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to achieve the universal terminal goal.
What's the future of those plants?
Quote from: hamdani yusuf on 16/05/2021 14:52:05What's the future of those plants? If we don't invade their planet, they can continue to enjoy life, praise their god and indulge in uninhibited random sex with strangers, all within their entirely alien moral code.
There cannot be a single moral code that encompasses both plants and animals.
Reasoning is possible not because you're free to think however you want, but because you're not free. To be convinced by an argument is to be subjugated by it. It's to be forced to believe it, regardless of your preferences....Reasoning is all about constraints....Whether you understand something or not isn't under your control. But the difference matters.
The first genetically modified mosquitoes that will be allowed to fly free outdoors in the United States have started reaching the age for mating in the Florida Keys.In a test of the biotech company Oxitec’s GM male mosquitoes for pest control, these Aedes aegypti started growing from tiny eggs set out in toaster-sized, hexagonal boxes on suburban private properties in late April. On May 12, experiment monitors confirmed that males had matured enough to start flying off on their own to court American female mosquitoes.This short-term Florida experiment marks the first outdoor test in the United States of a strain of GM male mosquitoes as a highly targeted pest control strategy. This strain is engineered to shrink local populations of Ae. aegypti, a mosquito species that spreads dengue and Zika (SN: 7/29/16). That could start happening now that the GM mosquitoes have reached mating age because their genetics makes them such terrible choices as dads.The mosquitoes now waving distinctively masculine (extra fluffy) antennae in Florida carry genetic add-ons that block development in females. No female larvae should survive to adulthood in the wild, says molecular biologist Nathan Rose, Oxitec’s chief of regulatory affairs. Half the released males’ sons, however, will carry dad’s daughter-killing trait. The sons of the bad dads can go on to trick a new generation of females into unwise mating decisions and doomed daughters (SN: 1/8/09).
Despite some high-profile protests, finding people to host the boxes was not hard, Rose says. “We were oversubscribed.” At public hearings, the critics of the project typically outshout the fans. Yet there’s also support. In a 2016 nonbinding referendum on using GM mosquitoes, 31 of 33 precincts in Monroe County, which comprises the Keys, voted yes for the test release. Twenty of those victories were competitive though, not reaching 60 percent.The males being released rely on a live-sons/dead-daughters strategy. That’s a change from the earlier strain of Oxitec mosquitoes. Those males sabotaged all offspring regardless of sex. The change came during the genetic redesign that permits an egg-shipping strategy. Surviving sons, however, mean the nonengineered genes in the new Oxitec strain can mix into the Florida population more than in the original version.Traditional pesticides can mess with creatures besides their pest targets, and some critics of the GMO mosquitoes also worry about unexpected ecological effects. Yet success of the Oxitec mosquitoes in slamming the current pests should not cause some disastrous shortage of food or pollination for natives, Yee says. Ae. aegypti invaded North America within the past four centuries, probably too short a time to become absolutely necessary for some native North American predator or plant.
QuoteThere cannot be a single moral code that encompasses both plants and animals. Why not? They both came from common ancestors, at least for the earthlings.
Ae. aegypti invaded North America within the past four centuries, probably too short a time to become absolutely necessary for some native North American predator or plant.
Quote from: hamdani yusuf on 17/05/2021 04:30:27QuoteThere cannot be a single moral code that encompasses both plants and animals. Why not? They both came from common ancestors, at least for the earthlings.Unless you have evolved "the pig that wants to be eaten", it is pretty clear that animals eat other animals that try to run away, or plants that have evolved spikes and poisons to put off grazing animals.
My hypothetical veg-only planet will not have evolved any defence because it hasn't experienced any animals. A bit like native Americans having no tolerance for influenza or bullets.
Quote from: hamdani yusuf on 18/05/2021 07:11:27 Ae. aegypti invaded North America within the past four centuries, probably too short a time to become absolutely necessary for some native North American predator or plant.That can be considered absolute justification for eliminating the buggers. There is no doubt that eliminating the vectors for parasitic diseases is a Good Thing and potentially more effective than treating the human victims, which can lead to drug-resistant mutations. The only question remaining is whether the GM males can do any other harm before they destroy the next generation of females.
Alternatively, you can evolve the ability to survive and thrive without having to kill pigs.
Quote from: hamdani yusuf on 18/05/2021 13:28:25Alternatively, you can evolve the ability to survive and thrive without having to kill pigs. If you don't eat animals, you have to eat plants. The only living things that can synthesise their structural materials from nonliving sources are called plants. Fortunately there are enough animals around to convert the plants (and smaller animals) back to carbon dioxide and water, so the cycle can continue.
Plants are mainly multicellular organisms, predominantly photosynthetic eukaryotes of the kingdom Plantae. Historically, plants were treated as one of two kingdoms including all living things that were not animals, and all algae and fungi were treated as plants. However, all current definitions of Plantae exclude the fungi and some algae, as well as the prokaryotes (the archaea and bacteria). By one definition, plants form the clade Viridiplantae (Latin name for "green plants"), a group that includes the flowering plants, conifers and other gymnosperms, ferns and their allies, hornworts, liverworts, mosses, and the green algae, but excludes the red and brown algae.
Prokaryotes lack mitochondria and chloroplasts. Instead, processes such as oxidative phosphorylation and photosynthesis take place across the prokaryotic cell membrane.
My point is that without a universal terminal goal, there is no universal moral standard, and we can't say if a moral rule is universally good or bad.
Quote from: hamdani yusuf on 26/05/2021 17:35:53My point is that without a universal terminal goal, there is no universal moral standard, and we can't say if a moral rule is universally good or bad. And there being no possibility of a UTG, there is no UMS.