Bat-shit crazy

I struck the board and cried no more!

Well, I didn’t actually. But what I did do was not exercise. Yup. No run. No yoga. No boxing. No Joe Wicks. No volunteering.

I visited the crows and did a thirty minute meditation then went to work.

I have to say that I feel guilty. It’s very rare that I take a day off. Here’s my excuse: the body budget was in the red.

In order to feel a trifle more virtuous, I’ve been working on my gene-editing for disease resistance idea.

There are a lot of really interesting aspects to this.

One is: if you can place value in a species (rather than in individual animals), then are gene-edited animals natural members of that species at all? Are you, in fact, improving the future for a different species and thus not helping at all the currently suffering individuals or their natural future off-spring?

And, how about this, as the existing animals will not be helped at all, all the pain and suffering that is caused in the process of developing this gene-edited strain is for the good of something that doesn’t exist before you create the gene-edited strain.

The existing suffering animals are, in a sense, irrelevant. So, you can only be doing this to ensure the survival of a population that looks like and acts like the population that is going and will go extinct.

In that case, who or what are you doing this for? The value to the ecosystem? The value of that evolutionary niche-filler which was species X and is now modified species X.1?

Intuition says that, whatever the pollination and insect-eating effects, it would be bad for endangered bats to go extinct. But, really, why? If this is just about how we feel about the loss of bats, then can we justify the pain to the created animals and surrogates? Does it make a difference if we have caused the endangered status indirectly (habitat loss and climate change, say) rather than directly (by actually killing bats)?

Is there a case to say that we should value, as well as individuals, a certain ‘way of reacting to the world’, with each unique way manifested by a different species? Is there anything in this? If we are to value sentience, then different ways of being sentient might have some value.

If this is the case, then would be have a duty to increase different ways of being sentient – by de-extinction and by creating novel species?

It’s really complicated, isn’t it?!