Post by Séamus on Jan 25, 2020 6:52:23 GMT
I've lately been cleaning up a lot after red-tailed black-cockatoos,which can be extremely destructive,especially towards a tree known as the Cape lilac,which were planted excessively in urban areas at some stage. The seeming capacity that the birds have to learn the boundaries of what humans will and won't do to them (and one could almost imagine an instinct for what does or doesn't annoy people also) coupled with an animalistic indifference to it all keeps reminding me of Dr Moreau's beast-men and it's probably fortunate that HG Wells' dystopian science is largely unfulfilled,even if some of his social imaginings are worth noting.
While we don't have time machines,and today's factory workers are far from becoming morlocks,genetic engineering might make the Moreau tale frightening,if it's still possible to frighten any more.
I was struck by a column yesterday by a journalist who began by insisting that she doesn't write family stories,but was writing a family story; her child was IVF conceived and she pays several hundred dollars biannually keep the other embryos frozen,else they'll be given to experimentation,destroyed or donated- something she admits will happen eventually.
There are apparently 26,692 frozen in Western Australia,she guessed about one million in the USA.
None of this was in the least surprising,I'm sure I've heard it many times, but the 'just like that' attitude made me realise just how frog-in-the-boiling-water we've become. At one stage we're told that the embryo may be donated to 'another woman or couple'- the latter almost mentioned as secondary,while 'theoretically no more than clusters of cells but potentially much more than that' or self-coining a phrase 'maybe babies' was far from reflecting every readers beliefs.
I once heard a Presentation Sister moaning that the Church should certainly support IVF,making a preposterous claim that it's opposition was like 'burning Galileo at the stake for believing the world was round' which she was well aware was untrue and was more a statement of 'no further argument'. The Church should be applauded for refusing to view humans as a commodity.
Perhaps we're closer to the scary world of humanist Wells than we'd realised.
While we don't have time machines,and today's factory workers are far from becoming morlocks,genetic engineering might make the Moreau tale frightening,if it's still possible to frighten any more.
I was struck by a column yesterday by a journalist who began by insisting that she doesn't write family stories,but was writing a family story; her child was IVF conceived and she pays several hundred dollars biannually keep the other embryos frozen,else they'll be given to experimentation,destroyed or donated- something she admits will happen eventually.
There are apparently 26,692 frozen in Western Australia,she guessed about one million in the USA.
None of this was in the least surprising,I'm sure I've heard it many times, but the 'just like that' attitude made me realise just how frog-in-the-boiling-water we've become. At one stage we're told that the embryo may be donated to 'another woman or couple'- the latter almost mentioned as secondary,while 'theoretically no more than clusters of cells but potentially much more than that' or self-coining a phrase 'maybe babies' was far from reflecting every readers beliefs.
I once heard a Presentation Sister moaning that the Church should certainly support IVF,making a preposterous claim that it's opposition was like 'burning Galileo at the stake for believing the world was round' which she was well aware was untrue and was more a statement of 'no further argument'. The Church should be applauded for refusing to view humans as a commodity.
Perhaps we're closer to the scary world of humanist Wells than we'd realised.