Randall Parker raises some interesting questions in reponse to the guidelines proposed for creating a human/mouse chimera:
What I find especially interesting about this report is the reticence to see animals made smarter. What is their motivation for this restriction? Is it that they do not want lab animals made intelligent because then experimentation on them would become too much like experimentation on sentient humans?
Or do they object more generally to modification of other species to make them become as smart as humans? If the latter, what are their reasons for opposing this move? Certainly one can think of reasons to oppose such a development. The human race could find its existence threatened if we genetically engineered some predator species to be as smart as we are. Imagine smart lions and tigers with no empathy for the human species hunting us down to eat. For that matter, imagine genetically engineered human psychopaths with no empathy for the human species. They already occur naturally in smaller numbers. Will some people ever choose to use biotechnology to produce offspring with little or no empathy?
There’s no question that the Yuck factor looms large in the setting of these kinds of guidelines. There is something…unsettling about the thought of a mouse that’s a little more like a human being than it should be.
But there’s something else, here. The question is — if we can make a mouse as smart as a human, should we do it? If we’re only doing so in order to perform experiments on the poor creature, then the answer is obviously no. But otherwise?
There, I’m less certain. Maybe a mouse would like to be smart like Stuart Little or Reepicheep in the Narnia books. Or maybe it would a tortured soul like Algernon, or Rodney in Susan Palwick’s The Fate of Mice. Maybe mice would rather not know about their mortality or anticipate future sufferings or remember past hardships. Maybe they evolved the way they did because a mousey life is their idea of the perfect existence.
Perhaps we would play the role of the Serpent in the Mouse Garden of Eden. But unlike the Serpent, we wouldn’t just tempt the mouse into advanced knowledge of his condition — we would force it on him. That would be a pretty nasty thing to do.
On the other hand, if there were a mouse of human level intelligence and we were to ask her whether she would like to continue as she is or go back to being like her unmodified brethren, which do you think she would pick?
Surely intelligence is more of a gift than it is a curse. But of course I think that. I’m a human. Whether smart mice would see us as the Serpent or as Prometheus remains to be determined.