Monday, December 27, 2010

Philosophy Wire: Strawberries, cacao and less evolved species (like humans)...

Is eating more evolved species ethical?

Philosophy Wire by Spiros Kakos [2010-12-27]: Scientists discovered that strawberry and cacao have more genes than the genes in the human DNA (source: news article 1, news article 2). In the past we believed that we are the more "evolved" species because we have more genes. More information = Better, claimed the supporters of the materialistic view of life. The Human Genome Project started with the bold goal to map the genome of the most evolved species: human. When it finished we decided to analyze "less advanced" species. And when we finally found out that these speces have more genomes, we went silent... The news wire from Reuters was carefully phrased: the cross-breeding from farmers were the cause of the large number of genes in strawberry (and not the fact that strawberry is more evolved). The theories of "evolution due to increase in the genome information" still stand... For how long?

(c) Philosophy WIRES - Commenting world news from philosophy's perspective...
Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...