in response to what Lawson had written, a bill was introduced in the House of Lords that would outlaw abortions conducted solely to prevent the birth of a child with Down Syndrome. (Currently, abortion of "seriously handicapped" children, including those with Down Syndrome, is legal in England through the ninth month.) A national debate has begun.
So far, no such public discussion has broken out in the United States, where amniocentesis and other genetic tests have been used to target Down Syndrome pregnancies for abortion since at least the late 1960s. In 1959, French geneticist Jerome Lejeune discovered that people with Down Syndrome have an extra chromosome responsible for the disorder. The discovery soon made it possible to detect the presence of Down Syndrome in utero. Grasping the implications of his work, Lejeune grew to be a passionate opponent of abortion and prenatal testing, which he called "biological pornography."
But Lejeune could not stop what he had unwittingly begun. By the summer of 1967, the American Medical Association had passed a resolution endorsing abortion in cases in which "an infant may be born with incapacitating physical deformity or mental deficiency." A year later, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists came out with a similar policy. A number of states, years before Roe v. Wade, followed suit with laws allowing abortion for the purpose of eliminating children with mental defects, including Down Syndrome.
During the 1970s, genetic testing of pregnant women became routine, a practice encouraged by groups like Planned Parenthood. Since it is an invasive procedure that entails extracting amniotic fluid with a needle from around the child, amniocentesis (like its alternative, chorionic villous sampling) carries a significant risk of miscarriage, in some places as high as one in 100. As a result, the test generally has been reserved for use by women over the age of 34, who are more willing to weigh the risk against that of having a child with Down Syndrome. (The incidence of Down Syndrome increases with maternal age, from about one in 2,000 births at age 20 to one in 10 at age 49.) In 1984, however, it was discovered that a non-invasive blood test could be used to calculate the likelihood of bearing a Down Syndrome child. The blood test made it possible to provide screening for Down Syndrome to women of all ages at no risk to the mother. In 1986, the State of California began requiring physicians to offer the tests to pregnant women. The state's health department now funds much of the screening itself, spending $56 million a year to detect prenatal birth defects.
The rest of the country followed California's lead. Between 1988 and 1993, the number of pregnant women who received blood tests for Down Syndrome doubled, to about 2 million. Almost all the tests were covered by private health insurance or Medicaid. Last year, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists officially recommended Down Syndrome screening for all pregnant women. Although there is no cure or prevention for Down Syndrome—indeed, the only real intervention that can be taken after a positive test result is abortion—prenatal screening is now, in effect, mandatory. Few physicians, regardless of their beliefs on the subject, are willing to risk not offering the test, for fear of being slapped with a "wrongful birth" suit if a handicapped child is born. It has happened, repeatedly.
The rapid growth of prenatal testing has had some undeniably positive effects: A woman who knows she will bear a child with a handicap can plan to deliver in a hospital equipped for risky births. And many couples prefer the opportunity to prepare psychologically for the work of raising a disabled child. By far the most profound effect of prenatal testing, however, has been a staggering increase in the number of abortions.
The trend is clear: More testing invariably leads to more—many more—abortions of Down Syndrome children. "Most women who have children with Down Syndrome did not have the amnio," says Lori Atkins of the National Down Syndrome Society, and there is growing evidence to indicate this is true. A study of data from selected states by the Centers for Disease Control found that the rate of Down Syndrome births to mothers 35 or older dropped by about a third between 1983 and 1990. Another study, conducted over a slightly longer period, pegged the decline at 46 percent.
Larry Edmunds, a CDC statistician who is among the country's acknowledged experts on birth-defect trends, cites data from the 1980s suggesting that abortion reduced the number of children with Down Syndrome born to white women over 35 in the metropolitan Atlanta area by about 70 percent. Of the 30 percent in that study who did bear children with Down Syndrome, Edmunds explains, "those were mainly women who didn't have the test."
Lewis Holmes, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School who works at Massachusetts General Hospital, says that in his experience, of women who learn they are carrying a Down Syndrome child, "90 percent will say they want to terminate. If you have all the technology available and educate the women as to what their choices are, that will happen."
