The operation was a success. Later, the duck, with his new human brain, went on to become the leader of a great flock. Irwin, however, was ostracized by his friends and family and eventually just wandered south.
Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is worried. He's afraid we're going to put a human brain in a rodent's head. No, really — it's not just a joke in a cartoon. He seriously wants to suppress research in transgenic and chimeric animals "before a mouse really does come up and ask for a cookie." Now, seriously, his worry isn't that mice will be smarter than he is and eat all his cookies. No, he has better reasons.
The scariest part of this research is directed at work done in hope of curing or treating diseases of the human brain.
They might cure debilitating neurological diseases like Alzheimer's or cerebral palsy or schizophrenia! Those horrible, horrible scientists—how dare they cure our god-given afflictions. We deserve them!
OK, to be fair, I think that was just a badly written sentence. I hope he isn't appalled at the idea of developing animal models that would be useful in curing human diseases (although he might be), but he's more concerned that mice might acquire some human mental abilities.
Saletan reports that ethicists at Stanford at first rejected the proposal, but have since come to approve it, allowing the researchers to produce mice with "some aspects of human consciousness or some human cognitive abilities."
This raises the frightening prospect of a human brain within an animal species. The proposed research at Stanford would not reach that point, but granting a mouse brain "some aspects of human consciousness or some human cognitive abilities" should be enough to set off the ethical alarms.
First, some perspective: the human brain weighs about 1500 grams. The mouse brain, about 0.4 grams. That's 3,750 times smaller—nobody is worried that implanting a few thousand cells will suddenly make a batch of mice that can do algebra and speak English and pester passers-by for cookies. The effects will be negligible—what the researchers are aiming for is minimal molecular compatibility, so that pathogens will affect them in the same way as they do us, or that we can more directly examine the effect of heritable diseases. The ethicists are erring on the side of caution to a ludicrous degree, reacting as if miniscule quantities of brain tissue or slight changes might send mice on the path to being Stanford professors. They won't.
I think the best they could hope for is turning mice into Southern Baptist theologians, which, as we all know, requires almost no brainpower at all.
Nah, I'm joking. These will be mice that, at best, have slightly disordered brains with some compatibility at the neural level with humans. Again, sort of like Southern Baptists, I suppose. Maybe Mohler should worry. Or maybe he should see this as an opportunity to greatly expand his flock.
Now here's the real reason Mohler is opposed. He quotes Nancy Jones, a bioethicist for the Center for Bioethics and Dignity, a Christian think-tank, who has a fully cited argument against chimeric and transgenic animals.
A more fundamental Christian concern involves violation of the divinely created order. The Bible tells us that God designed procreation so that plants, animals, and humans always reproduce after their own kind or seed. (Gen 1:11-12, 21) In the biblical view, then, species integrity is defined by God, rather than by arbitrary or evolutionary forces. The fusion of animal-human genomes runs counter to the sacredness of human life and man created in the image of God.
So the source cited is the Bible…that's a science book to these people.
It's a ridiculous objection. The biblical view, on this matter as it is on many others, is wrong. Species integrity is defined by reproductive barriers, not an invisible man in the sky. Evolutionary forces lead to new species all the time, and interspecies hybrids occur both naturally and in the lab. There are legitimate reasons to object chimeras (Jones mentions just one, that it would also allow viruses from the two species to mingle and possible acquire new possibilities for virulence), but trying to use the several-thousand-year-old myths of nomadic tribesman to whom plows were a radical new technology to argue against modern biotechnology is absurd. There's simply no relevance.
I say let the scientists do their work. I'd like to see progress towards a cure for Alzheimer's before I show any symptoms. And if a mouse asks me for a cookie, I'll give him a few crumbs, without any resentment. I will try to persuade him that atheism makes for a better way of life than that crazy Baptist nonsense, though.
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Rendering gripe: On Firefox 2.0.0.4, the gumbys background overwrites the text of the image caption.
Weird.
Horizontal gene transfer is of evil, then.
Mice schmice, I'm still waiting for transgenic hyper-intelligent talking squid.
If I were going to start a religious movement, it would be based on the idea that intelligence and consciousness are two of the coolest things in the universe and we should try to spread it around to as many species as possible.
What he's *really* afraid of, PZ, is that some small piece of 'human soul' will get split off and wind up in a mouse. And then they'd have to come up with a whole new category of heaven for those partial souls. Of course, this would also give them new fund-raising opportunities, both as source (the mice) and motivation ("Help us, dear bretheren, in our missionary work to SAVE the mice, and to bring them the GOOD NEWS of Christ's almighty sacrifice for all mouse-kind...")
