Center on Human Exceptionalism
SO THE RAELIANS, who maintain that human life was the product of cloning by space aliens, now claim that their for-profit corporation, Clonaid, has cloned the first human baby, a healthy female named Eve. There is no proof of any kind to verify this, and most of the world is highly skeptical. It took nearly 300 tries before Dolly the Read More ›
There is an old folk wisdom: “You are known by the company you keep.” As is true of most folk wisdom, the saying has much to recommend it. To use an extreme example, if you hung out with and financially supported a known terrorist, most people would reasonably think that you were a terrorist too. Which brings to mind the Read More ›
AMERICANS LOVE ANIMALS. We coo over and coddle our cats and dogs as if they were children. We paste “Save the Whales” bumper stickers on our cars. We groan in empathetic sadness if a squirrel darts into the road in front of a car. We flock to national parks to catch fleeting glimpses of bears, elk, and antelope. We anthropomorphize Read More ›
When President Bush selected bioethicist and author Leon R. Kass to head the President’s Council on Bioethics, many were outraged. Kass, a critic of human cloning, was accused of being a Luddite who would use his position to stack the council deck against “scientific progress.” But that is not how Kass viewed his mandate. He envisioned that the council would Read More ›
A wise man once said, “Don’t believe everything you read in the papers.” That is good advice, especially for stories that involve assisted suicide. Take the media’s reporting about the lawsuit between the State of Oregon and United States Attorney General John Ashcroft (Oregon v. Ashcroft), which has generally been abysmal. With reporters generally looking with favor upon legalizing assisted Read More ›
When many people think of “animal rights,” they may picture trendy celebrities posing in nude photographs to combat the fur industry. Or perhaps, they will roll their eyes and smile when they hear that the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) reported the California Milk Advisory Board to the FCC for false advertising because its television ads claim Read More ›
Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, & What Makes Us Human, by Matt Ridley (HarperCollins, 336 pp., $25.95) This is a very strange book, and I am not quite sure what the author is attempting to achieve. At the very least it appears that he wants to shore up genetic determinism as the key factor in understanding human nature and individual Read More ›
Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Ageby Bill McKibben Times, 255 pp.,$25 PEOPLE AREN’T SMART ENOUGH, strong enough, pretty enough, healthy enough, talented enough, or agile enough the way we are. Worse yet, our miserable lives are over far too soon. The human condition stinks, and then we die. That seems to be the vague despair that drives the partisans Read More ›
In recent years, scientists have mixed the DNA of a jellyfish with that of a monkey, creating a “transgenic” animal that glows in the dark. (“Transgenic” means possessing the genes of more than one type of organism.) Scientists have also inserted spider DNA into the genes of goats, creating ewes that produce milk containing spider-web silk. The goal of the Read More ›
SOMETHING DISTURBING is happening in the Florida elections this fall. No, not the chance that Janet Reno will be the Democratic candidate for governor. A state initiative has qualified for the ballot letting voters decide whether to grant constitutional rights to pregnant pigs. On the surface, the issue is one of animal husbandry. In the interest of industrial efficiency, and Read More ›