Far fewer than 90 percent of women support abortion, at least in the abstract, so there is some question as to why so many are choosing it when they find they are carrying children with Down Syndrome. A number of studies have attempted to provide an answer. One, conducted by the Canadian Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies, found that, because of pressure from hospital staff, one in four pregnant women "felt obliged" to undergo amniocentesis. Of those who tested positive for a birth defect, one in three believed she was "more or less forced" to have an abortion.
Another study, published this summer in the British Medical Journal, describes the case of one pregnant woman whose child had tested positive for birth defects. Following her doctor's orders, she reported to the labor ward of her hospital for what the physician had termed an "induction." It dawned on the woman, who was five months pregnant, that the "induction" was in fact to be an abortion. Horrified, she returned home and later bore the child.
Laurie Cowan, a physician at the state of Delaware's public health department, readily admits that abortion has had a dramatic effect on births of children with Down Syndrome. "We are seeing a real drop in the rate of [Down Syndrome] children who are born. We're not seeing a drop in the rate of children who are conceived," she says. But like many in the medical profession, Cowan is wary of how such information might be used. Abortion, she explains, "has been a right that people have had. So I hope that in no way you'll do anything to try to take away that right. I'm just very concerned about that. I just hope in no way your work will undermine that." Antiabortion forces, she warns, would allow the procedure "only if the mother is raped, only if she's going to die because of this pregnancy. And that's uncomfortable for me because there are certain things that are pretty close to that."
Having a Down Syndrome child is close to being raped? To dying?
Why such eagerness to prevent Down Syndrome children from being born? Undoubtedly, some physicians are motivated by a belief that children with birth defects pollute the gene pool. "There is nothing wrong with eugenics," said Dr. F. Clarke Fraser, founder of the genetics clinic at Montreal Children's Hospital, not long ago in an unusually blunt interview with the Montreal Gazette.
Many others, however, simply view abortion and Down Syndrome as parts of an economic equation. Amniocentesis "may cost about $1,000, but a reasonably conservative estimate is that it costs $ 100,000 for just the first year of a Down Syndrome baby's life," explained Dr. Mark Evans, director of Detroit's Center for Fetal Diagnosis and Therapy. "How many people would I have to test to balance the lifetime cost?" he asked a New York Times reporter in what must rank among the creepiest rhetorical questions ever posed. 'And then there are economic considerations nobody knows how to factor in, like the number of women who would have to quit their careers to care for these babies. "
Actually, Dr. Evans was wrong on at least one count: A number of people have "factored in" the various costs of Down Syndrome. A 1995 study led by Norman Waitzman of the University of Utah sought to calculate the toll birth defects take on the American economy. The results, published in a CDC report, found that each child born with Down Syndrome will, over a lifetime, cost society about $451,000. The total cost for all children born with the disorder in a given year, the study determined, is $ 1.8 billion. "Particularly in these times of fiscal squeeze," he concluded, "these costs provide a vivid picture of the value of research and prevention" (italics added).
Needless to say, Waltzman failed to point out that, in the case of Down Syndrome, there's no way to "prevent" the disorder, only the birth of those afflicted with it. Obscured by euphemisms or not, calculations such as Waltzman's have not escaped the attention of insurance companies, many of which have proved indecorously eager to cover testing for potentially expensive genetic defects, most recently for cystic fibrosis.
Nachum Sicherman of the Columbia Business School, another researcher who has examined the "enormous cost-saving potential of amniocentesis," is the sort of expert insurance companies doubtless will consult as they begin to sort out the growing number of prenatal genetic tests in order to determine which ones they should pay for. Sicherman figures the cost to society over the lifetime of a person with Down Syndrome is at least $ 1 million—most of which, he points out, "is not going to be paid by parents." Numbers like these—and Sicherman's are larger than most—have led Sicherman to recommend that amniocentesis be made available to all nearly pregnant women, regardless of age. "If you take all costs into account—costs to school districts, to Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, lost days of work for parents," he explains enthusiastically, "there is nothing more beneficial than amniocentesis, if it is given under the assumption that if Down Syndrome is discovered, there is an abortion following. It's a great cost saving."
