Unequally Yoked

November 14, 2007

What do Chuck Colson, Brandon Keim, and Carl Zimmer have in common? They each had much to say on 13 November 2007 about humans and animals, although with very divergent opinions. Some might call this “being unequally yoked.” Colson, in his BreakPoint commentary, decried the overarching goals of animal rights activism. He spoke of increasing rights of animals, beginning with pregnant sows in Florida. “Now, treating animals humanely is a moral imperative, especially for Christians; treating them as if they somehow were equivalent to humans is not. And,
increasingly, that is what we are doing. (“Of Pigs and People: Speciesism and Rights for Animals”).

Brandon Keim, writing in the Wired blog, “If Cloning Humans is Wrong, So Is Cloning Monkeys,” dealt with the published report of primate cloning by geneticist Shoukhrat Mitalipov. He stated,

Primate research is ethically difficult: some say that certain primate species are intelligent and empathetic enough to be considered people.
Rhesus macaques fall far down the spectrum from chimpanzees, but they’re indeed on the spectrum — and the macaque research will probably
be duplicated in chimps.

Personally, I do consider higher-order primates to be people. At the same time,
I’m hypocritical and cold-blooded and selfish enough to countenance research on
primates that I’d oppose in humans, simply because it could benefit loved ones
or myself. I know this is ethically indefensible, but my conscience can handle
it. What my conscience can’t handle, though, is the thought of something that
would never be done in people being done in monkeys, just to see if it works.
(Wired)

Carl Zimmer’s science article in the New York Times, was entitled “From Ants to People, an Instinct to Swarm.” In it, he describes the work of Iain D. Couzin, who apparently considers a comparison of people to ants as “a cruel insult — to the ants.” Couzin has studied swarming in ants, birds, and locusts, to name a few. He has made computer models of swarming behavior, and, with colleagues, filmed and analyzed swarming behavior frame by frame. Recent testing of his models has taken him into the realm of what Zimmer terms “mediocre swarmers — humans.” Tellingly, Couzin and colleagues plan to publish their results of human swarming behavior in the journal, Animal Behavior.

What is going on here? This is reductionism — with a broad brush. Ants, monkeys, pigs, and humans are all alive; therefore, they are all equal. Hogwash. That is equivalent to saying that since people eat plants for food, and Zea mays Linnaeus and Amanita virosa are both plants, then people can eat them both for food. While the former, maize, is of nutritive value, the second, a poisonous mushroom, usually kills the consumer! Ants function in highly organized ways that humans do not: true. Cloning monkeys is similar to cloning humans: probably true, in terms of the methodology, and perhaps in timeline. Animals should be treated with care: also true. But all of these truths do not equal the falsehood that all creatures are created equally, with inalienable rights. Such would be truly unequally yoked. Yet that is the concept behind these examples of blurring the lines of separation between humans and animals.