Jim D
In my teens, I started, but soon abandoned, writing a sci-fi novel based on a primate species evolving the intelligence of, roughly, early hominids, and the ethical quandaries this caused us humans. How would we treat them, and why? Probably someone has done it since.
Do Baptist brains fit in rat skulls? I'd have thought you'd have to use expanding foam, chewing gum or wadded up loo roll to stop it rattling round too much.
Now, if we could only take the Baptists' brains and put them in mice, the world would be a much better place. Their little mouse voices would finally match their relevance.
This may make perfect sense! We all know that that mice are hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings that created the earth as an experiment.............
On a serious note we had a similar spat in the UK recently, scientists at University College London wanted a license to create chimeric embyros, the usual suspects made a great jumping up and down and the regulatory body imposed a ban. Scientist protested.
Two months later the decision was reversed.
Would he still have a problem with this research if we promised to baptize the rats?
Ha ha, God! Once we've shown we can breath a soul into a mere animal, there'll be few of Your inventions we can't duplicate. All we've got to do is invent bigotry, hatred, genocide, the subjugation of women, and an obsession with sex, and we'll have You beat!
Who's a jealous God now, byatch?
"Or maybe he should see this as an opportunity to greatly expand his flock."
Ouch. That's gonna leave a mark...
We can't let this joker stand in the way of the Great Chain of Uplift!
Are you pondering what I'm pondering Pinky?
Two years ago Jeremy Rifkin was there making exactly the same nonsense claims. It's a vivid and important lesson that not all the enemies of science and rationalism are to be found on the political and theocratic right.
Same problem as owlmirror. IE has no problem.
Mice are already the smartest beings on the planet, so what is Mohler worried about?
What? He missed "There are some things Man is not meant to know!"?
This is kinda the premise of David Brin's "Uplift" novels:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uplift_Universe
I find it continually fascinating how an allegedly omnipotent being seems so haphazard in enforcing its desires. Speed of light? Can't be exceeded. But species boundaries? A little DNA tinkering and you're violating the Created Order. You'd think that, if it were really important, god(s) would have done a better job of preventing such transgressions.
Bummer.
This really makes me wonder how much confidence they have the brain/soul dualism they espouse.
Putting human brain cells into the crania of lab mice? I don't think they'll like that -- it would be quite a come-down for a race of pan-dimensional, hyper-intelligent beings. They might take action-with-prejudice to prevent it.....
Why not? Turn about is fair play, and he's got some kind of animal brain is his head, bird, I imagine.
BTW, it isn't just a matter of size, there is also the matter of endocrine system which is part of function.
"BTW, it isn't just a matter of size"
Yeah, you keep telling yourself that, mikmik ;)
Well, it seems doing this is really only mandatory, here.
I think so, Brain, but burlap chafes me so.
There is some serious biological nonsense wrapped up in this statement.
First, even if these transplanted mice felt like mating, all of their offspring would have a 100% mouse genome (barring the occassional escaped retrovirus). Their concern ignores all of modern genetics and seems based on some sort of ancient panspermia theory.
Second, scientists have been truly mixing human and mouse genomes in hybrid cells for decades. What is the diference here? Or will these folks be upset by this revelation and try to stop that work (which has led to the identification of oncogenes and other important advances)?
On the plus side, their argument seems to imply that they pretty much accept the materialist explanation that 'mind = brain', otherwise if the mind or soul has no physical location, then why would it matter where a few brain cells were?
What's the problem? If Yahweh ordered it to be so then it is so and no amount of tinkering by humans can change it. If Yahweh is omnipotent then creation of human-animal chimeraes will fail. Unless Mr. Moehler doubts the power of his god.
But anyway, we're the ones experimenting on mice. Not the other way round.
Well, I certainly hope none of these xians has ever used an antibiotic, cloned from a fungus into a bacteria for mass production, thus violating the sacred woo woo. Or eaten cheese made with recombinant rennet - these morons must have rennet from a calf's stomach (is that the 11th commandment?). Sure hope none of them is diabetic; how would they cope with the horrible evil that is cheap, plentiful human insulin grown in bacteria....
Not to mention shares in Monsanto.
God commands we not cross species barriers, huh?
Hmm, never realized eating a tangelo was such a direct affront to the creator. Go figure.