Sicherman does more than simply theorize on the subject. "When my wife was pregnant," he recalls, "we went to Lamaze class and I asked the women there if they'd ever heard of amniocentesis." Being a mostly young and lower-income group, he says, none had, and Sicherman did his best to remedy their ignorance. It was, after all, only the right thing to do. "Everybody should tell their patients about amniocentesis," he says.
Sicherman's views may be a bit blunt for the present state of public opinion in America. Not so in the Netherlands, however, where subjecting pregnancy to rigorous economic calculation is considered a civic responsibility. A 1991 report by the Royal Dutch Society of Medicine (entitled "Life Terminating Actions with Incompetent Patients, Part I: Severely Handicapped Newborns") studied a series of 2,816 amniocenteses given to pregnant women. The tests resulted in 75 abortions, 57 of which were of " defective fetuses."
"These 2,816 amniocenteses and the chromosome analyses cost approximately $ 1.5 million," the study said. "This is in the same order of magnitude as the costs for taking care of one patient with Down's Syndrome in a medical institution for a period of 60 years. Seen in the light of a cost-benefit analysis the conclusion is obvious."
From here, it is a short trip to killing handicapped children outright. Why, after all, stop the economizing simply because a child has left the womb? James D. Watson, who won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of DNA, believed that newborns who scored below a certain level on the APGAR test given immediately after birth should be euthanized.
In fact, infants with Down Syndrome are routinely starved to death in Dutch hospitals—a practice that has been resoundingly affirmed by both that country's supreme court and its Council for Children's Protection. Nor are such practices restricted to the Netherlands. A 1975 poll found that 77 percent of American pediatric surgeons favored withholding food and medical treatment from infants with Down Syndrome and leaving them to die. Seven years later, in the well-publicized Baby Doe case, a Bloomington, Indiana, couple asked their doctor to do just that to their child born with Down Syndrome. The infant, who needed only simple surgery to correct a blocked esophagus, died after six days of neglect. In a strikingly similar incident several years later in Montreal, a Down Syndrome child died after 11 days without food or water. "The presence of Down Syndrome," said a local coroner, "was another element [in the decision to kill the child] since mongolism implies a quasi-vegetative life or severely diminished quality of life."
Given these stories and the evidence that an entire population of retarded people may be wiped clean from this country, one would expect organizations that represent the disabled to be up in arms.
One would expect wrong.
"We have a clear position not to take a position on the issue of abortion," says Paul Marchand, head lobbyist at The Arc (formerly known as the Association for Retarded Citizens), one of the country's largest such groups. The National Down Syndrome Congress, in its "Position Statement on Prenatal Testing and Eugenics," is equally explicit: "These positions ... in no way involve the movement in the debate over whether a woman should have a legal right to abortion."
Disability groups tend to be on edge when it comes to public perceptions of the mentally retarded (Al Gore learned this the hard way when he referred to Oliver North's political supporters as "the extra-chromosome right wing," drawing roars of protest from Down Syndrome groups). They are quick to spot even the most subtle forms of discrimination—The Arc actually has an official policy demanding equal access to dental treatment. So it is puzzling that so few groups have seen fit to comment on the growth of state-endorsed eugenics targeted—in the most discriminatory, dehumanizing way imaginable—at their own constituents. It's a little like the NAACP refusing to come out against slavery.
In 1978, the Delaware chapter of the Association for Retarded Citizens did take a position: It passed a resolution demanding that the federal government pay for abortions for poor women who learn they are carrying potential retarded citizens. The resolution prompted The Arc's national organization to convene a task force on the issue. After months of work, the group produced a 60-page report declaring that, although a majority of its members supported government funding for the abortion of retarded children, a unanimous decision could not be reached. And that, says lobbyist Marchand, was that: "I don't think anything on abortion has crossed my desk in the last ten years." The only comparable issue today, he says, is the debate within the "disability community" over whether it is valid to search for a cure for mental retardation. "It can be a touchy subject," he explains without a hint of irony, because when you seek a cure, "what you're doing de facto is devaluing people with mental retardation."
Not that The Arc spends a lot of time pondering existential questions like these. The group's real concern nowadays, says Marchand, is "the federal role in the future of mental retardation"—i.e., getting more money from the government. He rattles off a list of programs his organization is lobbying to maintain and expand: Medicaid, Social Security, disability insurance, job training, special education. "We are extremely occupied with a myriad of federal policy issues that are before us," Marchand says. "Our plate is more than overflowing."
