Discovery Institute senior fellow Wesley J. Smith's fine blog contains a report today on a study with the breathless conclusion that chimps don't really have a human sense of fairness. Oh, but how can that be? Don't we have 97 percent the same DNA?
Well, yes, but so what? We have much the same DNA as a mouse, too, or a tulip, for that matter. DNA is not destiny. Genes are not blueprints, but building material. Efforts to make us seem like little more than complicated apes are less about elevating the animal world than lowering the stature of human beings.
If humans are just animals, then the whole panoply of liberal views apply to the question Pope John Paul II strategically asked, "What does it mean to be human?"
Smith himself offered a timely way of posing the issue in a now-famous message that Starbucks picked up and used on several million paper coffee cups a year or so ago: "The morality of the 21st Century will depend on how we respond to this simple but profound question: Does every human life have equal moral value merely because it is human? Answer yes, and we have a chance of achieving universal human rights. Answer no, and it means that we are merely another animal in the forest."
Not that there is anything wrong with that.
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