Artificial life created!

People are losing site of the best part of this news, obviously it means we can eventually create shapeshifting lizard men. And if we combine it with the powers of science fiction and religion, it means ultimately we will die, and be reborn as the lizard men we created.

What's wrong with crocoducks? :/

funny that new movie Splice would come out at the same time as this

Life is either life or it isn't.  Artifice doesn't even enter into the equation. 

HTCF wrote: I can't wait to see the devout religious types freak out over absolutely nothing

Why should they worry?
Don't they say that the essence of our being is our "soul"?

Now, since that doesn't physically exist you can't clone it, nor construct its DNA.
So there's nothing for them to worry about.

thellama73 wrote: This is not actually artificial life, but I am quite nervous about the possibility of artificial life. I am not a particularly religious person, but I think the moral and ethical implications are pretty daunting. I oppose human cloning for the same reason. It's a slippery slope that we should be very careful about pursuing.

This is a very good explanation of it.

stonebeard wrote: You have to embrace hypocrisy in issues like this. In taking a step, you're killing bacteria and organisms. You're not going to stop walking are you? One wouldn't pray for the souls or for forgiveness for killing bacteria, would they? No, people move on with their lives. There is no right answer. There is no should. But in general, it makes sense not to kill anything that would care about it. Unless it's human. Or cute. Or looks like a human....everyone's a hypocrite. It's the curse of humans.

I know, however thinking on this subject did make me wonder about the whole bio-ethics thing. luckily not believing in souls/god means that I only have my own actions to justify to myself

I personally dont see what teh fuss is about. but others are warning of great dangers of the breakthrough.

thellama73 wrote: This is not actually artificial life, but I am quite nervous about the possibility of artificial life. I am not a particularly religious person, but I think the moral and ethical implications are pretty daunting. I oppose human cloning for the same reason. It's a slippery slope that we should be very careful about pursuing.

It will take tens of generations if ever for people not to have an icky feeling about literally cloning people and having clones of people chilling around like it's The Island or something.

Besides, intelligent life is so ridiculously different than something alive it doesn't even matter.

I've read more than a few stories on this, and the thing that keeps coming up is "ethics/morals". I cant see the implications in that sense.

yes, if used to create super-bio-weapons then there is an obvious ethical issue there, but otherwise its equal to genetic engineering/selective breeding.

for the time being this will be limited to simple prokaryotes, as the single circular chromosome is easier to work with. ethically, I dont think anyone really cares about the welfare of microbes, and without some form of sentience its not really possible to define suffering, whilst the most ardent environmentalist will mourn the loss of animals/plants, their unlikely to think twice about disinfecting a work surface.

obviously as this develops towards more intelligent forms of life, ethics to avoid unnecessary suffering are required. and conversely research shouldn't cause the suffering of other life forms. (such as the creation of pathogens)

I spent a bit of time thinking on this, and realised I have a slightly paradoxical if not hypocritical view on life in general. I think all life should be respected (not out of some daft notion that theres a soul, just that its alive) and this applies from microbes to multicellular organisms. the paradoxical nature of this however concerns pathogens. whilst obviously their bad in the sense they cause needless suffering/death of other organisms, without it there would be less cause for evolutionary change. so do you kill them, or not. I haven't quite worked out an answer for that,

regarding cloning, thats another grey issue for me, I dont see it as a negative thing in once sense, but feel its somewhat of a retrograde action, change is required for life to be life, cloning sort of invalidates it, however, cloning only involves genetic material, there is  a huge amount of change that could occur epigenetically, human cloning is more a social issue. so whilst I dont believe in a soul, what makes a person is more than just a genetic blueprint


Edited by PsYcHoTiC_MaDmAn - May 21 2010 at 13:02