X-Message-Number: 7295
From:  (Thomas Donaldson)
Subject: Re: CryoNet #7288 - #7291
Date: Thu, 12 Dec 1996 14:21:06 -0800 (PST)

Hi again!

More for Bob: our biology and the selection pressures we are under NOW have
a very great deal to do with any attempt to work out what we "should" do. If
you claim they do not, you prove my case.

Please understand that I am saying this as a matter of fact, not as any issue
of morality or ethics. If you ignore our biology, your ideas of what people
can be expected to do become false; if your ideas of what people can be 
expected to do are false, then your arguments will not be heard.

Since we are intelligent creatures, we take many different strategies and have
many different ways in which we express that drive to propagate our genome. 
You, sir, have already done a good deal of that, as you well know. And one
such strategy is to change the selection pressures; as intelligent creatures
we have a good chance to actually do that (that, my friends, is exactly what
immortalism and cryonics are about). But if we do that, again, we still need
to understand human biology as it is NOW.

One major reason why immortalism can exist now, for instance, is the simple
fact that our current medicine has lengthened the lives of most people to 
close to their current biological limit. Indeed, by doing so we change the
selection pressures bearing on us. When most people weren't sure of getting
enough to eat (that was true even in the US prior to the Civil War) then
notions about immortality got very short shrift.

So please, Bob, tell us how your ideas about values fit with our biology.

			Long long life to all,

				Thomas Donaldson


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