Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
71. The people who migrated out of Africa circa 135,000 years ago cannot be
regarded as being closer to modern “Africans” than any other population in the
modern world.
72. Jürgen Trabant, “Origins of Language I: Thunder, Girls, and Sheep, and
Other Origins of Language” (paper, Summer Academy on Human Origins, Max-
Planck-Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, August 13-24, 2001), 15.
73. My personal view as of this writing is that humanness should carry a sym-
bolic/moral (and/or linguistic/cultural) sense separable from its biological (or
phyletic-typological) sense—and that if intelligent creatures are discovered in
some other part of the universe, they should probably be accorded some kind of
human rights. Humanity in this sense (or personhood, if you prefer) is a moral
category that transcends biological specifics. It also implies that humans could
find closer moral kinships with unrelated creatures (that is, non-DNA based)
than with nonhuman species here on earth. There are obvious ethical conun-
drums in such a view (for example, with regard to the humanity of nonlinguis-
tic
Homo sapiens
). There is also the intriguing question of what kind of answer
we should give if and when machines of human construct begin to ask for rights
of one sort or another. On machine consciousness, see Igor Alexander, “The
Self 'Out There,' ”
Nature
413 (September 6, 2001): 23; Raymond Kurzweil,
The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990); also Rodney A. Brooks,
Flesh and Machines;
How Robots Will Change Us
(New York: Pantheon, 2002).