Screw the mouse brain, the whole mouse doesn't weigh more than about 30 grams.
But we all know what happens if you give a mouse a cookie. He'll probably want a glass of milk to go with it....
"Christian think-tank"
Please don't use this term. It's as dissonant as "sterile septic tank."
I'm pretty sure the sentence meant that the scariest part is occuring in the brain research. Not the brain research itself or the reason for the brain research.
He is afraid of what human cells in a mouse brain might become. I think the idea is that the human cells themselves contain our human attributes. (e.g. Dogs don't sweat; humans do. Thus its our skin cells that "know" how to sweat and dogs' don't). And so the cells of the brain might contain bits of humanness of thought. I assume this is very very naive but not being a biologist I can't blow a raspberry at it. But I assume actual biologists know the answer for sure.
I'd certainly look something up before perporting how scary it might be.
Actually I guess he just finds mixing animals with humans vaguely unsettling. Well, intuitively maybe but the benefits have long been shown valuable.
Ditto ... CreationistIditiot.jpg obscures the caption. That image is not part of your html of the page ... must be coming from the mother ship...
In the biblical view, then, species integrity is defined by God, rather than by arbitrary or evolutionary forces.
I don't see what the problem is. If species integrity is a natural law defined by God then the law can't be broken. I don't see what they're worried about. If it's not a natural law then there is no species integrity. These people are goofy. I'm sorry.
Not quite, but your post reminded me of a book I loved when I was a teenager - Eva, by Peter Dickinson. Link here: http://www.amazon.com/Eva-Peter-Dickinson/dp/0440207665
Funnily enough, I tried my hand at writing a sequel to it when I was around 13, but never got very far!
This really makes me wonder how much confidence they have the brain/soul dualism they espouse.
My thoughts exactly. Maybe they think implanting brain meat into a mouse will allow the mouse to receive a "soul transmission".
Quick! Someone cue Egnor to write another dualism post! What's needed here is elaboration via some weirdly concocted and irrelevant thought experiment!
I just don't see what he's so worried about. After all, Narbon Labs clearly established that superintelligent transgenic gerbils can be productive members of society. Heck, they can even be strong forces for positive social and political change! ;)
Yeah, but note that that superintelligent gerbil from Narbon Labs was also gay. Don't tell Albert -- think how he'd freak out at the thought of gay genes and neurons being inserted into mice.
Maybe Mohler gets his ideas of lab-mice experiments from Pinky and The Brain.
See, if we make these chimeric mice, what do *you* think they will be doing tonight?
So you say.
I suspect what Dr. Mohler fears the most is the baby rat.
Re: comment #5
"writing a sci-fi novel based on a primate species evolving the intelligence of, roughly, early hominids"
See _A Different Flesh_ by Harry Turtledove. It's a series of stories set in an alternate history in which Homo Erectus got to the Americas & then presumably things changed in the Bering Straits area to isolate the Americas. So when Europeans develop ship good enough for crossing oceans, they find a different America & all those ethical dilemmas you mention.
but he's more concerned that mice might acquire some human mental abilities.
The "Island of Doctor Mohler"! No, more like the Island of Dr. Moron. Is he afraid that mice will start to speak and say, "Michael Behe, we'll tell you what to do with your mousetraps!" Obviously he knows some people whose brains would fit.
"Or maybe he should see this as an opportunity to greatly expand his flock."
Or litter?
CJ: You might check out "Orphan of creation" by Roger MacBride Allen. It begins with an archaeological dig at a Southern plantation where hominid remains are unearthed, and explores exactly the questions you asked.
Not being a psychologist, I'm probably stating something quite crudely that someone else has phrased perfectly, but I think that the Christians' fear has something to do with a violation of categories: "If somebody should happen to ___________ (show that the earth is spherical, show that the earth revolves around the sun, invent a device for speaking to others who are far away, fly, land on the moon, marry a person of a different race, marry a person of the same sex, or endow a nonhuman with human traits) then I'm going to have to rethink my ideas about how the world is arranged. And that will hurt."
I think it's pretty much the same gut-level hostility you get from people who insist that a decimal followed by an endless succession of nines is somehow less than unity.
But I thought Mohler was all in favour of curing god-given afflictions, as long as the affliction in question is teh Gay?
Oh no! It's the gay mouse that came back to bite Mr. Behe! Scientists are evil I tell you.
