Science of Good and Evil

by Michael Shermer

  Balderdash. Cloning scientists don’t want to play God any more than fertility doctors do. What’s godly about in-vitro fertilization, embryo transfer, and other fully sanctioned birth enhancement technologies? Absolutely nothing. Yet we cheerfully accept these advances because we are accustomed to them. In fact, most of us are alive because of medical technologies and social hygiene practices that have doubled the average life span in this century. What’s godly or natural about heart-lung transplants, triple bypass surgeries, vaccinations, or radiation treatment? Nothing. The mass hysteria and moral panic surrounding cloning is nothing more than the historically common rejection of new technologies, coupled with the additional angst produced when the sphere of science expands too quickly into the space of religion. The editorial cartoon in figure 25 captures this fear well, in which the cloning of God Himself spells the end of monotheism.

  The Human Rights and Dignity Myth is embodied in the Roman Catholic Church’s official statement against cloning, based on the belief that it denies “the dignity of human procreation and of the conjugal union,”37 as well as in a Sunni Muslim cleric’s demand that “science must be regulated by firm laws to preserve humanity and its dignity.”38 Members of Congress, assigned to deal more with legalities than moralities, have decreed that cloning violates the rights of the unborn. Bunkum. Clones will be no more alike than twins raised in separate environments, and no one is suggesting that twins do not have rights or dignity or that twinning should be banned.

  Figure 24. Cloning God

  (Courtesy of Hilary Price)

  In his 1950 science fiction novel I, Robot, Isaac Asimov presented the “Three Laws of Robotics”: “1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.”39 Given the irrational fears people express today about cloning that parallel those surrounding robotics half a century ago, I would like to propose the “Three Laws of Cloning” that address these misunderstandings:

  1. A human clone is a human being no less unique in its personhood than an identical twin.

  2. A human clone is a human being with all the rights and privileges that accompany this legal and moral status.

  3. A human clone is a human being to be accorded the dignity and respect due any member of our species.

  Instead of restricting or banning cloning, I propose that we adopt the Three Laws of Cloning, the principles of which are already incorporated in the laws and language of the U.S. Constitution. Most of the horror-laden scenarios proposed by moralists are already addressed by law—a clone, like a twin, is a human being, and you cannot harvest the tissues or organs of a twin. A clone, like a twin, is a person no less than any other human.

  Cloning is going to happen whether it is banned or not, so why not err on the side of liberty and allow scientists to freely explore the possibilities—not to play God, but to do science. The soul of science is found in courageous thought and creative experiment, not in restrictive fear and prohibitions. For science to progress, it must be given the opportunity to succeed or fail. Let’s run the cloning experiment and see what happens.

  Provisional Morality and Animal Rights

  At the top of the Bio-Cultural Evolutionary Pyramid (figure 6) is the biosphere, which includes all life on earth, a love of which Ed Wilson calls “biophilia.” The sentiment behind biophilia, if there is one, I call bioaltruism. Bioaltruism appears to be almost entirely the product of culture, not evolution, and as such it must be learned. In the long run, bioaltruism may be the most important moral sentiment that will save our species, along with other species upon which we depend, from extinction.

  Moving up the BCE pyramid from the family to the extended family to the community to the society, the liberty principle has been expanded to encompass more members of our species. Eventually we will achieve complete species altruism and belongingness, in which all members of our species are considered equal in terms of liberty rights. Achieving liberty for all human animals has been a difficult struggle against tyrannies of many types. It has been only a century and a half since slavery was outlawed. Only over the past century have women begun to approach anything like the liberty rights enjoyed by men. And it has been less than half a century since minorities began to see some progress in gaining civil liberties (gays, for example, have the legal right to marry in only three countries and are still fighting to gain rights for such matters as adoption, inheritance, and insurance benefits). What hope, then, can there be for nonhuman animals? Animal rights activists must often feel like King Sisyphus, condemned for eternity to roll the boulder of freedom up the hill of oppression, only to have it roll down again just before cresting the top. If far too many people still think that women and minorities do not deserve full liberty rights, what hope can there be for chimps and dolphins?

  At the heart of the animal rights debate is how we should treat nonhuman animals. Clearly, when we are talking about “animal rights,” no one is proposing that animals have the right to vote or the right to a public education. Animal rights are much more basic. Some, in fact, are already in place. In many Western countries, for example, it is a crime to treat animals inhumanely. Humans can be tried and convicted for the crime of cruelty to animals, although this is usually restricted to horrific abuses of our favorite pets, such as dogs, cats, and horses (the Animal Planet television network even has a series on animal-abuse busters who drive around, camera crews in tow, looking for abusers). Modifying the legal system to include some animals under its protective umbrella is going to require breaking through a number of substantial barriers, including economic, religious, legal, and psychological .40 On a positive note, these are the same obstacles faced by women and minorities who, in time, managed to leap the hurdles.

