Time to question bioengineering.

[Epimethean]

Thinking about what you've written, and totally cool with getting my ass handed to me here.

[Anomalocaris]

Before you think further along the lines of the morality of zombies and playing god, I like to call your attention to a remarkable case of bioengineering in nature, performed by a crustacean playing god, ending up with a victim crab being turned into a zombie.

Look up sacculina, a group of barnacles ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacculina ). Like other barnacles, sacculina belongs to a class of creatures which are related to crabs. In their youth they resemble shrimps and swim around, but once they reach adulthood they molt and undergo a metamorphasis turning into a sessile or stationary clam like thing that attaches to some other object. It is this for which barnacles as a group is particularly well known, because as adults they cling to and befoul the bottoms of ships and surfaces of other man-made underwater objects, as well as to rocks, flippers of whales, and other convenient surfaces on which they can attach themselves.

Sacculina adults, however, live differently from other barnacles. They don't cling to ships. Instead they seek out real crabs. Once they find a crab they don’t attach themselves to the carapace of the crab, instead they crawl around on the shrimp's shell until they find a joint on the limb of the crab. When they’ve located a joint, they secret a chemical agent that dissolves a hole through the soft part of the crab’s joint. They Sacculina undergo the first of its several remarkable metamorphasises. The secculina injects a small tendril of undifferentiated cells into the crab's body through the hole. The rest of the sacculina then dies, and falls off. The tendril cells inside the crab then differentiate, and begins to develop into something wholly different. In effect, a highly evolved crustacean juvenile, with differentiated muscle, nervous system, organs, diggestive track, just jetisoned 99% of itself including all of its developed organs, leaving just a handful of stem cells. The stem cell then develop into something whole unrecognizeable as a crustacean.

So far, Sacculina sounds just like a lot of other parasites that invade host body from the outside, such as hook worms that afflict humans. But from here on Saaculina would by your definition start to play god and make zombies.

You see, sacculina does not consume the crab from the inside. Nor does it simply free load off the crab like a normal parasite. Instead, it undergoes a truly remarkable transformation inside the crab’s body – a transformations so incredible that the most ambitious bioengineers can scarcely image it.

While inside the crab, the sacculina tendril turns into a soft bodied, amorphously shaped parasite that sends web of tendrils into every part of the crab’s body. This sacculina now has no differentiated organ in the conventional sense except the reproducive organ, and It secrets hormones that mimic’s the crab’s own hormones in order to interfere with and hijack the crab’s normal biological process. If the crab it entered is male, the sacculina secrets counterfeit crab female sex hormones until the male crab is sterilized and began to exhibit female mating behavior. If the crab it entered is female, it let the crab’s normal mating behavior alone.

But it’s not done. Sacculina also causes the crab it infested to reabsorb its own sex organs. In its place, the sacculina itself grows its own reproductive organ, which eventually emerge from the under the crab’s belly in the form of an orange sac, giving the parasite its name “sacculina”. Once this happens, the sacculina secrets additional hormones that cause the crab to stop its own normal growth. The crab stops molting, and whether originally male or female, the crab now exhibits female grooming behavior that tends not its own, but the sacculina’s reproductive organ.
The natural hatching process of a crab consists of the female finding a high rock and grooming its brood pouch on its abdomen and releasing the fertilized eggs in the water through a bobbing motion. The female crab stirs the water with her claw to aid the flow of the water. When the hatching parasite eggs of the Sacculina are ready to emerge from the brood pouch of Sacculina, the crab performs a similar process. The crab shoots them out through pulses creating a large cloud of parasites. The crab then uses the familiar technique of stirring the water to aid in flowThe male Sacculina looks for a female Sacculina adult on the underside of a crab. He then enters and fertilizes her eggs. The crab (male or female) then cares for the eggs as if they were its own, having been rendered infertile by the parasite.