I've often wondered how long it would take organized religion to get its collective dander up over Chimaeras and heterologous hosts. I was a student in a Jesuit school when I first encountered these ideas and techniques, and the first thing that popped into my head, right after "Whoa!", was "Why haven't I heard this condemned from some pulpit or mouthpiece yet?" That was five years ago, and the question still holds.
The conclusion I came to was that organized religions and preachers were simply unaware of the field. That blissful ignorance may be at an end.
If physiological purity is such a hot issue, where's the hue and cry over vaccination, antibiotics, pacemakers, the use of metal and plastic in orthopedics, and biomedical engineering in general... and so on? I can only conclude that what makes us human is, apparently, our genes. But if the body is, as we are so often urged to believe, just a temporary vessel for our souls during our oh-so-brief time here on the physical plane, then what's the big deal? Really, now.
"before a mouse really does come up and ask for a cookie."
Well you know, if you give a mouse a cookie...
Oh, sheesh, Larrylove beat me to it.
< twisted_fantasy > O.K. squeezing human language processing in a 0.4 g brain is not possible... but... what about the parrot brain ? It is not that big but still allows the parrot to remember and use a few human words.
So, what about producing a mice/parrot hybrid smart enough to run to mohler and ask for a cookie ? I'd bet he would drop dead on the spot..< b/twisted_fantasy >
Carlie, is that a reference to a book called If you Give a Moose a Muffin ? I remember that one!
The real problem is, if you cure schizophrenia, who is left to see god, speak in tongues, and prophesy?
Mouse, smouse, This is what they're really afraid of.
Mohler can have my cerebral palsy; I'm quite done with it. (Any time you'd like to get on this, you guys, any time, really...)
Typical temporarily-able-bodied privileged schmuck...
Kseniya #52
I'm pretty sure there is a book called "If you give a mouse a cookie" probably by the same folks. I doubt it would take long to look it up, but I'm lazy.
Cheers,
Ray
Hey Lint, Re:32
Not really, a sterile septic tank is one that has never been put to use for the purpose for which it was created, very much like a christian think tank.
Doofus Profundus:
British Prime Minister Tony Blair will convert to Roman Catholicism as soon as he steps down from his role as head of the British Government next week.
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/06/25/blair-to-become-catholic-looki…
But anyway, we're the ones experimenting on mice. Not the other way round.
Posted by: commissarjs | June 25, 2007 05:05 PM
Absolutely correct sir, no question about it.
Point of information: schizophrenia is not known to be a neurological disorder. We know some of the things it's not, but we still have no good idea of what it is.
And then they'll learn to milk our cows and take over the entire dairy industry. Let's see who's doing the cheese-moving now, bitches!
You know, what I find most interesting in this discussion is the implicit (albeit incorrect) concession on the part of Dr. Mohler that a talking mouse might be possible!
Yes, there may be a hyperspace bypass coming in where we are now, but at least they are creating a backup.
I think so Brain, but me and Pipi Longstocking? I mean, what would the children look like?
Ignoramus, thy name is Southern Baptist.
OT: I'm using Firefox on Mac OSX and the inset is blurring over the cartoon in a most annoying fashion.
Hmmm...gene therapy on unborn children to stop them from being gay is ok with Mohler, but doing what bacteria and retroviruses have done for a few billion years is baaad. Anyway - that horse escaped from the barn a decade ago. Hasn't anyone told him that the evil atheist darwinist materialist scientists put bacterial genes in his corn (and there's corn in just about everything).
I can't believe that no one has mentioned Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH yet. Mice and rats are given 'treatments' that increase their intelligence, extend their lifespans and they learn to read. Of course, the first thing they read is 'Lift latch to open cage', and they all escape. Ha Ha Ha. A great kids' book.
Let's write a sequel where they take over the world and prevent the Rapture. Jesus has to come down to fight them himself but the rats win, kind of like Passion of the Christ meets Willard. You know, an uplifting kind of family entertainment.
THEN the squids take over.
There's a whole series. It started with If you give a mouse a cookie, followed by If you take a mouse to school, and If you give a moose a muffin (my personal favorite!), and a quick check on Amazon also turns up If you take a mouse to the movies, If you give a pig a pancake, and If you give a pig a party. All cause and effect, consequences, and a cute little circular pattern that repeats over and over like The Song That Doesn't End (by Shari Lewis and Lambchop).
M31 - I was thinking the same thing. Great book, kind of rotten cartoon. I adored that book when I was a kid.