  Economically, the trade in animals, as it was in slavery in nineteenth-century America, is so extensive that if animal rights were suddenly instituted just for all mammals, the economy would suddenly grind to a disastrous halt. The blood and fat from cows, to pick just one example, goes toward the production of adhesives, contraceptive jellies, cosmetics, cough syrup, crayons, detergents, dyes, fabric softeners, fertilizer, fire extinguisher foam, ink, jet engine lubricants, lubricants, plastics, shaving cream, soaps, textiles, and countless medical products.41 And this does not even include the food industry. How many of us are willing to give up eating juicy tenderloin steaks? We are the dominant carnivore species on the planet. We cannot simply grant all nonhuman mammals the same rights as human mammals without considerable economic consequences. Religiously, the Bible says that God bestowed upon one species (us) dominion over all other species. Of course, for centuries God and the Bible were invoked by slave owners and oppressors of women. Christians enslaved Africans, Muslims enslaved Africans, and Jews enslaved gentiles, Africans, and other Jews. One justification for the enslavement of black Africans was that they were subhuman and thus not full rights-bearing members of the human species.42 Similarly, for centuries religion laid the foundation for the control of women, by fathers, husbands, and patriarchal society at large.43 If religion can justify the treatment of blacks and women as subhuman, we should not be surprised about the religious attitudes toward non-humans. Legally, animals are, in essence, things—products and property for humans to buy and sell. The legal treatment of nonhuman animals as things means that we think of them in substantially different ways than we think about human animals. Psychologically, it is the same attitude found in the proslavery movement of centuries past, as the slave historian David Brion Davis explains: “Today it is difficult to understand why slavery was accepted from pre-biblical times in virtually every culture and not seriously challenged until the late 1700S. But the institution was so basic that genuine anti-slavery attitudes required a profound shift in moral perception.”44 That shift could
not come about until there was a psychological shift toward including all people as members of the species. For the animal rights movement to succeed, there must be a psychological shift from speciesism toward bioism.

  Fuzzy Animal Rights

  Arguably, one of the most extreme religions in the world is Jainism, a form of Hinduism whose members hold such a deep reverence for life that it drives them to sweep the ground before them to avoid squashing insects. This is the reductio ad absurdum of the animal rights movement—since there is no good place to draw the line, then we should grant all animals all rights, including the mosquitoes buzzing about our heads. This position is so ridiculous that, thankfully, almost no one embraces it. However, this is the logical opposite of the system of binary rights that we presently hold—all rights for us, no rights for them. But what constitutes “us” and “them”? There is a logic, however binary and restrictive, to speciesism. Although species are nonstatic and malleable over evolutionary time scales, they are static and fixed entities on historical time scales. I shall never forget memorizing Ernst Mayr’s definition of a species in my first course in evolutionary theory: “Species are groups of actually or potentially interbreeding natural populations which are reproductively isolated from other such groups.”45 Since humans are reproductively isolated from all other species (that is, we cannot interbreed with them and produce viable offspring), the species level is a clear and distinctive place to “draw the line.”

  In 1955, the French novelist Vercors penned a science fiction story entitled You Shall Know Them, in which a scientist impregnates a female chimpanzee, kills the offspring, then turns himself in for murder. During his trial the fuzzy boundaries between human and nonhuman primates are explored, demonstrating how difficult it is to justify any particular line between us and them.46 Something like this scenario almost played itself out in our own evolutionary history. Considerable fossil evidence now reveals that not long ago—within the past 100,000 years—there were several species of hominids living simultaneously and reproductively isolated in the same geographic regions of the globe, most notably Homo erectus in Asia, Homo neanderthalensis in Europe, and Cro-Magnons, or anatomically modern humans.47 If the Neanderthals had not gone extinct about 35,000 years ago, and instead were living among us in Europe (where they flourished for 200,000 years before our arrival), would they be granted rights? Their brains were as large as if not larger than ours, but they showed little cultural progress and they may or may not have had language. If we were able to control them, imagine the justifications for Neanderthal slavery and slave labor: “Neanderthals to the mines!”

  Still, that is not what happened, and here we are, the dominant primate species, the last one left standing at the end of the Pleistocene. So, yes, we are the only hominids around and we are reproductively isolated from all other species. But once we expand our thinking to include, well, thinking, the lines blur with a handful of other species. This is fuzzy logic applied to animal rights. Fuzzy logic allows us to expand beyond our fuzzy species boundary to include in our circle of liberty rights a tiny cadre of other big-brained, intelligent, emotional mammals, including the great apes (chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans) and what we might correspondingly call the great marine mammals (dolphins and whales). Fuzzy logic is a very effective way of thinking about animal rights, so I was not surprised to encounter it in Steven M. Wise’s brilliant analysis of the animal rights debate, Drawing the Line: Science and the Case for Animal Rights.48 My fuzzy scale is not as inclusive as Wise’s (see figure 26), which includes African elephants and African grey parrots. I will admit to considerable sympathy, even empathy for elephants, especially when seeing them grieve over the murder of one of their brethren by poachers. 49 But I sense that I am over-anthropomorphizing; I also retain some skepticism about some of the language and cognitive studies conducted with chimps, gorillas, and parrots, particularly because of the tendency for their scientist handlers to exaggerate and anthropomorphize their abilities. Nevertheless, there is now a sizable body of evidence that makes a potent case that in terms of evolutionary closeness, cognitive abilities, and emotional capacities, the great apes are too near to us to withhold from them certain basic liberty rights; and although dolphins and whales are genetically more distant from us than the great apes, their large brains, convoluted cortexes, socially complex groups, and apparent symbolic languages put them in the same fuzzy set to receive basic liberty rights.50