Once the sacculina enters the crab, the crab never grows, never molts, never reproduce for itself. It even loses the normal ability of a crab to regrow a lost limb. The sacculina hijacks all biological processes and all spare eneregy of the crab to further the interests of the sacculina. The crab becomes literally nothing more than a robot the feeds the sacculina, moves the sacculina around, tends the sacculina's eggs, and protects the sacculina from predators.


So how is this for your predator does not play with prey for reasons other than energy?

[theVOID]

Thinking about what you've written, and totally cool with getting my ass handed to me here.

I was just pointing out some things that didn't seem very well thought through.

For the record I don't necessarily disagree with your general views, for instance I would agree with you so far as condemning behaviour that causes unnecessary suffering regarding animals, praising farming practices that treat animals well and raising awareness and generally persuading people to share my views, however I suspect we would differ over legislature, whether or not we have the moral authority to order people to take certain actions regarding animals or punish them for certain practices.

Before you think further along the lines of the morality of zombies and playing god, I like to call your attention a remarkable case of bioengineering in nature, performed by a crustacean playing god, ending up with a victim crab being turned into a zombie.
Look up sacculina, a group of barnacles

Holy shit That's awesome.

[Epimethean]

Chuck, that is fascinating. A question I would put forward here is this: Is the Sacculina doing what it does by instinct or out of a calculated plan? Further, are we so reduced in our capacities that we should take refuge behind instinct in a situation such as the one which prompted this line of inquiry? I find that barnacle impressive for its adaptations to survive, and yet I feel that, as high order vertebrates, we are in a slightly different arena here.

Is there an ethics of barnacality? If not, does that mean that no such system must exist for man?

---

Void, when reason is given for me to seriously evaluate my thinking, I will always say thank you. I realize that I am making a rather emotional argument here, and yet something in me does not see this as inherently wrong, somehow. In a way, I see the difference as that between burglary and robbery, wherein killing the animal to use it seems (yes, I realize the tendentious nature of that verb) more like the former and removing its own motivations while leaving it alive more like the latter. Both are thefts, but one seems more violative.

I appreciate you fellows walking me around this thing.

[Anomalocaris]

Chuck, that is fascinating. A question I would put forward here is this: Is the Sacculina doing what it does by instinct or out of a calculated plan? Further, are we so reduced in our capacities that we should take refuge behind instinct in a situation such as the one which prompted this line of inquiry? I find that barnacle impressive for its adaptations to survive, and yet I feel that, as high order vertebrates, we are in a slightly different arena here.

Is there an ethics of barnacality? If not, does that mean that no such system must exist for man?

I like to put it to you this way. Calculated planning is part of human instinct, part of our adaptation to survive. We are indeed in a slightly different arena here. Where as the ancester of sacculina might have taken millions of generations of trial and error to make the instinct required to avail itself of the benefit of this mode of life, our much more versatile instinct had allowed us to develop the ability to take advantage of something analogous in perhaps just a few thousand generations.

Whether ethics of barnacality exists or not, we can make as many different flavors of eithics of humanity as we have spare moments with which to amuse ourselves. But we can also use our versatile calculation instinct to assess just what each plausible variety of ethics of "humanity" will do to humanity, and not just use our lesser instinct of self-righteousness to assert that what feels good to one must be accepted by all those to whom it may not actually be good.

[Epimethean]

So, as long as we aren't doing it to our own kind, it is not wrong if we find reason for it not to be wrong. Is that close to what you're saying there?

[Anomalocaris]

No, I am saying we shouldn't let what we find wrong be informed by silly efforts to take ad-hoc rules designed to minimize human social friction and project them onto things with which those rules never were concerned when they were formulated. For these things, rules should be formulated for their own merit.

[Epimethean]

Who determines those merits? Man, as the dominant species, thinking for maximizing mankind's benefit exclusively (and I don't necessarily mean profligately)?

---

In retrospect, what I think I am feeling is what Kant would have called the imperfect duty to strengthen compassion.

[Anomalocaris]

Our benefit is the only benefit.

[Epimethean]

What are your thoughts on Objectivism?