One of the dangers of science is the way it weakens our humanity. For instance, the entire field of neurobiology is founded on the suffering of animals, who were dissected thoroughly enough for us to discover that they could still exist if all organs were removed except the spine. Leonardo da Vinci was the first recorded person to do this, with a frog*. Two centuries later, as science gained momentum and the scientific method apparently gave people a license to lose their empathy, these heinous actions were repeated enough to convince everyone that it was moral. Ethics and science has come a long way since then, but we are still abusing animals to discover things that would improve our longevity. How incredibly selfish we must look to any outsiders who happen would judge us. At least DaVinci only did it to satiate his wonder. His career was so remarkable that his pioneering and dissection gets overlooked**.
The people experimenting on animals, who are only trying to improve the lives of humans, or worse, sell them pharmaceuticals based on scant evidence, are not doing this ethical dilemma any service. Logically there is nothing that makes animals ethically inferior to us, so why are we trying so hard to make them superior?
*Isaacson, Walter. 2017. Leonardo Da Vinci. Simon & Shuster: New York.
**He also helped pioneer cartography, topology, physics, and dentistry, which I hadn't known prior to reading Isaacson's biography. It's thought he would have stumbled on calculus two centuries before Newton and Leibniz if he'd been more educated at math.
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