TMNT
The re-hatching of one of my personal childhood favorite sensations, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT) and reading The Island of Dr. Moreau made me think about the humanization of animals. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are just that, chemically mutated animals and not vivisected animals turned into beasts but nevertheless they are animals that are very much humanized. They walk, talk, and act in a very human way. While watching the show or movies I very quickly forgot that these creatures are not humans, but turtles just like Prendick began to see the island beasts as humans.
Dr. Moreau's beasts could not laugh (85) which is an exclusively human action, which separates them from humans in a fundamental way no matter how close they phyiscially resemble humans. But the TMNT can laugh. Then I began thinking, what made the TMNT more human-like than the beasts in the Island of Dr. Moreau? Is it that they live and function in "normal" society? Is it because they wear clothes? How is it that chemicals are capable of producing more human-like animals that vivisection? Does it all come down to chemical alteration of genes over manually reshaping the physical and physiological bodies?
posted by Kristian at 2:08 PM
4 Comments:
You seem to be tackling the idea of what are the major factors in labeling something as human. Going beyond the aesthetics, I agree that an organism's actions are really what determine how human like it is. For example, people are creating artificial intelligence robots right now to mimic humans...although these robots look nothing like humans, we label them more as human the more easily they can interact with us...
Amit, I completely agree with you; however, I think that the general public would not. The common human is very visually affected, so I think that if they were presented with a robot that possessed all the abilities of a human, but looked like a machine, and with a beast, that looked exactly like a human being, the average human would select the beast as being more humanlike. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles deals with this, as even though it may seem that the TMNT are considered humanlike, they also live underground in the sewers, hiding from humanity.
The whole question of chemical alteration or physical appearance is a very difficult one. This is because humans are a very distinct race, as are many others, and thus in order to embody human characteristics, something must possess both the insides and the outsides.
I agree with Jordan, the only reason that anyone perceives TMNTs as being "human" is that it was a TV show/movie. If in real life there were 4 walking, talking, giant, ripped, turtles society would have treated them exaclty like Frankenstein was treated. Society would want to kill them out of fear, or capture them for experimentation.
I think the defining factor in what makes something humanized or not is it's ability to talk and communicate. Robots don't neccessarily look like humans, but like Amit said, the more effectively they can communicate with us, the more human like they seem.
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