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posted by martyb on Saturday March 10 2018, @03:04AM   Printer-friendly
from the Newest-Entrée-at-Milliways?-Long-Pig-Bacon? dept.

'Soylent' Dawkins? Atheist mulls 'taboo against cannibalism' ending as lab-grown meat improves

What if human meat is grown? Could we overcome our taboo against cannibalism?"
- @RichardDawkins - 6:15 AM - 3 Mar 2018

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/969939225180364805
https://archive.fo/kSmgi

"Lab-grown 'clean' meat could be on sale by end of 2018, says producer"
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/clean-meat-lab-grown-available-restaurants-2018-global-warming-greenhouse-emissions-a8236676.html

"'Soylent' Dawkins? Atheist mulls 'taboo against cannibalism' ending as lab-grown meat improves"
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/mar/6/richard-dawkins-mulls-taboo-against-cannibalism-en/

and:

https://www.nationalreview.com/blog/corner/richard-dawkins-eating-human-meat-cannibalism-taboo/


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by bradley13 on Saturday March 10 2018, @09:26AM (4 children)

    by bradley13 (3053) on Saturday March 10 2018, @09:26AM (#650471) Homepage Journal

    At the risk of sounding even more conservative than I am, a lot of recent events remind me of what one reads about the fall of the Roman empire. Increasing decadence, fewer and fewer inhibitions against doing anything. Why not free sex? Why not widespread porn? Why not transgenderism? Why not legal drugs? Why not cannibalism? Why not...whatever?

    I will happily argue for many of these individual issues; I'm as much a product of the times as anyone else.

    However, taken as a whole, the changes of the last 50-60 years do represent a wholesale discarding of established mores. Which really does look like what happens to civilizations that become too successful: decadence, degeneracy and ultimately collapse. Or many I'm just in a grumpy mood, because I have to work today...

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by theluggage on Saturday March 10 2018, @12:22PM (3 children)

    by theluggage (1797) on Saturday March 10 2018, @12:22PM (#650499)

    Why not free sex? Why not widespread porn? Why not transgenderism? Why not legal drugs? Why not cannibalism? Why not...whatever?

    ...the trouble is, for too long the answer to those questions was always either, "because... ewww!", "because my grandparents didn't do it" or "because my interpretation of a millennia-old fairy story says its wrong" - and used those as excuses for persecution and discrimination. Or, worse, used those as a premise for pseudo-science and policy-based evidence making.

    Once people start calling bullshit on that line of reasoning they're too angry to rationally debate the question "no, really why/why not X?" and so, while a lot of wrongs get righted, a lot of babies get throw out of the bathwater, old prejudices get flipped into new prejudices and pendulums swing too far.

    What is the actual danger threatening "Rome" today? Is it the last 60+ years' swing towards permissiveness, or is it the last few years' "popularist" backlash?

    Meanwhile, assuming synthetic human meat could be made safe - thus removing any rational reason for not eating it - who would want to eat it? Answer: people wanting to provoke a reaction from those with irrational prejudices.

    (Thinking of the "tiger carpaccio" scene from the Netflix version of Altered Carbon - I only went "ew!" because I don't like scriptwriters bashing me over the head with an anvil)

    Its really just an extension of the question of whether a vegetarian would eat synthetic beef. Answer: probably, some would, some wouldn't, depending on why they became vegetarian, and I don't give a flying fuck as long as they don't mind quietly putting up with the odd salad when their exact preferred choice isn't available.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 10 2018, @03:06PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 10 2018, @03:06PM (#650523)

      What is the actual danger threatening "Rome" today? Is it the last 60+ years' swing towards permissiveness, or is it the last few years' "popularist" backlash?

      They are both symptoms of the actual problem - widespread ignorance and indolence as a result of longterm supremacy. Comfortable people look inward, neglect thought of the future, and see no reason to abide by strict social rules that make sense in more fraught periods. Eventually, societies that lack external threats inevitably collapse upon themselves because dominance, aggression, and gang-mentality were very valuable survival traits at one time, and barriers to the future now.

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by meustrus on Saturday March 10 2018, @03:55PM (1 child)

        by meustrus (4961) on Saturday March 10 2018, @03:55PM (#650538)

        Eventually, societies that lack external threats inevitably collapse upon themselves

        Except that what killed the Roman Empire once it was weak was a threat from outside, not inner collapse. Granted, it was external threats that could normally have been dealt with easily. But what threat like that are we likely to face in the world today? North Korea? What a joke. Iran? Please. Russia? Well...maybe.

        But with nukes and globalism, international politics have changed fundamentally. There's a reason the big guys don't go to war against each other anymore. And even though it only takes a small nuclear arsenal to deter large threats, America maintains the largest military force in the world anyway.

        Now I'm not saying that we aren't facing a collapse-worthy situation. But unlike the Romans, there isn't a large unknown out there waiting to destroy us. We know what all the potential threats are, and we have taken steps to ensure our safety from them. Barring alien invasion, there isn't really any external threat that could rake us the way of the Roman Empire.

        Speaking of aliens, what if this is actually inevitable? That once there is no big unknown, once a civilization can anticipate all external threats, there is no check against decadence? That once there is no group of barbarians waiting in the wings to burn it down, saying "try again", whatever society remains turns inward and stops making itself greater? Would we still have reached for the stars without the Soviets trying to beat us there? Or is globalism the Great Filter that keeps all civilizations from reaching beyond their home planets?

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        • (Score: 4, Insightful) by theluggage on Saturday March 10 2018, @05:59PM

          by theluggage (1797) on Saturday March 10 2018, @05:59PM (#650571)

          Or is globalism the Great Filter that keeps all civilizations from reaching beyond their home planets?

          I suspect "interstellar space travel is difficult (yet to be proven possible) and expensive, with few short-term economic paybacks" is the problem there. Hard to do, harder to ship out any significant fraction of your population, even harder to bring the resulting "riches" back to the homeland.

          If your technology can build a self-sustaining, closed-environment generation ship, and your social science can maintain a stable population of crew without them procreating uncontrollably, fighting for resources, descending to savagery and worshipping the engines (or whatever) then you've pretty much sorted out all the shit that made you want to leave in the first place, and can stay at home, build space habitats and sustainably exploit the vast resources of your solar system. Move to the Kuiper belt when the sun starts to swell up.

          To quote Greg Egan, the Fermi-paradox-style exponential colonisation "Is what bacteria with spaceships would do".

          ...and if you're arrogant enough to want to spread your genome to the far reaches of space, stick it into some bacteria and give them a (tiny) space ship - yay! panspermia.