From the article cited in the OP:
I’ll bet he’s morally opposed to the use of anesthetics in surgery, too. :rolleyes:
Darn! How’s we gonna hunt y’all down if’n ya won’t stay in uniform! 
Yeah GOM, I’m sure God is offended. :rolleyes:
Man, some people need to take a few deep breaths and maybe a short nap after reading about some scientific advances, before reacting all over the place. Who the heck has “put God on notice” lately? People on BOTH the pro- AND anti- science camps have been WRONGLY claiming since the 1850s that science has done that. It hasn’t. It has just provided explanations for various phenomena that happen to test out w/o need for the “and then a miracle happens” step, to the point we can rely on them to explain the day-to-day if life.
“Science has no built-in morals”??? Well, neither does government. Or carpentry. Or cubist painting. Or the digging of ditches. Or salsa music. Or salsa cooking. Or reading tarot cards. It’s the people engaging in those activities that need morals. If people’s value sets are so shallow that a result of scientific research can lead them to dump moral behavior, that is an impeachment of their weak character, not of science. Morally bankrupt people will do morally bankrupt things and if they don’t have science as an excuse and technology as a tool they’ll use the spread of the One True Faith or the defense of the Sacred Fatherland or the protection of Our Women’s Virtue as excuses and common swords, fire, and whips as tools.
Those who believe that a naturalistic explanation for the universe, and the technology to control phenomena such as life, are nothing but an excuse to exempt us from moral behavior, those are the yahoos. Meanwhile, I’ll gladly take from the guys in the labcoats the medication that prevents me from dying young, this computer, this internet, and a whole lot ofother wonderful things. And that in no way takes from me a jot nor a tittle of my beliefs in what is proper, right, wrong, ethical, correct, beautiful or harmonious, nor from my capacity to love, nor my awareness of the inherent dignity of the human being.
As a zookeeper, I should point out that the actual lesson of Jurassic Park was not “Don’t try to create life via genetic manipulation.” Rather, the moral to the story was “When designing animal enclosures, always include a physical barrier between the animal and the guests.” At least that’s the way I always viewed the movie. I mean, come on, a seven-ton predator kept in check by an electrified string?! Yeah, great habitat design, guys. The real villains in Jurassic Park weren’t the genetic engineers…they were the architects! It’s fairly obvious that our society should turn our backs on naturalistic zoo habitats, since at some point in the future someone may try to place a dinosaur in a poorly designed enclosure.
But, as they say, once the genie is out of the bottle… And because we can’t even agree on outlawing theme park-like zoo exhibits, that, too will one day occur. Architecture has no in-built morals, and it’s outpacing society’s ability to constrain it. Time will tell whether the alarm should have been sounded or not.
This stuff is only the beginning…
in a thousand years there might be talkingbonobosmerpeople or humans adapted to live in free fall
And so on…
well it passes the time…
i(s that what god said all those billions of years ago?)
The article linked by the OP is silly. Not for what it says, but because it reads like a sophomoric creative writing assignment.
GOM, you’re going to find the next 50 years pretty frustrating.
Can too! What about pregnant women?
I remember reading about this in * Cosmos * by Carl Sagan. He termed it as “the stuff of life,” a biological compound.
The reason as to why they did it is to learn more about how life initially developed. Apparently, with the right compounds, and a little electricity, it’s easy enough to create “life.”
Lissa:
What you describe is the Miller/Urey experiment. It was performed in 1953 by two scientists at the University of Chicago – not by NASA. This experiment established that, by applying lightning-like electrical sparks to methane, ammonia, and water vapor (thought to be the compounds available in Earth’s primordial atmosphere), you could create amino acids, which are the individual building blocks of proteins.
It’s a huge step (or set of steps) from amino acids to anything resembling bacteria, though.
**
Well, I wouldn’t be too sure . . .
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/sci_tech/2001/san_francisco/1181710.stm
It might seem strange for me to say this, but in some ways GOM is right.
As an enthusiast for genetic engineering, but aware of the problems it might cause (like economic collapse for small farmers in the third world and elsewhere, germ warfare, semi-viable transgenic organisms polluting the gene pool), I am also aware that the GM we are looking at is artificial horizontal gene transfer between species, and not really inventing new creatures at all. The link that Truth Seeker posted concerns a true neogen virus, a totally new entity. It would be a long time before entirely new eukayotes, or any large multicellular organisms, can be created without cribbing genes from existing animals.
That good old Catholic, Tolkien, denied the ability of making new life to any being less than The Creator. In some ways he might be proved right.
Any transgenic animals that are developed in the near future are likely to be chimeras, assembled from existing genomes, perhaps with a small amount of neogen material added if the biologists are feeling brave.
The input of regulatory bodies like the UN will no doubt mean all such experiments will be under close scrutiny and within tight boundaries.
No. Almost exactly the opposite. It will prove the incredible intelligence required to design, assemble and program life. Far more intelligence than the combination of all the scientists in the world right now.
HTH
Oh thanks!
Trying to kill off my thread, I see…
Hell, why not crib? It’s not like God didn’t fire up the ol’ Ctrl-C Ctrl-V when he was designing life.
In other words, if people can’t create life, that proves that Goddidit.
And if people can create life, then that too proves that Goddidit.
GOM, when, if ever, will you reply to the counterarguments that have been made to your position?
For starters, you can tell us why diamonds aren’t proof of ID. After all, it used to be that people couldn’t make them- so God must have done it. Now people do know how to make them- proving that intelligent design is necessary, so God must have done it.
If you’re so uninterested in real debate, why don’t you either post these threads to MPSIMS or the Pit?
I wish I could be as optimistic as you are about this…
My confidence in the UN is close to zero.
NaSultainne, who do you trust? When you’re sick, do you trust your doctor? Doctors are just people like you and me. When you want your kids to know stuff (do you?) do you send them to school? Teachers are just people like you and me. When you want to know how to get the best return on your tax, do you go to an accountant? Accountants are just people like you and me. When you need to fill up your car, how are you aure that what you’re putting in your car is petrol? The oil companies are run by people just like you and me? How did you trust that your computer could be used to connect you to this message board would work? The person who designed was just human, like you and me.
In fact, how do you trust anyone to do anything for you, knowing that they are only human?
My favorite part in the article is this:
No mention of me!! Geesh, Pandora was given to me fer Zeus’ sake, not mankind. Dear old brother Prometheus was the one that warned me. This allegation against dear ol brother, whom is paying a dire price for his insolence in giving fire to mankind, is horrendous. Learn some history washingpost.com.