Aww, don't feel bad. Those ancient sheppards were probably so glad their favorite sheep wouldn't give burth to some weird half-man half sheep (wait, is that where the design for Satan comes from?) that they made it sacred.
CJ (#5), I agree with Billy (#44): Orphan of Creation is worth a read.
I guess the Dr. Dobson doesn't know that well before the Bible was written Man was corrupting the integrity of God's species. Maybe he should contemplate the existence of the Mule -- the offspring of two species, E. asinus (Donkey) and E. caballus (Horse) -- and alert his congregation to the dangers of this unholy beast?
Be ye not as the horse, or as the mule,
which have no understanding:
whose mouth must be held in with bit and bridle,
lest they come near unto thee.
-- Psalms 32:9
I'm waiting for the time that scientists transplant human muscles and then pump it up with 'roids
Since I don't think this has come up, I'll mention it: Mouse neurons and human neurons are the same. From a functional neurobiological perspective (how a particular brain may work, and thus be "human" or "murid") there are no differences in the neurons. You could probably replace the neural stem cells of an embryonic mouse with human fetal neural stem cells and get the same exact mouse you would have gotten had you not done the transplant, if nothing went wrong during the procedure and there were no rejection issues.
When I read the original post I immediately thought of Pinky and the Brain. Unfortunately, none of the Brain's schemes worked out. Back to the laboratory!
A mouse with a 0.4 gram brain can still be a Creationist, though, easily.
The mouse is quite likely to accept the advice about atheism - moreso than the humans. Especially after a massive bribe like a chunk of cookie.
I'd like a cure for my CP - that would be great. Come to think of it, it's always been a rather strong repellant from good physical exertion.
"I think the best they could hope for is turning mice into Southern Baptist theologians, which, as we all know, requires almost no brainpower at all."
It would be a cruel thing, really inhuman, to damage the brain of a mouse so thoroughly as to force it to operate on that level. I'm not really a person much concerned about animal rights, but that's just sick.
Never doubt that three thousand, seven hundred and fifty transgenic mice, working together, probably under the direction of some kind of powerful Mouse King, can change the world.
"What are we going to do today, Brain?"
"The same thing we do every day, Pinky: try to take over the world!"
Cheese us
Mr Myers!
Give me a cookie!
Give me a cookie NOW!!!
Or I'll run up your trouser leg!
Hmmm, the HTML for tiny font size didn't work, rendering the above comment completely unfunny.
D'oh. (Squeak!)
It certainly would make it easier for them to fulfill The Great Commision as laid out in Mark 16:15.
Besides I can't see why Mohler is worried. If we do create super-intelligent mice it will be good because it will be part of God's plan. How could it be otherwise if there is an omniscient and omnipotent magical entity in charge of the universe?
God shmod I want my monkey-man!
Don't be silly. Mice with a few human brain cells would never become Southern Baptist theologians. That only happens to humans having only a few mouse brain cells.
FYI, William Dembski has an inordinate fondness for cheese.
as if miniscule quantities of brain tissue or slight changes might send mice on the path to being Stanford professors. They won't.
Of course not.
Princeton, on the other hand...
Of course organized religion is concerned o' mice an' men, since their best laid schemes may gang aft agley.
But it may not take a chimera to give them problems, since characteristics such as human-like altruism is now claimed in chimp:
(Of course there are caveats:
)
...
...
...
When they start experimenting on sheep, sure.
Meanwhile, intelligently designed mouses as we are discussing here will be a problem for creationists. I can see the future William Ratski discussing with Mouchael Behe, improbably parodying the inimitable:
WR: "My Cheesical Spiceries Infolisting lists roquefort as both curdled and spiced. It is very unlikely to be produced by natural processes, so it must be created in a factory by fully artificial means."
MB: "And my Impossible Cheesicality criteria says the same - you can't naturally cut a cheese an infinite number of times. There are no holes in our cheesiness!"
Oh, and what about if mice invent religion? Wouldn't giant cheese-making mice gods be a problem for the anthropomorphic theologists?
Methinks someone has read the beautiful "Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes, and not quite digested its content.
Highly recommended, by the way.
Hasn't anyone told him that the evil atheist darwinist materialist scientists put bacterial genes in his corn
I'm pretty effing sure that the few biology types signing on to the Creationist nonsense are the same ones that work for the gen-ag corps, because they don't believe evolution exists.
Gee, what happens when you douse a species with a toxin continually? Resistance? Never!
And I may be giving away my age here, but I thought Instrumentality, not Uplift.
