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From: kevin@chromo.ucsc.edu (Kevin McLoughlin)
Newsgroups: talk.bizarre,misc.legal,talk.politics.misc,misc.jobs.misc,sci.bio
Subject: Re: Are Animals Patentable?
Message-ID: <2924@saturn.ucsc.edu>
Date: 21 Apr 88 03:42:01 GMT
References: <97500013@prism> <4872@xanth.cs.odu.edu> <9915@tekecs.TEK.COM> <3447@gryphon.CTS.COM>
Sender: usenet@saturn.ucsc.edu
Reply-To: kevin@chromo.UUCP (Kevin McLoughlin)
Organization: Physics Asylum, University of California, Santa Cruz
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In article <3447@gryphon.CTS.COM> richard@gryphon.CTS.COM (Richard Sexton) writes:
>ok, lets start a contest ? how many years before they develop an animal
>that is mostly human, but does a great job of washing dishes, 
>fixing cars, making b movies with chimps.................
 ~~~~~~~~~~~~

I can't fix cars, and I find this remark a slander against the
intelligence of people with the ability to do so.
Let's not be intellectual snobs here. 

And there's no need to get melodramatic a' la Jeremy Rifkin.
Such an animal probably exists now. It's called a chimpanzee. 
In fact, an even more perfect such creature could easily exist
without any fancy genetic manipulation at all. As someone above mentioned,
humans share 99% of our genetic material with chimps--we're
closer than sheep and goats, closer than horses and donkeys--and
you know what happens when you mate a horse with a donkey.
A mule is sterile, but it IS a real creature, and it's neither clearly
a horse nor clearly a donkey; it has characteristics of both.
I don't know that much genetics, but
my hunch is that the genetically-based differences between 
humans and chimps have a lot to do with regulatory genes (which,
of course, include those that affect the physically obvious
differences between us: degree of neotony has a lot to do with
these visible differences). 
-----------
Susan Nordmark
Internet: kevin@chromo.UCSC.edu			
UUCP: ...ucbvax!ucscc!chromo.kevin		Santa Cruz, CA