A comical reworking of "Happy Birthday To You" ends, "You look like a monkey and you act like one too."
If certain scientists have their way, that ditty might very well come to be seen as something akin to a racial slur.
It is reported that researchers from MIT and Harvard are contending that, millions of years ago, early humans and chimps got down and dirty with a little interspecies hanky-panky.
Such unions produced fecund offspring that introduced genes from both species into the respective genomes.
Some might dismiss such speculation as idle academic babbling, however, such theorizing will serve as the background of future policy and social thought.
To most of us, chimps and humans getting together seems so bizarre it sounds like eharmony meets Planet of the Apes. Yet for years rumors have circulated that mixed creatures known as "humanzees" have been engineered behind the closed doors of laboratories where the only standards adhered to are the twisted imaginations of the mad scientists that lurk in the shadows of such places.
It has been claimed that Stalin dreamed of an army of hybrid ape-men to impose Communism upon the world. In China during the Cultural Revolution it has been alleged one of these monstrosities was killed before it could be born.
However, such experiments are not confined to the godless Communists across the sea. It has been claimed one such hybrid was born at Yerkes National Primate Research Center but destroyed shortly after birth.
But whether or not these incidents have actually occurred, what there is no debate about is that there are those in scientific and philosophical circles bent on undermining the distinctions between man and beast.
Ethicist Peter Singer, who believes it is permissible for parents to kill their infant children, argues that the great apes should be granted what we currently call "human rights".
Though it is another issue entirely, already things have gotten to the point where a person reluctant to endorse courtship and marriage outside their respective race or ethnic group puts themselves in the position of social sanctions being imposed upon them such as when Bob Jones University stuck to the beliefs of its founders rather than change its position simply because the government told them to in the name of tolerance and diversity. Just imagine the condemnation that will be heaped upon those insisting upon the integrity of the species in a world where the very word "person" will be greeted with the same revulsion reserved today for the vilest of slurs and terms of superiority.
Won't take that little cute red-headed orang gal to the prom? Why you are so prejudiced, its off to the reeducation camp for cognitive reconditioning for you, you wretched conservative.
Many enjoy "The X-Men" as an allegory analyzing the ramifications of the acceptance of human beings and the dangers of ethnocentrism. Viewers might want to consider it more as a literal depiction of the horrors that await mankind if we continue to allow our technical advancement to take mankind into ethical realms best not trodden upon.
Frederick Meekins is an independent theologian and social critic. Frederick holds a BS in Political Science/History, a MA in Apologetics/Christian Philosophy from Trinity Theological Seminary, and a PhD. in Christian Apologetics from Newburgh Theological Seminary.
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