  Figure 25. Equal Rights for All Hominids?

  What if Australopithecus afarensis and other hominids had not gone extinct? Would we grant them equal rights, or would we enslave them? (Illustration by Michael Rothman. Reproduced by permission)

  Figure 26. The Fuzzy Logic of Animal Rights

  In Drawing the Line, attorney and animal rights activist Steven M. Wise applies fuzzy logic to arrive at a scientific basis for the granting of basic liberty rights to some species. In Category 1 he includes species “who clearly possess sufficient autonomy for basic liberty rights,” including the great apes (although not on the chart, he includes chimpanzees). In Category 2 he includes species who might qualify for basic legal rights, depending on what other criteria we might consider. In Category 3 he includes species for which we do not have enough knowledge to determine what rights they should have, and Category 4 includes those species who lack sufficient autonomy for basic liberty rights. (From Steven Wise’s Science and the Case for Animal Rights, 2002. Courtesy of Steven M. Wise)

  As Wise notes, for example, the mind of Koko the gorilla is on par with the mind of a six-year-old human. Koko has a sense of self, in that she can pass the mirror self-recognition test in which a red dot is clandestinely placed on her forehead and she notices that something is different. Koko can pass an “object permanence” test in which she can remember the shape and location of objects, as well as the conservation of liquid, in which she realizes that the quantity does not change when it is poured into a different-sized container. Koko imitates the actions of humans and other gorillas, has learned hundreds of symbolic language signs with which she can answer questions and attempt to deceive her handlers, and has even attempted to teach language signs to other gorillas. This implies that Koko has a “theory of mind”; that is, she not only has a sense of self, she realizes that other gorillas and humans have the same sense of self. Most tellingly (in terms of how many people judge an animal’s moral worth), Koko has scored between seventy and ninety-five on a standard human child intelligence test.51 And there is evidence that the minds of a chimpanzee named Washoe, a bonobo named Kanzi, and an orangutan named Chantek are functionally equivalent to that of Koko, bringing all of the great apes into the same cognitive set.52

  The case for dolphins is also compelling. Two extensively studied bottle-nosed dolphins, named Phoenix and Ake, exhibit evidence of symbolic communication, and other dolphins studied in marine laboratories have passed the mirror self-recognition test, which means they too have a sense of self.53 Dolphin brains make for an interesting comparison. Although the brains of gorillas (average 500 cubic centimeters, or cc), chimpanzees (400 cc), bonobos (340 cc), and orangutans (335 cc) are considerably smaller than ours (1440 cc), dolphins’ brains (1700 cc) are slightly larger than ours, even when adjusted for body size and weight (figure 29). More importantly, the surface area of a dolphin’s cortex—where the higher centers of learning, memory, and cognition are located—is enormous, averaging 3 700 cc squared compared to 2.300 cc squared for humans. Although this is a little misleading—the thickness of the dolphin’s cortex is roughly half that of humans—when absolute cortical material is compared, dolphins still average an impressive 560 cc compared to our 660 cc. Dolphin brains are also asymmetrical, which some neuroscientists believe is related to intelligence and language ability.54

  Provisional Animal Rights : The Moderation Principle

  For the animal rights movement to succeed, the moderation principle must be applied. Torching scientific laboratories that use white rats f
or subjects is no virtue; in fact, it is immoral, illegal, and idiotic. Human property rights, liberties, and freedoms are destroyed in the extremist name of animal liberation. The end result is that the hearts of people are hardened against granting any animals any rights, and the animals are not liberated. Here, extremism is a vice. Why worry about lower mammals when higher mammals can’t get a fair hearing in the court of public opinion? Let’s take this movement one step at a time, justifying each claim with a mountain of scientific evidence and legal precedence. We have that for apes and dolphins. Based on their evolutionary closeness, cognitive abilities, and emotional capacities, it is reasonable to offer our provisional assent to extend basic liberty rights to them. If we can win for them basic liberty rights, then we can worry about monkeys, elephants, dogs, and parrots. What rights? We can begin with the most basic rights granted by the U.S. Constitution: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.