Speaking of Michael Crichton, his next book promises to have us asking some strange questions: “Could your loved one be missing some body parts? Is everyone at your dinner table of the same species? It’s 2006: do you know who all your children are? Do you know humans and chimpanzees differ in only 400 genes? Did you know one fifth of all your genes are owned by someone else? Could you and your family be pursued cross country just because you happen to have certain genes in your body?”
If we come to a point where we can define our bodies and our mental abilities while living or define them for our children (or by government mandate, one another’s children), then we will have lost our humanity or at least some of it. Mars Hill Audio has discussed this repeatedly, talking to Nigel Cameron about the ethics of current bio-technology. As C.S. Lewis said, if we gain the ability to define our attributes like we can software, we will not have conquered nature; we will have become its slave.
What do you think it means to be human? Are you and I really barely different than apes? Is your body only the vehicle for your soul or whatever is the real you inside?
I worry about the genetic/statistical approach. “We have 90% of our genes in common with gorillas, so we’re really pretty much the same.” As if God and gold were the same thing because they share mostly the same letters.
I think I read somewhere that we share 50% of our genes with bananas.
I just looked that up. I found it in a editor’s note in New Scientist magazine. Their point agreed with yours. Saying there is a statistical similarity between the genes of two living things does not say a great deal.
On being human, I think modern people need to wrestle with their beliefs, especially if they rule out God. What is a human being, just another animal? If you (however you define the real you) could be moved into a dog, would you still be human or would you be a talking or thinking dog? If a thing could be made which looked, acted, sounded, and seemed to be a person in everything way, would that thing be human?
I don’t know that I can fully explain my answer, but I think the dog and the android are not human simply because humanity is a gift from God. We cannot give ourselves humanity. Of course the hypotheses above are outlandish, but if we believe they are achievable, we may work toward them as well as live by their implications.
One dilemna we’re facing is the old philosphical conundrum of universals vs. particulars. If two people ((thru genetic engineering) are quite different, can we speak of them both as being men? If we can’t (and it would seem we can’t) what are the implications for society? (ie. for law, ethics, etc.)
– there are even deeper problems; especially for christians. At what point does a man cease to be a man? ie. someone christ died for. (Is a cloned brain in some kind of artificial environment a man?)
p.s. In my opinion this gene similarity argument is bogus. If I’m correct humans and chickens have over 90 percent similarity. (You can make a computer and a hammer out of metal; does that mean they have some inherent similarity?)
There’s a lecture by Cameron available at Maclaurin.org.