| Yawning
Bread. 10 August 2008
Give me dogs over religionists anytime
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As reported in BBC news, the experiment involved 29 dogs. In the first part, a stranger was put in front of a dog, calling its name. Once the dog made eye contact, the person yawned. In 21 out of 29 cases, the dogs yawned too; in fact, on average, each fido yawned 1.9 times. In the second part of the experiment, the same procedure was repeated, but instead of yawning, the human just opened and closed his mouth. None of the dogs yawned. To Dr Atsushi Senju of Birkbeck College, this supported the idea that dogs have an unusual ability to empathise with humans. "Dogs have a very special capacity to read human communication. They respond when we point and when we signal," he said. * * * * *
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Religionists, on the other hand, tend to be quite hypocritical about empathy. They regularly declaim their "love" for other humans, concern for the underprivileged and their mission to go out and "save" people. But when one looks at what exactly they set about doing, one sees them cajoling, even coercing others into a rather narrow idea of how life should be lived. Their campaigns do not start by an understanding of the human condition, and working out empirically from there, the social responses that are needed. Instead they start from certain ideological (scriptural) givens, which are then crafted to sound like empathy. The recently declared war on abortion provides some interesting examples of this. The campaign was initiated by an article in the Straits Times by law lecturer Tan Seow Hon on 24 July 2008. Since then it has been followed by more missiles/missives. Angela Thiang, a lawyer working in TSMC Law Corporation (headed by Nominated Member of Parliament Thio Li-Ann's mother, Thio Su-mien) contributed a letter to the Straits Times Forum. Published on 4 August 2008, she said:
Her point was echoed just two days later in another letter, this time by a certain Tan Siew Pin. Why the Straits Times didn't think that letters and more letters saying the same thing weren't redundant, when they are usually quick at refusing to publish too many letters arguing for liberal values, remains a mystery to me. Anyway, Tan Siew Pin's letter is here:
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Readers picked up quickly on the selectivity employed in the argument. Bellbellz1986 wrote in the comments tail behind Tan's letter:
0517elias wrote:
The first does not logically compel the second. Helping people make informed decisions is to burnish respect for an individual's autonomy. Demanding that we should foreclose options by force of law is to do the exact opposite. Another thing I have noticed is how they keep referring to a foetus as "life", a "person", and so on. This black-and-white position does not accord with reality, which is that there is a gradual transition from non-life to life, and when we are done living, a transition back to non-life. Fundamentalists tend to be rather poor at coping with complexity, preferring simplistic concepts to a sea of relativity and uncertainty. There is a tendency to deny transitional stages, which only makes their arguments sound rather divorced from reality. In any case, I don't even think resolving the question of whether a foetus is life is ever going to help in the subject of abortion, because what humans are generally more concerned about morally is whether a life is one capable of consciousness and suffering. A tree is a living thing, yet most times we think nothing of cutting one down. Cows are living things, yet we kill them all the time, our moral concerns assuaged once we are assured that they had been stunned beforehand. Cadaveric organ transplants are carried out not when a human being is dead by any absolute measure, but by a relative measure, based on medical judgments as to how far and irreversibly along the transition between life and death the donor person has gone. Likewise, if we are honest, the abortion debate should centre around the question of when a foetus can be recognised as having a consciousness, or when it has gained the ability to feel pain. Perhaps our abortion law, which allows pregnancy termination up to the 24th week, is incompatible with a current understanding of when that threshold might be, and we might want to rebalance it. But such a debate is not helped by
arguments that slam abortion in toto -- the logical thrust of such
arguments being not to permit any abortion at all. It is not helped when
the campaigners cite selectively from the science. These impulses come not
from any real empathy for individuals caught in one of life's dilemmas,
but from an attempt to impose an ideology on everyone else. © Yawning Bread
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Footnotes None Addenda None
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Researchers from Birkbeck College, University of London, have confirmed
what many dog-owners would have long observed -– pet dogs are induced to
yawn when people around them do so.