Not so much age, as far wider diffusion of David Brin's books than of the masterwork of Cordwainer Smith...
The mistaken idea of a few human brain cells introduced into a mouse causing an increase of intelligence makes me think of Daniel Keyes' 'Flowers for Algernon', a contender for saddest book ever written. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowers_for_Algernon
My father died of Alzheimer's. He was an accountant, and his early loss of ability to work with numbers was incredibly frightening to him. So I can start to appreciate the character Charlie Gordon's horrible realization of his eventual reversion to a state of mental retardation.
Human brains into rodents ? I look at Falwell, Robertson and the other charlatans and think, hah, been there done that.
Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr. is a stooge. He is being manipulated by a genius of rare talent. This whole thread is nothing more than masterful plot to call attention to the one who is destined to rule us all! Soon the world will know of the chimeras that already exist! Yes!!
Not so much age, as far wider diffusion of David Brin's books than of the masterwork of Cordwainer Smith...
Which is probably generational. Now get off my lawn ;-)
He is rightly concerned about protecting his very cushy job. Mice don't make money, so can't support a weasely blood-sucking do-nothing preacher in the style that he is accustomed to.
That ain't working, that's the way you do it. Money for nothing, and chicks for free. (adapted from Mark Knopler and Dire Straits)
I sense a whole new generation of LOLmice coming.
Something like this, for example.
I've got two problems with this, one with the religious, one with the scientists.
I thought that according to the Bible, mankind was given stewardship over all animals and we could therefore do as we damn well pleased with them. There shouldn't be any religious objections to it at all.
However, there should be lots of other ethical objections to it. Who here thinks it would be a good idea to replace a human's brain with a mouse's? Any takers? Thought not. Now, why should it be right to put a human brain into a mouse?
Aside from some vague mention of Alzheimer's, there isn't much in the article about exactly why the researchers want to do this. Yet many here are very gung-ho about letting them do it, despite not really knowing why. The fact that the ethics committee at Stanford initially rejected the proposal indicates that there are serious objections to this research, although these were later (for whatever reason) overcome.
I'm not saying that such experiments should be banned, I just find it a bit worrying that so many people are prepared to let such a major operation go ahead (if you'll excuse that) without really thinking about the ethical side of it.
(Graculus): I'm pretty effing sure that the few biology types signing on to the Creationist nonsense are the same ones that work for the gen-ag corps, because they don't believe evolution exists.
I have one data point to support your hunch: the one and only creationist I know who is also a biologist (as opposed to any other field of science) is employed by the genetic engineering corp. In fact, he makes his living inserting genes into plants.
S.
hinschelwood:
so, you're also subscribing to mohler's idea that this research consists of actually putting the human brain and its cognitive abilities into the skull of a rodent?
and which human's brain are you talking about? of someone against his wishes?
Um, it's pretty much fully described in the post. ""...curing or treating diseases of the human brain" They might cure debilitating neurological diseases like Alzheimer's or cerebral palsy or schizophrenia".
To study a disease (and its treatments), an animal model is often necessary.
I almost posted a comment about Flowers for Algernon a few days ago. Today I saw this and remembered this one.
http://sciam.com/article.cfm?articleId=6901F70B-E7F2-99DF-3648F0789D1EC…
Horizontal gene transfer is of evil, then.
Of course organized religion is concerned o' mice an' men, since their best laid schemes may gang aft agley.
But it may not take a chimera to give them problems, since characteristics such as human-like altruism is now claimed in chimp:
(Of course there are caveats:
)
...
...
...
When they start experimenting on sheep, sure.
Meanwhile, intelligently designed mouses as we are discussing here will be a problem for creationists. I can see the future William Ratski discussing with Mouchael Behe, improbably parodying the inimitable:
WR: "My Cheesical Spiceries Infolisting lists roquefort as both curdled and spiced. It is very unlikely to be produced by natural processes, so it must be created in a factory by fully artificial means."
MB: "And my Impossible Cheesicality criteria says the same - you can't naturally cut a cheese an infinite number of times. There are no holes in our cheesiness!"
Oh, and what about if mice invent religion? Wouldn't giant cheese-making mice gods be a problem for the anthropomorphic theologists?
Um, it's pretty much fully described in the post. ""...curing or treating diseases of the human brain" They might cure debilitating neurological diseases like Alzheimer's or cerebral palsy or schizophrenia".
To study a disease (and its treatments), an animal model is often necessary.