Seeking Person Status for Chimpanzee

Matthew Hiasl Pan is the name given to him. Nice name except for one major detail. Pan is a 26 year old Chimpanzee. And in the radical animal rights activists mind Pan should be seen as, treated as and protected in law as a person.

Thankfully the high court in Austria decided that only people get people status. Duh! The only agreement with the animal rights activists is that Pan is not a human. But the claim is, if you get to know Pan, you will realize that he is a person.

Not happy with the Austrian decision, they've taken their case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France.

Wesley has said, "giving constitutional rights to animals and plants will open Pandora’s Box.
“Chimp personhood is a primary goal that animal-right activists seek to attain and then use as a wrecking ball to disintegrate human exceptionalism,” Smith also said “Once a court declares a chimpanzee to be a full person, that ruling would make chimps, in at least some regards, our legal equals. … And when it happens … it will be a moral earthquake that will harm humankind profoundly.”

No one at Secondhand Smoke would say that animals should not be treated with respect and treated humanely, however, if it looks like a chimp, acts like a chimp, sounds like a chimp, it must be a chimp! And not a person.

AIDS Vaccine Fails: Behavioral Control the Only Answer for Now

The latest efforts to create an AIDS vaccine have failed and the dread HIV continues to spread. From the story:

Last fall's spectacular failure of a three-shot regimen by Merck, which may have left some volunteers more susceptible to HIV infection, is prompting soul-searching at a major AIDS conference here, and calls for a pause in new trials until basic research uncovers new strategies to immunize against the shape-changing virus.

Further evaluation of the Merck vaccine study results has yet to pinpoint why it didn't work, but researchers have uncovered a surprising clue as to why volunteers who received the vaccine may have increased their risk of infection: the infection rate was highest among volunteers who were not circumcised. It was a totally unexpected finding that adds to the mystery of why lack of circumcision seems to play such a big role in HIV infection.

In the wake of a trio of AIDS vaccine field trial failures - Merck's STEP trial was only the most recent - National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases chief Dr. Tony Fauci has agreed to convene a "summit" of top leaders in the vaccine field to rethink strategy and perhaps plot new directions for the flow of federal tax dollars.

I vividly remember the scene in San Francisco when Secondhand Smokette and I moved here in 1992 at the height of the AIDS devastation. The heartbreak of seeing young men barely able to walk and looking as if they were 100 was almost too much to bear. I did some volunteer work to help AIDS patients and I saw the naked face of the plague up close--and the utter heartbreak it causes.

Why would anyone risk that? Yet tens of thousands of people are still infected every year in the USA. And what gets me is that almost every new infection is wholly preventable if people simply control their behavior.

This is an aspect of human exceptionalism that needs more emphasis in all our lives. Unlike animals, we can control our urges. We can deny ourselves that which our biological natures desire. As rational and moral beings, we have the capacity to transcend instinct. Vegetarians, for example, forgo natural human food for moral or health reasons. Monastics forgo sexual relations and family for religious or philosophical reasons. Surely, with HIV such a dread disease, people can restrain their risky behaviors--at least until a true vaccine or cure can be found. Indeed, that should be society's expectation of everyone. After all, lives are literally at stake.

ACLU's Anti-Human Exceptionalism Claim of Constitutional Right to Indulge Sexual Urges in Public

One of the attributes of human exceptionalism is our capacity to control even the most urgent biological urges rather than being controlled by them. If we are hungry, we can decide not to eat, for example. Or, even if we really want that juicy steak that the wimpy looking outdoor diner is eating, unlike animals, we don't steal the food out of his mouth. We also have the capacity to delay sexual gratification and control where and with whom we express that aspect of our nature. Even if we strongly feel the "have sex" biological urge, that doesn't mean we have to get right to it in the Pavlovian sense.

But just as some seek to elevate animals to the human moral status, we also see advocacy that would effectually undermine this difference by elevating the importance of the urge and our "right" to indulge--just like animals do. And indeed, the ACLU is proclaiming what would essentially be a right to have sex in public. Its lawyers don't say it that bluntly, of course. Instead, they have filed a legal brief in the Larry Craig case that, if followed, would create a constitutional right to get it on in public bathroom stalls--ironically in the name of protecting privacy. From the story:

In an effort to help Sen. Larry Craig, the American Civil Liberties Union is arguing that people who have sex in public bathrooms have an expectation of privacy...

The ACLU filed a brief Tuesday supporting Craig. It cited a Minnesota Supreme Court ruling 38 years ago that found that people who have sex in closed stalls in public restrooms "have a reasonable expectation of privacy." That means the state cannot prove Craig was inviting an undercover officer to have sex in public, the ACLU wrote. The Republican senator was arrested June 11 by an undercover officer who said Craig tapped his feet and swiped his hand under a stall divider in a way that signaled he wanted sex. Craig has denied that, saying his actions were misconstrued.

The ACLU argued that even if Craig was inviting the officer to have sex, his actions wouldn't be illegal.

Human freedom also brings with it human responsibility. And that includes controlling our desires. The ACLU may not know it, but its advocacy says that we really are mere animals that should not be expected to control ourselves when we have the urge.

Chimps More Evolved Than Humans?

It is a continuing source of astonishment and concern to me that so many "scientists" so fervently wish to knock human beings off of the pedestal of exceptionalism, and transform us into merely another animal in the forest, just one of the fauna, if you will. I bring this up because of the reaction to a paper presented to the National Academy of Sciences, as described in Technology Review, that claims chimps to be more evolved than humans:

With our big brains, capacity for speech, and upright stance, humans have long assumed that our species must have hit the genetic jackpot. But a controversial new study challenges the idea that we sprinted along on the evolutionary fast track while our chimp brethren were left swinging in the trees.

A comparison of thousands of human and chimpanzee genes suggests that chimps have actually evolved more since the two species parted from a common ancestor approximately five million years ago, according to Jianzhi Zhang, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who led the research.

Mutations happen spontaneously, and most are neutral or bad, says Zhang. But sometimes a beneficial mutation occurs in an individual and spreads throughout the population over time, a process known as positive selection: the genes carrying these good mutations confer evolutionary advantages that allow organisms to adapt and thrive. The changes thus become "fixed" in the genome...Chimps had 233 positively selected genes while humans had just 154, implying that chimps have adapted more to their environment than humans have to theirs.

I beg your pardon? Do chimps live and thrive in the Sahara Desert, Antarctica, the tundra, the rain forest, and the Himalayas? To claim that chimpanzees have adapted more to their environment than we have is ridiculous on its face. But here is the reason I bring this up. Note the gleeful reaction by a scientist who is more than eager to knock humans off the pedestal of exceptionalism:

"It's human egotism to put us on a pedestal," says molecular anthropologist Morris Goodman of Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit. "I was attracted to the paper because it seemed to be chipping away at this desire to make us all that extra-special. At the molecular level, humans are not necessarily exceptional in terms of the adaptive changes."

Who cares? At the carbon molecule level we are not more exceptional than carrots. This desire to destroy our self-perception will not redound to the benefit of the world, but to its detriment. After all, if we are not exceptional, why should we act beneficially toward the planet, other species, and each other as if we are?

HT: Mere Orthodoxy