Meanwhile, as The Arc concerned itself with its "myriad of federal policy issues," another issue was being decided on Capitol Hill, one from which the voice of the disability lobby was noticeably absent: partial-birth abortion. The vast majority of Down Syndrome children identified in utero are diagnosed using amniocentesis, which is not even performed until the sixteenth week of pregnancy. The abortions that result are of the grisly variety, some of them performed by the skull-crushing partial-birth technique on infants capable of living outside the womb.
During the debate over the procedure, the Clinton administration cited the record of abortion doctor James McMahon as evidence that a ban on partial-birth abortions would be unacceptably rigid. The pregnant women McMahon had treated, the administration argued, had received abortions to alleviate the sort of "serious health problems" that should be exempted under the ban. And what were these problems? According to data the doctor himself provided to Congress, the single most common "serious fetal defect" McMahon" treated" was Down Syndrome.
It would be unfair to single out organized Down Syndrome groups for their unwillingness to confront the subject of abortion, since the willful blindness runs much deeper. In Life As We Know It, his recent book about raising a son with Down Syndrome, Michael Berube describes the typical response on an Internet discussion group when the subject of prenatal testing and abortion arises: "Every time someone brings up the question on the listserv, he or she is met with dozens of e-mail responses reading, "NO! NO! NOT ON THIS LIST! Please don't have this discussion here! There are plenty of other newsgroups for this debate. This is about children with disabilities.'"
Dr. Bill Cohen of the Down Syndrome Center of Western Pennsylvania, a noted authority on the disorder, has much the same response when asked about his views on abortion. "If someone comes to me and says that they're thinking about terminating the pregnancy, my job is not to convince them not to," he says. "This is not a right-to-life issue. This is a choice issue. This is an information issue. ... It's hard enough to deal with any of these things without being made to feel on top of it that you've done something wrong."
Yet, it's difficult to shake the feeling that those who abort a child simply because he or she has Down Syndrome have done something wrong. Children with Down Syndrome are not monsters, but uncommonly gentle human beings who can and do lead full lives. And there are alternatives to abortion. "It's not at all difficult" to find homes for kids with Down Syndrome, says Janet Marchese of the Down Syndrome Adoption Exchange in White Plains, New York, one of several agencies of its kind in the United States. Over the past 20 years, Marchese has placed about 3,600 children with Down Syndrome; her waiting list of couples hoping to adopt rarely dips below 100.
What do people who would adopt a Down Syndrome child know that most obstetricians do not? "Having a child with Down Syndrome is not such a big deal—if you have some experience with Down Syndrome you realize that," says Nancy Simpson of Chesapeake Down Syndrome Parent Group in Phoenix, Maryland, whose eight-year-old daughter has Down Syndrome. "It's definitely not as easy as raising a typical child; there are a lot of things that are involved in it. Raising a child with Down Syndrome takes extra patience and extra care and extra time. But you also get back a completely different perspective on the world, and a great deal of love."
Sentiments like these are almost unimaginable to Jeffrey Greenspoon, M.D. Greenspoon is the director of the high-risk obstetric unit at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. In the summer of 1995, during the beginning of the debate over partial-birth abortion, Greenspoon sent a letter to Rep. Henry Hyde passionately defending the procedure, especially in cases where a child might be born with "problems ... incompatible with a normal life," such as Down Syndrome.
"A pregnancy that is desired and planned is the foundation for the next generation of productive, healthy Americans," Greenspoon wrote. "The burden of raising one or two abnormal children is realistically unbearable."
Reached at his office, Greenspoon admits that he approves of eugenics—weeding out "babies who don't have much of a viable life." What makes him uncomfortable, he says, is the word "eugenics," which somehow has assumed "bad connotations over time. I think the better terms would be 'genetic counseling' and 'prenatal diagnosis' and 'having a country in which the option to exercise choice in whether to continue or terminate a pregnancy is a right of the people.'" After all, he says, "Sometimes you need to abandon words that have common meanings that connote the wrong ethics or morals."
But only the words have changed.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_...nd_the_abortion_of_down_syndrome_babies_.html
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